Epoetker
March 20th 2003, 01:17 AM
http://www.nationalreview.com/derbyshire/derbyshire031903.asp
They don't understand. — How a-n-g-r-y we are. It was our proud buildings that were brought down on 9/11. It was our office workers, airplane passengers, firemen and cops who got killed. Those attacks were the worst foreign assaults on American soil since the founding of the republic. We are mad as hell, and we have every right to be. It didn't help a bit that we heard stories from all over the world of people rejoicing in our loss and grief, standing up and cheering, dancing in the streets, writing smug editorial pieces in the London Review of Books to the effect that we had it coming. Those things just spread our anger wider, from the monsters who attacked us to the fools who try to give them moral credibility.
Comment: And the thing is, you really haven't seen us in true blind rage mode yet...
We don't understand — How much they resent our wealth and power. Fourteen years after the end of the Cold War, the sheer scale of our supremacy in the world has not really sunk in to our consciousness yet.
Our military is better funded, better equipped, and more awesome by an order of magnitude than any other. Even before 9/11, we accounted for over 36 percent of the world's military expenditure. The next in rank, Russia, had less than six percent.
Our economy makes everyone else's look puny — we currently have 43 percent of the world's economic production. Twenty years ago we fretted about rising competitors like Japan, a united Europe, Asian tigers, China. Now Japan is a busted flush, Europe is choking on red tape, the tigers are trending Japan-wards, and China is facing a major systemic crisis. We stand supreme.
Our culture is omnipresent: peasant lads in Nepal wear NBA T-shirts, teenage girls in Sudan hum the Titanic theme, bankers in Buenos Aires meet at Starbucks.
To the rest of the world, we look like a 200-foot giant. Immense wealth and power may be respected, are occasionally admired, will sometimes be feared, but they are never loved.
"But don't they remember how we saved their bacon twice in the 20th century?" Sure they remember. Gratitude, however, is an emotion with a short half-life. If you save me from drowning, I shall be intensely grateful to you for days and weeks afterwards. Months and even years later, I may still regard you with a warm appreciation. If, however, you are still reminding me of the good deed 50 years on, I shall find it irritating. That is not fair at all, but it's human nature. "I did for you what you could not do for yourself" contains, if you look at it closely, an implied comment about my own abilities.
No theologically parallel comments here.:wink:
They don't understand — Our deep idealism. All right, Americans say, we are a giant. Are we not a kindly giant, though? Was there ever a giant with such a will to do good? Can you imagine what a world dominated by Russia would be like? Or China? (If you can't, ask a Hungarian, or a Tibetan.) We are proud of the great good we have done in the world — Lend-Lease, victory over fascism and communism, the Marshall Plan, and all the liberating and wealth-encouraging institutions we have helped fund and support — the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO, and, yes, in theory at least, the U.N. Sure, some of those good deeds benefited us, too. That is the "self-interest" in "enlightened self-interest." Will someone please note the other half of the phrase? Uniquely among all the Top Dog nations that the world has ever had, we do not believe that the international order is a zero-sum game, that what is good for us will be bad for you.
Yeah, this is something that I get pissed at too. I WANT stable, democratic nations to have working militaries and dynamic economies. Even France, for crying out loud.
Even when we have blundered, it has been with good intentions. France fought in Vietnam to preserve her imperial standing and keep her planters in business; we fought in Vietnam to hold the free world's line against communist dictatorship. Every pronouncement from our leaders about possible war with Iraq comes with a rider that we shall do our utmost to avoid harming civilians. When did any other nation prepare for a military expedition with such oft-repeated declarations? When? The Chinese going into Vietnam in 1979? The Russians going into Chechnya in 1994? The French in Algeria? Iraq attacking Iran? The Libyans in Chad? When? When?
None I've heard tell of...
We don't understand — Their cynicism. Two stories.
Around 1991 I was in a movie theater in London's Leicester Square (which is to say, a tony movie theater in the heart of London) watching Tom Selleck in Three Men and a Little Lady. Near the end of the movie, Tom looks into the eyes of his leading lady and says the words she's been longing to hear: "I love you." The London audience erupted in hoots of laughter. Can you believe it? Americans really go for that sappy stuff! What rubes they are!
In China a year and a half ago, I was talking to one of my Chinese relatives about the United States Constitution. He waved away the Constitution with a laugh. "Oh, that's all nonsense. it's just a piece of paper. Doesn't mean anything."
There is an innocence, an earnestness about Americans that, all too often, foreigners just don't get. If we love someone, we look into her eyes and say so. We take our Constitution seriously. One way and another, we passed through most of the great disillusioning experiences of the 20th century, from the Great War to the sexual revolution, with our illusions pretty much intact. Outside the intellectual classes, irony doesn't come easily to Americans. Europeans who come to live in the U.S. find that they have to perform major adjustments to their sense of humor to avoid giving offense to the literal-minded inhabitants of this country.
Americans have had no prolonged education in cynicism. We have never been expected to look up to rulers who claim to be appointed "by the grace of God," yet whose failings are all too obviously human. We have never had to endure the indignity of living in a "people's republic" in which the actual people count for nothing, under a "constitution" whose sole purpose is to provide a fig leaf of legitimacy to naked, brutish power.
I'm pretty sure Iraq has a constitution somewhere...
They don't understand — Our patriotism. There are styles of patriotism. Old ethno-nations like France, Poland or China tend to assume that patriotism is bred in the bone, and does not need to be shown or expressed except at times of dire national emergency. The flamboyant, everyday patriotism of Americans is unsettling to them, and looks like bumptiousness covering insecurity. There is perhaps no other country in the world in which, on a day that is not a national holiday, you can walk down a residential street and see flags flying from the doorposts. I have been hunting around on the web for statistics on flag ownership — how many citizens, country by country, actually own a copy of their country's flag. Couldn't find those statistics, but I feel sure the U.S.A. easily ranks number one in this table, too; and I bet that was true even before 9/11. I lived more than twenty years in Britain, and I can't recall a single instance of any British person I knew owning a British flag.
Man. Not even at soccer-ah, sorry, football matches?
We don't understand — Their patriotism. French people, Germans, Russians, even Mexicans, nurse deep attachments to their history, their customs, their language and cuisine, their traditions, the great deeds of their ancestors. We may look down at these people's political incompetence: at France, which has been through five republics, two empires and two kingdoms in the lifetime of our own single Constitution, at the Russians, who submitted to be the slaves of amoral despots for 70 years, at the Germans, who surrendered their liberties to a psychopath with a comic-opera mustache and stood by obediently while he massacred millions of their unarmed fellow-citizens.
Still we should not forget that when you and your ancestors have lived in the same place for a thousand years, speaking the same language and eating the same food, practicing the same religious observances and quoting the same poets, gazing out over the same rivers and hills, you do not take kindly to the intrusions of a 200-year-old upstart nation, half of whose people do not seem even to be able to describe themselves as "American" without sticking something hyphenated in front of the word.
They don't understand. — How a-n-g-r-y we are. It was our proud buildings that were brought down on 9/11. It was our office workers, airplane passengers, firemen and cops who got killed. Those attacks were the worst foreign assaults on American soil since the founding of the republic. We are mad as hell, and we have every right to be. It didn't help a bit that we heard stories from all over the world of people rejoicing in our loss and grief, standing up and cheering, dancing in the streets, writing smug editorial pieces in the London Review of Books to the effect that we had it coming. Those things just spread our anger wider, from the monsters who attacked us to the fools who try to give them moral credibility.
Comment: And the thing is, you really haven't seen us in true blind rage mode yet...
We don't understand — How much they resent our wealth and power. Fourteen years after the end of the Cold War, the sheer scale of our supremacy in the world has not really sunk in to our consciousness yet.
Our military is better funded, better equipped, and more awesome by an order of magnitude than any other. Even before 9/11, we accounted for over 36 percent of the world's military expenditure. The next in rank, Russia, had less than six percent.
Our economy makes everyone else's look puny — we currently have 43 percent of the world's economic production. Twenty years ago we fretted about rising competitors like Japan, a united Europe, Asian tigers, China. Now Japan is a busted flush, Europe is choking on red tape, the tigers are trending Japan-wards, and China is facing a major systemic crisis. We stand supreme.
Our culture is omnipresent: peasant lads in Nepal wear NBA T-shirts, teenage girls in Sudan hum the Titanic theme, bankers in Buenos Aires meet at Starbucks.
To the rest of the world, we look like a 200-foot giant. Immense wealth and power may be respected, are occasionally admired, will sometimes be feared, but they are never loved.
"But don't they remember how we saved their bacon twice in the 20th century?" Sure they remember. Gratitude, however, is an emotion with a short half-life. If you save me from drowning, I shall be intensely grateful to you for days and weeks afterwards. Months and even years later, I may still regard you with a warm appreciation. If, however, you are still reminding me of the good deed 50 years on, I shall find it irritating. That is not fair at all, but it's human nature. "I did for you what you could not do for yourself" contains, if you look at it closely, an implied comment about my own abilities.
No theologically parallel comments here.:wink:
They don't understand — Our deep idealism. All right, Americans say, we are a giant. Are we not a kindly giant, though? Was there ever a giant with such a will to do good? Can you imagine what a world dominated by Russia would be like? Or China? (If you can't, ask a Hungarian, or a Tibetan.) We are proud of the great good we have done in the world — Lend-Lease, victory over fascism and communism, the Marshall Plan, and all the liberating and wealth-encouraging institutions we have helped fund and support — the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO, and, yes, in theory at least, the U.N. Sure, some of those good deeds benefited us, too. That is the "self-interest" in "enlightened self-interest." Will someone please note the other half of the phrase? Uniquely among all the Top Dog nations that the world has ever had, we do not believe that the international order is a zero-sum game, that what is good for us will be bad for you.
Yeah, this is something that I get pissed at too. I WANT stable, democratic nations to have working militaries and dynamic economies. Even France, for crying out loud.
Even when we have blundered, it has been with good intentions. France fought in Vietnam to preserve her imperial standing and keep her planters in business; we fought in Vietnam to hold the free world's line against communist dictatorship. Every pronouncement from our leaders about possible war with Iraq comes with a rider that we shall do our utmost to avoid harming civilians. When did any other nation prepare for a military expedition with such oft-repeated declarations? When? The Chinese going into Vietnam in 1979? The Russians going into Chechnya in 1994? The French in Algeria? Iraq attacking Iran? The Libyans in Chad? When? When?
None I've heard tell of...
We don't understand — Their cynicism. Two stories.
Around 1991 I was in a movie theater in London's Leicester Square (which is to say, a tony movie theater in the heart of London) watching Tom Selleck in Three Men and a Little Lady. Near the end of the movie, Tom looks into the eyes of his leading lady and says the words she's been longing to hear: "I love you." The London audience erupted in hoots of laughter. Can you believe it? Americans really go for that sappy stuff! What rubes they are!
In China a year and a half ago, I was talking to one of my Chinese relatives about the United States Constitution. He waved away the Constitution with a laugh. "Oh, that's all nonsense. it's just a piece of paper. Doesn't mean anything."
There is an innocence, an earnestness about Americans that, all too often, foreigners just don't get. If we love someone, we look into her eyes and say so. We take our Constitution seriously. One way and another, we passed through most of the great disillusioning experiences of the 20th century, from the Great War to the sexual revolution, with our illusions pretty much intact. Outside the intellectual classes, irony doesn't come easily to Americans. Europeans who come to live in the U.S. find that they have to perform major adjustments to their sense of humor to avoid giving offense to the literal-minded inhabitants of this country.
Americans have had no prolonged education in cynicism. We have never been expected to look up to rulers who claim to be appointed "by the grace of God," yet whose failings are all too obviously human. We have never had to endure the indignity of living in a "people's republic" in which the actual people count for nothing, under a "constitution" whose sole purpose is to provide a fig leaf of legitimacy to naked, brutish power.
I'm pretty sure Iraq has a constitution somewhere...
They don't understand — Our patriotism. There are styles of patriotism. Old ethno-nations like France, Poland or China tend to assume that patriotism is bred in the bone, and does not need to be shown or expressed except at times of dire national emergency. The flamboyant, everyday patriotism of Americans is unsettling to them, and looks like bumptiousness covering insecurity. There is perhaps no other country in the world in which, on a day that is not a national holiday, you can walk down a residential street and see flags flying from the doorposts. I have been hunting around on the web for statistics on flag ownership — how many citizens, country by country, actually own a copy of their country's flag. Couldn't find those statistics, but I feel sure the U.S.A. easily ranks number one in this table, too; and I bet that was true even before 9/11. I lived more than twenty years in Britain, and I can't recall a single instance of any British person I knew owning a British flag.
Man. Not even at soccer-ah, sorry, football matches?
We don't understand — Their patriotism. French people, Germans, Russians, even Mexicans, nurse deep attachments to their history, their customs, their language and cuisine, their traditions, the great deeds of their ancestors. We may look down at these people's political incompetence: at France, which has been through five republics, two empires and two kingdoms in the lifetime of our own single Constitution, at the Russians, who submitted to be the slaves of amoral despots for 70 years, at the Germans, who surrendered their liberties to a psychopath with a comic-opera mustache and stood by obediently while he massacred millions of their unarmed fellow-citizens.
Still we should not forget that when you and your ancestors have lived in the same place for a thousand years, speaking the same language and eating the same food, practicing the same religious observances and quoting the same poets, gazing out over the same rivers and hills, you do not take kindly to the intrusions of a 200-year-old upstart nation, half of whose people do not seem even to be able to describe themselves as "American" without sticking something hyphenated in front of the word.