Welcome to the American Story.

Stories about what it is that makes America beautiful.

Heartbreaking, funny, inspiring, and endlessly interesting.

This is Chris Flannering with the Claremont Institute.

I call this one, as time goes by.

We'll always have Paris.

Here's looking at you, kid.

Round up the usual suspects.

We were sitting around clustered tables,

smoking cheap cigarettes and drinking cheap scotch and beer, in a

neighborhood pub in London. College students from around the world, Irish, English, French and

German students, all sitting together in peaceful conviviality. There was even an Afghan Muslim and an

Indian Hindu, a Canadian Jew. Really? I mentioned that he was a Jew

because getting the Afghan Muslim to sit down with him at the same table was harder even than getting

him to sit down with the Indian Hindu. But he did, and they became friends. We played soccer with students from every

African country of the former British and French empires, including Morocco. But none of them

was with us that night. We were all in our 20s, born some time in the decade after the end of World War II.

We were studying all kinds of different things, from architecture to finance, engineering,

classics, philosophy. And as often happened when the evening gained or lost momentum,

someone started throwing around lines from the movie Casablanca.

We all knew them, and we seemed to know them all.

Play it, Sam.

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