It’s not just totalizing over different countries in phrases like “Western-style democracy” and “Western-style constitution.” It’s being maddeningly ahistorical in totalizing as Western what is a product of Romanticism or the Enlightenment or the Civil Rights movement of not even fifty years ago.

Tho I still make generalizations about the US! When I talk about what I love about the US, it’s invariably all the lovely qualities of Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens which are hardly shared even by Staten Island, much less New Jersey or Bushlandia.

I’m spending the weekend in Washington DC (will be here again soon for the whole summer – my wife still lives here) and was delighted to discover that Marvellous Market, just off Dupont Circle, now stocks Kerrygold butter. This is…