Posted on 05/11/2003 4:39:24 PM PDT by Pokey78
Margaret Drabble went haywire on these pages last week [opinion, 8 May]. Her state was, she told us, "almost uncontrollable". She deceived herself. It was out of control.
"It has possessed me like a disease," she continued. "It rises up in my throat like acid reflux…" Drabble was referring to her loathing of America. Her list of American horrors, apart from the war in Iraq, was standard issue. "I detest," she wrote, "Disneyfication… Coca-Cola… burgers… American infantilism... American imperialism..." and so on.
Countering the arguments Drabble advanced to justify her pathology is easy. The lady is a fine fiction writer, but when it comes to facts or ratiocination, she should be put in care. The sight of the faces painted on the noses of American planes bombing Iraq led her to the conclusion that "a nation that can paint those faces on death machines must be insane".
There are 26,000 entries alone on the first search engine I went to on the web for "nose art", which is what aviation art is called. It appears to have been first used by the Italians in 1913, but its golden age was the Second World War, when the Germans and British, as well as Americans, used it to keep up morale.
The key to understanding Drabble's lunatic rant is her reaction to what she says she saw on CNN celebrating the 25th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam war. She describes an old, shabbily dressed Vietnamese man bartering for dollars. The horror of this moment - an "elderly, impoverished" Vietnamese man wanting that terrible currency, American dollars, for heaven's sake - just put the lid on it for Drabble. She writes: "The Vietnamese had won the war, but had lost the peace."
Well no, Miss Drabble. The Vietnamese fought the war for communism and they won communism. That, indeed, is why the old man is impoverished, shabbily dressed and bartering for dollars. In your deliberate obtuseness, you become blind to the most self-evident conclusions and an apologist for the appalling regimes that are so far removed from your ostensible values.
Forgetting the danger Saddam posed to those outside his borders, we have now seen that removing him from power cost fewer Iraqi lives than just one of his killing sprees. Would you have condemned the Iraqi people to another 12 years of Saddam's murderous nightmare?
Are you too sophisticated for Coca-Cola and Disneyfication but not for Saddam's garish palaces and his giant posters on every street corner? After Stalin, Hitler and Mao, this horrifying man probably captures fourth place in the great mass murderers' list, or fifth after Pol Pot.
One is tempted to call this visceral anti-Americanism "the Drabble syndrome", but she is neither the first nor the most prominent sufferer. You could as easily call it the Pinter syndrome and it certainly is the BBC syndrome.
One face of it appeared in the form of Dame Margaret Anstee, the first female UN Under-Secretary General, interviewed last week on BBC World's Hard Talk.
For all anti-Americans, the primary danger is American "unilateralism". No one ever explains why - this is simply a given. Dame Margaret believes that after the Cold War it has become important to have some "balancing factors" in this "unipolar world" by creating some "closer combination between the north and south".
If American unipolarity is dangerous and we need to replace the nuclear-equipped Soviet balance of power with a north-south combination, Dame Margaret and her UN might equip their Durban Conference participants with some nuclear weapons. North Korea's Chairman Kim Jong-Il should do the trick. "I don't think it's in the interests of anybody," explains Dame Margaret, "including the United States, to have a situation in which the world as a whole is policed and run by the United States."
These are the arguments of idiots or scoundrels. The last thing America wants is to be alone in the world trying to uphold the values of liberal democracy. The problem is that it does find itself alone, forced into unilateralism by Dame Margaret's UN, which would not enforce any of its 17 resolutions on Iraq. But for her and her ilk, everything comes back to the fault of the US.
Castro's executions get a frown from her, but "as far as Cuba's Castro is concerned, his stay in power has been very much facilitated by certain policies... from outside". The last refuge of the totally blinkered Left-liberal is, when faced with the undeniable evidence of a monstrous regime, to say it is all the fault of America.
If you watch the BBC for any 24 hours, you see institutionalised anti-Americanism. When Mayor Ken Livingstone told schoolchildren that President George Bush was "everything repellant in politics… venal... corrupt" [report, 10 May], the BBC's commentary was concerned only with how badly this would affect tourism in London - as if there was nothing substantially wrong in the remarks themselves.
When BBC World News presenter Deborah Mackenzie faced American Enterprise Institute scholar Mark Falcoff, she found him insufficiently contrite about American unilateralism. "Doesn't world peace depend on international organisations?" she demanded, as if he had just pronounced two plus two equal to five. When Falcoff appeared unmoved, she turned very grumpy. "So, are you happy for the US to play judge, jury, prosecutor and executioner?" she countered, at last abandoning any pretence to objectivity.
The BBC has no idea that it has a bias. But in its anti-Americanism, as in its stand on a number of other issues (ranging from abortion to membership in Europe or the moral equivalence between the actions of suicide bombers and those of the Israeli army), there is nothing in its mind to be decided. If a dissenting view has to be presented, it will always be put in a defensive position.
The canard of choice among those voicing anti-American views is to claim to distinguish between Americans and the administration of George Bush, suggesting the latter is unrepresentative of the people. Every BBC interviewer relies on this, as did Drabble, Astee and Livingstone. But Mr Bush enjoys a popularity rating of more than 65 per cent among his countrymen.
The dislike of the United States has several components, including jealousy of its superpower success, dismay over America's eclipse of European economic and political influence, and unhappiness with a certain vulgarity in American culture. But the primary antagonism springs from the fact that British and European institutions - including the BBC and most of the media - are now firmly in the hands of the statist Left, with its slavish adherence to all the shibboleths of Left-liberalism.
American institutions, under any administration, enthusiastically celebrate the values of free enterprise and individual freedoms relative to the British and European Left. What is called anti-Americanism is really anti-liberal democracy.
Which brings us back to Drabble. "There is another America," she concludes. "Long live the other America and may this one pass away soon." It's pretty much how I feel about the grip the Left has on Britain, the BBC, the EU and the UN - except I don't delude myself that their leaders are anything but representative of the majorities who have brought them to power.
I read this twit's piece here last week.
But, of course. Just not to sarcastic oneliners. ;-)
And good that you recognise the BALANCE of the Telegraph for a change! ;-)
I've wondered, as you know, Happygal, why the conservative Telegraph twists now and then. A post on the board today of an Enter Stage Right interview with the brilliant Mark Steyn may offer some ideas. Here's an excerpt from Mark's response when he was asked about the difference between British conservatives and American ones:
"....it's a snob thing. When Margaret Drabble raged the other day about how she hated Bush and Rumsfeld and Coca-Cola and burgers, many patrician Tories would agree wholeheartedly, at least on the last two. And once you've decided that Coke and burgers are unspeakably vulgar it's a small step to feeling uncomfortable about Bush's hokey invocations of God and love, and from there to not being entirely on board with Rummy's go-ahead-make-my-day shtick with Boy Assad.
American conservatism is much more populist than British conservatism or what passes for conservatism on the Continent. There are simply no equivalents to, say, the gun nuts or the religious right in Britain or Europe. You can imagine what American conservatism would be like without those big grass-roots forces, and in Britain it is."
I love this article by Barbara Amiel. She's a snob, too, but then she's got something to feel snobbish about, is my opinion. As for those grassroots gun nuts and the religious right the British may look down on.....they add muscle and heft to conservatism, and get conservatives, real ones like Bush, elected. Britain could use a few of these to toss Labour out on its ear. The more effete conservatives haven't the red-blood to get it done alone.
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