From The Times:

July 22, 2008

Eventually, we will all hate Obama too
What makes America such an indispensable power is precisely what makes anti-Americanism inevitable

David Aaronovitch

It amuses me that some of those who criticise the present US Administration for its Manichaeism - its division of the world into good and evil - themselves allocate all past badness to Bush and all prospective goodness to Obama. As the ever-improving myth has it, on the morning of September 12, 2001, George W. and America enjoyed the sympathy of the world. This comradeship was destroyed, in a uniquely cavalier (or should we say cowboyish) fashion, through the belligerence, the carelessness, the ideological fixity and the rapacity of that amorphous and useful category of American flawed thinker, the neoconservative. They just threw it away.

But there isn't anything that can't be fixed with a sprinkling of genuine fairy dust. What Bush lost, Obama can find. Where the Texan swaggered, the Chicagoan can glide. Emotional literacy will replace flat iteration, persuasion will supplant force as the preferred means of achieving what needs to be achieved, empathy will trump narcissism. Those who hate America may find their antipathy waning, those who were alarmed by unilateralism will warm to softer, moral leadership. A new dawn will break, will it not?

Some on the Left are getting their count-me-outs in already, realising that Mr Obama is, after all, a big-game hunter, a full-trousered American candidate. They, I think, are more realistic than those who manage on one day to laud the Democrat as not being a real politician, and on the next to praise him for his sensible left-trimming when seeking the party's nomination and his equally sensible centre-hugging once it was in the bag. I say the antis are more realistic because, eventually, we will hate or ridicule Mr Obama too - provided, of course, that he is elected and serves two full terms.

George W.Bush, of course, represents a particular kind of offence to European sensibilities. He blew out Kyoto, instead of pretending to care about it and then not implementing it, which is what our hypocrisies require. He took no exquisite pains to make us feel consulted. He invaded Iraq in the name of freedom and then somehow allowed torturers to photograph each other in the fallen dictator's house of tortures. He is not going to run Franklin Roosevelt a close race for nomination as the second greatest president of the US.

But even if he had been a half-Chinese ballet-loving Francophone, he would have been hated by some who should have loved him, for there isn't an American president since Eisenhower who hasn't ended up, at some point or other, being depicted by the world's cartoonists as a cowboy astride a phallic missile. It happened to Bill Clinton when he bombed Iraq; it will happen to Mr Obama when his reinforced forces in Afghanistan or Pakistan mistake a meeting of tribal elders for an unwise gathering of Taleban and al-Qaeda. Then the new president (or, if McCain, the old president) will be the target of that mandarin Anglo-French conceit that our superior colonialism somehow gives us the standing to critique the Yank's naive and inferior imperialism.

Often those who express their tiresome anti-Americanism will suggest, as do some of the more disingenuous anti-Zionists with regard to anti-Semitism - that they, of course, are not anti-American, and that no one really is. But, coming as I do from an Anti-American tradition that wasn't afraid to proclaim itself, I think I know where the corpses are interred. For example, the current production of Bernstein's Candide at the English National Opera is a classic of elite anti-Americanism, in which we are invited to laugh at the philistine invocation of “Democracy, the American Way and McDonald's”. The laughter that accompanied this feeble satire showed our proper understanding that we, the audience, had a proper concept of democracy, and would never soil ourselves with an Egg McMuffin.

The true irony went way above the sniggerers' heads, which was that Leonard Bernstein was the American cultural import that we were, at that very moment, enjoying. But the prejudice is that American culture has had a negative influence on the world, tabloidising our journalism, subverting the gentle land of Ealing with the violent pleasures of Die Hard 10 and commercialising our most intimate lives. And so we have ever complained; my father, back in the early Fifties, once wrote an entire communist pamphlet about the terrible effect of Hollywood and jazz on the land of Shakespeare and Elgar.

This week you could hear the author Andrew O'Hagan on Radio 4, reading from his collection of self-conscious essays, The Atlantic Ocean, in which - despite his own claims - every impact of American life on Britain is somehow configured negatively. He writes of an exported popular culture “born in the suburbs of America” and defined as “Spite as entertainment. Shouting as argument. Dysfunction as normality. Desires as rights. Shopping as democracy.” This in the country that has sent Big Brother, Pop Idol, Wife Swap and Location, Location, Location over the Atlantic in the other direction, while taking delivery of Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Wire.

I should admit that I am irked by O'Hagan's dismissal of the “idiots who supported that bad and stupid war (ie, Iraq)” and am willing to match my idiocy against his intelligence in any debating forum that he cares to name. More interesting, though, is the desire to blame America. For all that O'Hagan claims that the US has lost its purchase on the world's affections, it remains the chosen destination for the most ambitious of the planet's migrants. For all that he claims that this change in sentiment is recent, I can't help recalling those - the most honest - who commented, in journals he writes for and on the very day after September 11, that the Americans had had it coming.

In part I think that anti-Americanism is linked to a view of change as decline. The imagination is that dynamic capitalism, associated with the US, is destroying our authentic lives, with our own partly willing connivance. It is a continuing and - at the moment - constant narrative, uniting left and right conservatives, which will usually take in the 19th- century radical journalist William Cobbett (conveniently shorn of his anti-Semitism), and end with an expression of disgust over the Dome, the Olympics or Tesco. Just as bird flu is a disease from out of the East, runaway modernity is a scourge originating to the West.

So Barack Obama, en fête around the world, will one day learn that there is no magical cure for the envy of others. What makes America the indispensable power (and even more indispensable in the era of the new China), is precisely what makes anti-Americanism inevitable.

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Cordially,
Rush

elrushbo2@theobviousgmail.com
Remove the obvious...

Built on envy, destroyed by arrogance... ;)

(How fitting.)

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It may not be 1984 but George Orwell sure did see the future . . .

Well, someone missed the point of the article entirely.

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Cordially,
Rush

elrushbo2@theobviousgmail.com
Remove the obvious...

As the USA continues to sop up 25% of global resources to feed the appetite of 5% of the global population, backed by military fiat, the rest of the world will find a way to balance once again this inequity.

As an aside, this is just idiocy. It's the nature of geography--just as London sops up some massive percentage of UK resources. Draw some imaginary lines anywhere and you can get this result. Why is that? Because people and incomes and standards of living aren't distributed equally across the globe. By extension, for every bit of "global resources" that the US buys, the corresponding person who sold it got paid, i.e. for every five dollars of "global resources," that enter the US, five dollars leave the country for those people to use on whatever they wish.

Nothing and no one forces those people to sell their goods to the US (or the UK, or Canada, or Germany, or France)--they do it because they want to. They certainly don't want to try selling their stuff to Burkina Faso. You can if you want to--let us know how that works out for you.

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Cordially,
Rush

elrushbo2@theobviousgmail.com
Remove the obvious...

I don't hate America or "Americans" and never have. The achievemnts of that country and its people are so great as to be almost past belief.
However, what Europe likes about Obama, whatever he may turn out to be like, is the fact that he is not the megalomaniac Nixon or the idiot Reagan or the ignorant, odious Dubbya.
Don't forget that the best President for years, Clinton, knew perfectly well that "It's the economy, stupid." Those that followed him forgot that precept and have landed the world in a global crisis entirely of USA making.
It is arrogance, ignorance, thoughtlessness and stupidity that much of the world hates, not the USA or its citizens.
David Aaronovitch has long been an apologist for even the most extreme policies of the USA and is carefully ignored by people who care about people.

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Yay, more "because you sez so" Barbra Streisand.

I don't hate America or "Americans" and never have. The achievemnts of that country and its people are so great as to be almost past belief.
However, what Europe likes about Obama, whatever he may turn out to be like, is the fact that he is not the megalomaniac Nixon or the idiot Reagan or the ignorant, odious Dubbya.

What he actually is is a politician. Where he differs, slightly, is that he is more like European politicians in that he will lie directly to your face, act as if he cares, and do whatever the hell he pleases. That way, millions and millions of people will give him a pass on nearly anything because they think "he cares."

Don't forget that the best President for years, Clinton, knew perfectly well that "It's the economy, stupid."

Clinton, just like every other President or Prime Minister, has little to NO effect on any economy, other than very slightly, and only years after they have left office. Where they do have an effect is in driving costs in their respective nations ever higher. That also takes time to show up.

Those that followed him forgot that precept and have landed the world in a global crisis entirely of USA making.

Uh huh, right. It's the US' fault that China uses more energy and food than ever before. It's the US' fault that India, and Russia and everyone else uses more resources than ever before. It's the US' fault that population is increasing. It's the US' fault that not one of the countries that signed up to Kyoto made their targets. It's the US' fault that China is the number one emitter on earth.

It is arrogance, ignorance, thoughtlessness and stupidity that much of the world hates, not the USA or its citizens.

Big deal. You can find arrogance, ignorance, thoughtlessness and stupidity EVERYWHERE--and in fact, you can find MORE of that among those that profess anti-Americanism because those that simply cannot differentiate between individual humans and the foreign policy of their respective gov'ts aren't the brightest bulbs in the batch.

David Aaronovitch has long been an apologist for even the most extreme policies of the USA and is carefully ignored by people who care about people.

Maybe. But ignoring him doesn't refute any of the statements he made in his article. If you'd like to address them as a way of demonstrating your point, we would like to see it.

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Cordially,
Rush

elrushbo2@theobviousgmail.com
Remove the obvious...

Let’s all be honest and realistic, at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter who the president of the US is, he will inevitably end up more or less a puppet whose strings will be pulled by the same group of people who have being pulling all the strings for decades now.

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http://www.therageclub.com

Let’s all be honest and realistic, at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter who the president of the US is, he will inevitably end up more or less a puppet whose strings will be pulled by the same group of people who have being pulling all the strings for decades now.

Centuries!

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"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." - Dr. Seuss

Let’s all be honest and realistic, at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter who the president of the US is, he will inevitably end up more or less a puppet whose strings will be pulled by the same group of people who have being pulling all the strings for decades now.

Centuries!

Yes, centuries... e.g. the Rotschilds!

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http://www.therageclub.com

Most likely, longer,

Perhaps Marxism and Leninism were on to something when they thought of the Abolition of all rights of inheritance.


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"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." - Dr. Seuss