How disappointing for our many American-hating fellow-Europeans to see that people in New Orleans are now returning to most areas of the city. But even as the sound of sniggering still echoed over Europe's capitals, the US army corps of engineers were quietly plugging the supposedly unpluggable breaches in the levees, and simultaneously despatching a sullen Mississippi back to its riverbed, writes Kevin Myers
Now, I like and respect John O'Shea of Goal, but he was wholly wrong to have said we should not send anything to help disaster relief in the US. Even a single Army engineer with a bucket would have been a symbol of the brotherhood of freedom, of blood and of history which binds us, and an acknowledgement of the unpayable debt that we owe to the US.
British forces, without the US, could never have liberated occupied Europe in 1944, or any other year. Worse, it is just remotely possible that the USSR, aided by that supreme bungler, Adolf Hitler himself, might have defeated the Nazis without the assistance of the US - a glorious prospect indeed, with Stalin's tanks within viewing distance of the white cliffs of Dover. So democratic victory 60 years ago was a largely American achievement, and without ever becoming slaves either to America or to history, we should never forget that.
The debt does not stop there. For down the decades which followed, the forces of Communist tyranny were halted on that line from Stettin to Trieste by the real curtain which descended across Europe immediately after the war and which was provided by the US. This was the steel curtain of freedom, forged by American guts and American gold and American guns. This side of the curtain, in the greatest act of selflessness that European civilisation has ever known, our economies - even that of neutral Ireland - were brought from the abyss of wartime impoverishment by the Marshall Plan.
So we send our sapper with his bucket to the US in order to show that we will always remember what the US has done for us, and moreover, to remind our young people that there is a reason that we in Europe are free, and it is spelt with just three capital letters.
I had the privilege recently of dining with a group of Europe-based US Marines. When you meet such people, you understand why the US is the great power that it is. I was sitting next to Christopher, a black Floridian staff sergeant who would have been an officer in any other armed force - but the Marine Corps insists that only college graduates can receive commissions (to my mind, an unnecessary qualification, but it does say something about the intellectual expectations of the corps).
What had struck him most about Europe here was Europeans' lack of patriotism. He said, naturally and quite unaffectedly, that he loved his country above all else. He then corrected himself and said he loved his God first, his wife and family second, his country next, and the Corps fourth; but in reality, they were an indissoluble unit. He was in the Corps because he loved his country: this was a God-given duty, as was that towards his family.
Soon he would be returning to the US, and if service in Iraq followed, so be it. Of course, he didn't want to leave his family, but he had his duty to do his country and the corps, and he would uncomplainingly do it. May heaven guard him.
Does anyone in Europe - even religious people - ever say that they love God any more? Yet if you actually believe in God, it is a peculiarly otiose folly not to acknowledge your worship of him. For whose disapproval do European believers fear more: that of their sneering, atheistic contemporaries, or that of God, whom they believe to be the creator of heaven and earth, and all things in between, including those very contemporaries?
Moreover, does anyone in Europe even respect patriotism any more? I don't mean the often shrill, exclusive, hate-filled witch called nationalism, but rather that rounded, embracing quality of loving the land you come from, and the people who inhabit it, and honouring the duties that both demand.
True patriotism - the sacrifice of your own self-interest in the interests of your country and its people - is one of the great and most ennobling forces of the world. Americans have it in abundance. It is perhaps their greatest quality. It defines the US Marine Corps.
Patriotism does not mean conformism. It does not mean a single version of history. It doesn't mean that your country has always done right, and will never do wrong. But it does mean that your desire to serve your country is an abiding feature of your life. Europeans, however, have largely abandoned such notions as quaint and anachronistic - and worse, in this country a self-declared love of Ireland for decades nearly became the monopoly of murderous, bloodthirsty heathens.
Though most men and women who join our own Defence Forces do so for utterly patriotic reasons, they would probably be too embarrassed to tell a stranger, as Christopher did, that they did so out of love of country. Yet such emotional reticence is surely dysfunctional. For in an era of celebrity, a culture which does not make a virtue of esteeming itself and its values is one that sooner or later is doomed - or at the very least, one that is probably going to have to be saved, once again, by the soldiers, sailors and airmen of the USA.