NOT 'a historical', please. It's 'an historical'. Par contre, it's 'a happy...', 'a holy...'. Oh how I do wish fundies would spend as much time on English as on their turgid god-mania.
As for prosperity, compared to the American rich, most Americans are piss-poor, and likely to remain so given the brain-washing they recieve about the so-called 'evils of socialism'. Anything that might benefit the ordinary people, such as state health care, decent holiday periods etc, they are taught to regard as a covert manifestation of 'communism'. The truth is that they are being conned by the rich. The line in the song: "There's nothing surer, the rich get rish and the poor get poorer", is a truism in America. Whyfor example, did Reagan suppress R+D into alternative energy sources? Could it have had anything to do with oil? Why is petrol (gas) so expensive at America's filling stations? (Actually it's a hell of a lot cheaper than here in Europe)? Someone is lining their pockets out of the average American's pocket. Yet Americans are hard-wired not to question this sort of situation because it is 'anti-American'. The so-called free market is tilted/biased in favour of milking the market to the benefit of the rich.
And when did America last have a president that came from the ranks of ordinary people? Or put it another way, how rich do you have to be to be eligible and capable of becoming president? "It's a rich man's world", in the line of another song.
As to puritans, they brought Slavery, and also the crimes of the Salem hangings. Superstitious, ignorant and bible-based. Why that did not taint forever in the American mind the turgid shite of bible and preachers and churches, I will never be able to fathom.
