As America celebrated its national birthday with festivities televised from Washington DC, the finale of its fireworks display over the Washington Monument was accompanied by Russian music -- Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture. Later in the evening, U.S. President George Bush was shown attending a gala at which an impersonator appeared on stage and teased him about his most famous foibles. Bush laughed heartily throughout the performance, as did his wife who was seated by his side. Bush is the fifth Republican president reelected with a majority of the popular vote -- only one Democrat in U.S. history has achieved that feat. So perhaps he had the last laugh, after all.

Can you imagine similar events ever occurring in Russia? Will Russians ever prominently play John Philip Souza during a patriotic holiday, or show President Putin watching himself being lampooned?

These events will happen in Russia just about the time that Russia deserves to be thought of as a successful and civilized nation capable of giving the United States a run for its money. In other words, as far as can be seen, they'll happen when Hell freezes over.

Russians would undoubtedly view the suggestion of playing American music or watching the president get criticized on any official occasion, much less a patriotic one, as being an impossible outrage, something that would make the nation weaker and lessen its prestige. That's the attitude, of course, of someone who is already impossibly weak and knows it, someone whose already a laughing stock and can't afford to get any better because he can't afford to recognize any of his faults lest they destroy him.

1812 is a particularly apt date to remember when thinking about Russia's future. It's the year when Amercia was invaded by a British army which sought to reimpose Britiish colonial rule three decades after it was dissolved in the Revolution of 1776 that America, quite wrongly, celebrates as its birthday.

Why wrongly? Well, when those who now call themselves Americans won the war of Revolution, they didn't decide to form a new country. That was the last thing they wanted, a united country with a single ruler who could become their next dicatator. Instead, they formed a confederacy of independent countries with names like New York, Delaware and Virginia. It was only six years after the revolution that, fearing a new invasion by the British which actually did come in 1812, the former colonists sought to unify. The process was drawn out more than a year as they argued over the form the new country should take, and even after the British invasion was defeated, civil war broke out in 1865 -- a war that killed more Americans than all other wars Americans have ever fought to date, combined. America wasn't actually born as a country until the 9th state ratified the Constitution that made them a country, and you'd be hard pressed now to find a single American who knows the date on which that happened or how old his country truly is. Not only are Americans celebrating the wrong date as their national birthday, in doing so they are betraying the spirit of liberty that gave it birth, completely ignoring the fact that their founding fathers didn't have the slightest intention of creating a country in 1776.

And it's not really accurate to say that America "won" the War of 1812. The British were much better prepared for Round 2 in the colonial battle than they had been for the first round, and at the very best the two sides fought to a draw. The war ended because of the intervention of the Russian Tsar, who wanted Britain's aid against Napoleon, and therefore brokered a peace between the two sides that has lasted to this day. That's why 1812 is such an apt date to recall when thinking about Russia.

Because most Russians have no idea that their Tsar brokered this peace, just like they have no idea that an America president was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the Treaty of Portsmouth, which brokered the peace in a famous Russian war. They have no idea, like many Americans themselves it seems, that Americans didn't form a country right after they won their revolution. In fact, they have no clear idea what the world "liberty" even means. Most Russians have no idea how much they have in common with America, or how much they have to learn from it, and proudly couldn't care less. That's why their country continues to languishin the backwaters of civilization.

Russians, it seems, will never understand that when America plays Russian music at a patriotic event it shows strength, not weakness. They will never realize, perhaps, that when they watch their president getting lampooned, they increase their awareness of their own faults and make it that much more likely that those faults will be eliminated and their society become even greater and more powerful, even more of world leader.

In other words, come to think of it, you could say that La Russophobe is a greater Russian patriot than Vladimir Putin, just as Solzhenitsin was a far greater patriot than Brezhnev. That is you could, if you weren't a Russian.

Russians go on century after century living in blissful ignorance of their own faults, totally unaware of how they are seen by the outside world and oblivous of their status in comparison to other countries, even while haughtily proclaiming the ignorance of Americans. They tell themselve that any shortcomings are due simply to bad luck and foreign conspiracies, and they move inexorably down the path that leads to extinction.

So Americans will go on patriotically pointing out they they can't even get their own birthday right, and acknowledging the role Russia has played in their history, and playing foriegn songs and laughing at their president, even on national holidays.

And they'll go on leading the world, producing a GDP ten times the size of Russia with only twice as many people, and their population will keep growing. And until Russians learn a few important things from Amerca, they'll keep plunging down the road that will lead them to become "Zaire with permafrost," a colony of China, a language like Latin, a place only some historians can remember.