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| 5/25 |
| 2004/7/18 [Politics/Domestic/Gay, Politics/Foreign/Europe] UID:32339 Activity:high |
7/18 Why euro-peons hate amerika:
http://hudsonreview.com/BawerSp04.html
\_ would anyone be willing to comment from experience on where
canada stands on the statism spectrum? closer to the US or to
Europe? would his criticisms apply to canada?
\_ Wow. That's so formulaic, it's amusing.
Part 1: what he used to think (establish author as fair and
unbiased critic who's seen both sides of the issue)
Part 2: his "enlightenment"
Part 3: occasional acceptance of some small flaw is his new
perfect XYZ, usually revoked by some later "but..." section
to further the appearance of objectivity
Part 4: set extremist work from opposing view up as strawman, and
use it to demonstrate validity of all arguments
\_ So.. uhh.. what's your point? Perhaps it's formulaic
because that's what his experiance was actually like? That
formula of thinking is very common when you live for a few
years in a foriegn country. Although I don't know that
part 4 was particularly useful. Are you saying the article
is invalid or untrue because it is formulaic?
\_ interesting article (ostensibly a book review) on this
subject:
http://snipurl.com/7uhd [nytimes] |
| 5/25 |
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| hudsonreview.com/BawerSp04.html Bruce Bawer Hating America I I moved from the US to Europe in 1998, and Ive been drawing comparisons ever since. Living in turn in the Netherlands, where kids come out of high school able to speak four languages, where gay marriage is a non-issue, and where book-buying levels are the worlds highest, and in Norway, where a staggering percentage of people read three newspapers a day and where respect for learning is reflected even in Oslo place names (Professor Aschehoug Square; Professor Birkeland Road), I was tempted at one point to write a book lamenting Americans anti-intellectualismtheir indifference to foreign languages, ignorance of history, indifference to academic achievement, susceptibility to vulgar religion and trash TV, and so forth. On point after point, I would argue, Europe had us beat. Yet as my weeks in the Old World stretched into months and then years, my perceptions shifted. Yes, many Europeans were book loversbut which countrys literature most engaged them? Many of them revered educationbut to which countrys universities did they most wish to send their children? No, Europeans werent Bible-thumpersbut the Continents ever-growing Muslim population, I had come to realize, represented even more of a threat to pluralist democracy than fundamentalist Christians did in the US And yes, more Europeans were multilingualbut then, if each of the fifty states had its own language, Americans would be multilingual, too. That this was, in fact, a crucial question was brought home to me when a travel piece I wrote for the New York Times about a weekend in rural Telemark received front-page coverage in Aftenposten, Norways newspaper of record. its sole news value lay in the fact that Norway had been mentioned in the New York Times. And even more astonishing was what happened next: the owner of the farm hotel at which Id stayed, irked that Id made a point of his want of hospitality, got his revenge by telling reporters that Id demanded McDonalds hamburgers for dinner instead of that most Norwegian of delicacies, reindeer steak. Though this was a transparent fabrication (his establishment was located atop a remote mountain, far from the nearest golden arches), the press lapped it up. The story received prominent coverage all over Norway and dragged on for days. my irksome weekend trip was transformed into a morality play about the threat posed by vulgar, fast-food-eating American urbanites to cherished native folk traditions. But my erstwhile host obviously wasnt: he knew his country; and hed known, accordingly, that all he needed to do to spin events to his advantage was to breathe that talismanic word, McDonalds. Why had the Norwegian press given such prominent attention in the first place to a mere travel article? Why had it then been so eager to repeat a cartoonish lie? Were these actions reflective of a society more serious, more thoughtful, than the one Id left? Or did they reveal a culture, or at least a media class, that was so awed by America as to be flattered by even its slightest attentions but that was also reflexively, irrationally belligerent toward it? This experience was only part of a larger process of edification. Living in Europe, I gradually came to appreciate American virtues Id always taken for granted, or even disdainedamong them a lack of self-seriousness, a grasp of irony and self-deprecating humor, a friendly informality with strangers, an unashamed curiosity, an openness to new experience, an innate optimism, a willingness to think for oneself and speak ones mind and question the accepted way of doing things. I found myself toting up words that begin with i: individuality, imagination, initiative, inventiveness, independence of mind. Americans, it seemed to me, were more likely to think for themselves and trust their own judgments, and less easily cowed by authorities or bossed around by experts; they believed in their own ability to make things better. No wonder so many smart, ambitious young Europeans look for inspiration to the United States, which has a dynamism their own countries lack, and which communicates the idea that life can be an adventure and that theres important, exciting work to be done. Reagan-style morning in America clichs may make some of us wince, but they reflect something genuine and valuable in the American air. Europeans may or may not have more of a sense of history than Americans do (in fact, in a recent study comparing students historical knowledge, the results were pretty much a draw), but America has something else that mattersa belief in the future. Briefly, Western European hostility toward the US yielded to sincere, if shallow, solidarity (We are all Americans). But the enmity soon re-established itself (a fact confirmed for me daily on the websites of the many Western European newspapers I had begun reading online). With the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, it intensified. Yet the endlessly reiterated claim that George W Bush squandered Western Europes post-9/11 sympathy is nonsense. In The Eagles Shadow: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World, American journalist and NPR commentator Mark Hertsgaard purports to seek an answer. Our consumerist definition of prosperity is killing us, and perhaps the planet. Our democracy is an embarrassment to the word, a den of entrenched bureaucrats and legal bribery. Our media are a disgrace to the hallowed concept of freedom of the press. Our precious civil liberties are under siege, our economy is dividing us into rich and poor, our signature cultural activities are shopping and watching television. To top it off, our business and political elites are insisting that our model should also be the worlds model, through the glories of corporate-led globalization. America, in short, is a messa cultural wasteland, an economic nightmare, a political abomination, an international misfit, outlaw, parasite, and pariah. If Americans dont know this already, it is, in Hertsgaards view, precisely because they are Americans: Foreigners, he proposes, can see things about America that natives cannot. Americans can learn from their perceptions, if we choose to. What, one must therefore ask, are their media telling them? Such questions, crucial to a study of the kind Hertsgaard pretends to be making, are never asked here. In any event, The Eagles Shadow proves to be something of a gyp: for though its packaged as a work of reportage about foreigners views of America, its really a jeremiad by Hertsgaard himself, punctuated occasionally, to be sure, by relevant quotations from cabbies, busdrivers, and, yes, a restaurateur whom hes run across in his travels. His running theme is Americans parochialism: we not only dont know much about the rest of the world, we dont care. And while Americans relative indifference to foreign news is certainly nothing to crow about, the provincial focus of Norwegian news reporting and public-affairs programming can feel downright claustrophobic. Hertsgaard illustrates Americans ignorance of world geography by telling us about a Spaniard who was asked at a wedding in Tennessee if Spain was in Mexico. I once told such stories as well (in fact, I began my professional writing career with a fretful op-ed about the lack of general knowledge that I, then a doctoral candidate in English, found among my undergraduate students); then I moved to Europe and met people like the sixtyish Norwegian author and psychologist who, at the annual dinner of a Norwegian authors society, told me shed been to San Francisco but never to California. One of Hertsgaards main interestswhich he shares with several other writers who have recently published books about America and the worldis the state of American journalism. His argument, in a nutshell, is that few foreigners appreciate how poorly served Americans are by our media and educational systemshow narrow the range of information and debate is in the land of the free. To support this claim, he offers up the fact that internationally renowned intellectuals such as Edward W Said and Frances Moore Lapp signed a statement against the invasion of Afghanistan, but were forced to run it as an a... |
| snipurl.com/7uhd -> query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F01E7DD1038F932A25754C0A9629C8B63 Most E-Mailed Articles Whether or not you can tell a book by its cover, you can generally tell a country by its books. If most political books are any indication, the way we argue now has been shaped by cable news and Weblogs; it's all ''gotcha'' commentary and attributions of bad faith. No emotion can be too angry and no exaggeration too incredible. Yet if the technologies used by bloggers and hardballers are new, the form is older than the Republic. While they appear as books -- and are staples of the best-seller lists -- today's give-no-quarter attacks, as George Packer noted recently of bloggers, have their origins in the pamphlets of the colonial era. Our framers warned against the dangers of faction because we so rarely stood together. If you prefer your invective unseasoned by decorum, check out what the anti-Federalists had to say about the Constitution or how the Whigs treated ''King Andrew'' Jackson. Judge our contemporary culture warriors by the standards of books, and they disappoint: logic, evidence and reason are conspicuously absent. Judge them by the standards of pamphleteering, and they may be doing democracy a favor, reminding our apathetic public why politics matters. Let me, then, apply the pamphlet standard to a slew of recently published volumes in which liberals and conservatives have at each other. Pamphleteering flourishes because in both publishing and politics, established elites and institutions are no longer able to ensure consensus and insist on moderation. The new pamphleteers certainly do not lack for what in Great Britain would pass for libel. Ann Coulter set the tone with ''Slander'' (2002) and ''Treason'' (2003). Coulter's style of attack politics, while still far ahead of the pack in the violence of its language, is no longer confined to the right. Just as the key to winning office these days lies in mobilizing the base rather than appealing to the center, so the aim of the new pamphleteering is to stay on message, no matter how contradictory your ideas become. The Truth About Bias and the News (Basic Books, paper, $15) -- itself a reply to Coulter and other smackdown artists on the right -- that conservatives dominate the airwaves. Logical inconsistency raises its head instantly: Bozell himself frequently appears on radio and television to make the case for liberal domination. on one page the left controls everything on television, on another commentators like those on Fox (whose bias Bozell refuses to acknowledge) do not count as counterbalance, for they only discuss the news, not report it. But Bozell did not write his book to convince anyone duped enough to listen to Alterman in the first place. com found that conservatives tend to read and recommend conservative books and liberals, liberal books. The content of books like Bozell's supports the researcher's conclusion. Rare among pamphleteers, Huffington has a sense of humor, a disposition that might make her suspect as a true warrior of words. Here she is on ''selective amnesia'' as a campaign tool: George W Bush ''could not recall any antiwar protests when he was a student at Yale. Huffington is not the only pamphleteer who has changed her mind; David Horowitz and Christopher Hitchens moved from left to right, while the onetime smear artist David Brock shifted, like Huffington, from right to left. One who believes as passionately now in the opposite of what was believed before does not invite our credence. But in the pamphleteer's upside-down world, switching sides is essential to persuading your readers of the infamy of what you used to hold dear. No such nuance can be found in the writing of the new pamphleteers. Brock's previous book, ''Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative,'' his 2002 mea culpa for gutter-shouting from the conservative side, was engaging and informative. Unable to keep an insult in his quiver, Brock gleefully announces that the Catholic theologian Michael Novak had his thesis rejected at Harvard and that the political scientist Abigail Thernstrom did not get academic tenure, factoids that are either irrelevant (anyone familiar with the academy knows what thesis committees can be like) or wrong (Thernstrom rejected a full-time academic career). Brock also fails to grasp the conflicts that have emerged within right-wing punditry since he served in its ranks. Chris Matthews was not a supporter of the war in Iraq and Bill O'Reilly has serious questions about it. Lou Dobbs now sounds like Dick Gephardt when he discusses outsourcing. Andrew Sullivan's position on gay marriage is anathema to many other conservatives. Conservatives may well have shared a party line when they were out of power, but now that they have an actual president advancing their worldview, their ideas suddenly have consequences -- and turmoil is the inevitable result. This kind of behavior among liberals is called political suicide. The final missing ingredient, especially when the product of the new pamphleteering is compared with real books, is research. The rationale seems to be: case closed, why bother investigating anything? John Gibson, host of ''The Big Story'' on Fox News, evidently thought it a good idea to document the many ways in which foreigners, especially Europeans, hate Americans. But he seems not to have traveled anywhere or talked to anyone, instead relying on the Internet for outrageous statements about American perfidy. The authors see conditions of life in the United States as so wonderful that only the ''mental state of the haters'' can explain their determination to destroy their country. Conservatives cannot give up on the idea that the left runs the country when in fact the right does, which adds an element of unreality to books that are supposed to touch on the real world. We normally think politicians have to simplify reality to get elected, while book writers can deal with the world in all its complexity. But the bulk of these adventures in polemics, so shoddily researched and poorly argued, might make us question the state of non-fiction publishing in the United States. In truth, the venomous rhetoric in books like these comes all too close to the extremist politics of 20th-century Europe. Yet pamphlets served us well during our revolutionary times; the question is whether the present moment is sufficiently pregnant with historical importance for them to serve us well again. Mark Crispin Miller calls for a return to ''republican ideals'' and grounds himself in the spirit of Jefferson and Madison. T D Allman, a stickler for our 18th-century Constitution, argues that Dick Cheney, appearances to the contrary, is not actually vice president of the United States because, although the president and vice president can be from the same state, electors from that state can't vote for both of them, and Cheney, like Bush, lived in Texas. We are not, to be sure, about to face a coup d'tat, although according to Michael Moore's STUPID WHITE MEN . But we are living in an era when many of our key institutions are failing. Before Watergate and the collapse of Vietnam, there existed an American Establishment, a bipartisan group of bankers, politicians and journalists who shaped the contours of national opinion. The Establishment specialized in its own type of political book: Maxwell Taylor's ''Uncertain Trumpet,'' which made the case for developing military strategies to deal with third-world insurgencies; James MacGregor Burns's ''Deadlock of Democracy,'' which argued for a more coordinated domestic policy to counter the complacency of the Eisenhower years; and Theodore White's ''Making of the President, 1960,'' the gold standard of campaign coverage. Some of these writers may have been partisan, but they tried to sound judicious and evenhanded. There was such a thing as consensus, and their job was to find it and to speak on its behalf. We cannot expect today's political books to stand up to the weightier tomes of the 1950's and 60's, since the Establishment that sponsored the latter no longer exists. Our pamphleteers spend so much time debating each other's media prominence because both sides recognize that there is no nat... |