Our Spoiled and Unhappy Global Elites

http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200505270759.asp ^ | May 27,2005 | Victor Davis Hanson

[mal]

Not long ago Pepsi Cola’s chief operating officer, Indra Nooyi, gave an address to the graduating class at Columbia Business School. In it, she metaphorically likened America to the middle finger on the global hand.

Denunciations and anger arose from her use of the silly metaphor (e.g., “This analogy of the five fingers as the five major continents leaves the long, middle finger for North America, and, in particular, the United States.…However, if used inappropriately — just like the U.S. itself — the middle finger can convey a negative message and get us in trouble. You know what I'm talking about… So remember, when you extend your arm to colleagues and peoples from other countries, make sure that you're giving a hand, not the finger.”)

[Fenris6]

What a stupid metaphor, and from a company that has made its fortune off the culture of America.

[2banana]

Some facts about the middle finger:

My favorite essay on the Right to Keep and Bear Arms:
History of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

By Vin Suprynowicz, assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

excerpt

Because for a thousand years, no village of peasants with their scythes and pitchforks could stand up to a mere handful of the helicopter gunships of that time, the mounted knight in his coat of mail.

Only the landed gentry could afford a warhorse and a suit of armor. Let even three or four of these medieval equivalents of the Abrams tank enter your village, and the peasant's only hope was to drop to one knee and plead for his life. Take the cattle, take our daughters, use them as you will ...

Why did this ever change? Do you think it's because the guys in charge just got tired of having it all their way?

Of course not. This changed in the mid-1400s, at Crecy and Agincourt, when mere English commoners found they could destroy the cream of the French aristocracy--drowning thousands of armored noble knights in the mud beneath their own toppled horses--by dint of one simple, technological advance: the Welsh longbow, an inexpensive weapon best deployed by large gangs of anonymous peasants.

The French considered this so barbarous they threatened to cut off the index and middle fingers of any English archers they caught, rendering them incapable of using their dreaded bows. The Brits responded by defiantly waving these two fingers in the air--or sometimes just one of them.

Far from banning them from bearing arms, by the 16th century English law actually required commoners to practice their archery at least one weekend per month, to remain ready should the king need them. Suddenly--coincidentally?--the "rights of Englishmen" began to be interpreted to mean the rights of commoners under the law, not just the rights of nobles, as envisioned in the Magna Carta of 1215.

This new state of affairs reflected the new reality of the field of battle, where commoners could and did dictate terms to defeated monarchs--even going so far as to behead the King of England in 1649.

Can you imagine that? They cut off his head.

Of course, some lessons take a little time to sink in. Marching south from Lake Champlain to the Hudson in the early autumn of 1777, Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne sent out mercenary Hessian scouting parties to demand fodder for his horses from the local peasantry.

The New York farmers watched the brilliantly-uniformed Hessians walk into their farmyards demanding free food for the general's army ... and shot them dead, sometimes wiping out entire detachments to a man.

This was unheard of in continental Europe, where most peasants were still expected to know their place.

But things only got worse for Burgoyne's army, its morale sapped by the heat, the humidity, the sudden storms, the bugs and the venomous snakes of what Americans now consider the "resort district" of Glens Falls and Lake George. (Thank goodness these wimps didn't find themselves in North Florida--the Yankees would probably have ended up owning Devon, Somerset, and half of Wales.)

As the exhausted army and its overladen baggage wagons emerged from the woods and climbed toward the open lands around Saratoga, a few isolated bands of Yankee farmers in homespun took up position behind the trees, and began "firing on the officers' persons."

I have always loved that quotation from Johnny Burgoyne's journal. The words so succinctly capture the outrage and incredulity of a dying class. British officers knew they ran the risk of being struck, along with their men, by unaimed volley fire. But to have enemy peasants--commoners--purposely take aim at an officer's person, using a Pennsylvania or Kentucky rifle which by an outlandish historical accident proved to be more accurate than the standard-issue British Brown Bess musket ... well, it was unthinkable.

Students of American history know it was the leadership of Gen. Benedict Arnold of Connecticut--rising again and again despite his wounds to lead from the front as his horse was shot from under him--that turned the tide of battle at Saratoga, the turning point of the Revolutionary War, the battle that brought in France as America's ally and thus sealed Cornwallis' eventual fate.

But few recall the first question that occurred to both King Louis and King George when news of Burgoyne's surrender in October of '77 reached the European courts:

Who in hell had Burgoyne surrendered to? Washington and the entire Continental Army--excepting the aforementioned Gen. Arnold and a handful of other officers in fancy coats--were in Philadelphia, withdrawing before the successful (but finally meaningless) siege of Gen. Howe.

The answer--inconceivable to the kind of European mind that ordered the band to play "The World Turned Upside Down" at Yorktown in 1781--was that Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne had surrendered an entire British army to the American militia, to nothing but a gang of New York and New England farmers.

Is there a "control sample" that tends to confirm my thesis for why commoners in America (and, to a lesser extent and until recently, places like Australia and Western Europe) managed to throw off the chains of feudal tyranny and become far more "free" in the centuries after 1500--with all the advantages of economic, scientific, and technological progress with which we're so familiar ... even if we've forgotten how they were won?

Yes, I think so. After toying with imported European firearms in the late 1500s, the shoguns of Japan banned the instruments entirely. In fact, under the decree of the shogun Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-1598), issued on the 8th day of the seventh month, Tensho 16, "The people of the various provinces are strictly forbidden to have in their possession any swords, short swords, bows, spears, firearms, or other types of arms. The possession of unnecessary implements makes difficult the collection of taxes and dues, and tends to foment uprisings."

So, artificially and in an almost ideally isolated experiment, while commoners gained increasing rights in direct proportion to their importance and strength on the battlefields of the rest of the world in the next 250 years, Japan remained (until Commodore Perry brought this experiment to a crashing close in 1853) one of the few places in the world where the peasant remained in absolute feudal subservience to the hereditary aristocracy, with their warhorses and their deadly steel and lacquered leather armor.

Because the people had no guns.

[Sertorius]

So which continent is not "major"? Which group of people is she disregarding?

[vrwinger]

So which continent is not "major"? Which group of people is she disregarding?

Probably those Antarctic-ans... I never did like them...

[Archon of the East]

Never Been a Pepsi drinker but now I sure will let others know why. Drink Coke!

[litehaus]

BUMP!

[tahotdog]

I used to be addicted to cola drinks; nowadays I don't drink them at all. We've had a perfectly good diet sweetener (Splenda) for the last ten or twelve years and they should have had diet colaas out there with just Spenda in it that long ago. The diet drinks with Spelenda AND Ace-K in them still taste like battery acid and I refuse to drink battery acid anymore.

[Tolik]

Victor Davis Hanson:

...The anti-Americanism that we frequently see and hear, then, is often a plaything of the international elite — a corporate grandee, a leisured athlete, or a refined novelist who flies in and out of the West, counts on its globalizing appendages for wealth, and then mocks those who make it all possible — but never to the point that their own actions would logically follow their rhetoric and thus cost them so dearly.

....There are easily identifiable constants in these sad examples. Rhetoric is always at odds with lifestyle: A novelist who tours and writes in English is the epitome of the Western liberal tradition that allows freedom of expression, promotes book sales through open markets, and enjoys unfettered peer review. Ms. Roy will always operate deeply embedded in the system she ridicules, and Western grandees will always pay her well for making them feel badly for a few hours. Islamists, Communists, and theocrats — in a Saudi Arabia, Iran, Cuba, or China — would not only not pay her, but might well issue a fatwa, jail time, or a death sentence for what they didn’t like to read or hear.

.... A second constant is illustrated by director von Traer’s remark: “America fills about 60 percent of my brain.” There is a sort of schizophrenia also common among the “other” who bumps up against the U.S. The extreme example of this syndrome can be seen in bin Laden and Mohammed Atta, who seemed mesmerized and yet repelled by their own thralldom to things Western.

In the case of von Trier, does he ever ask why the U.S. is so obtrusive in his gray matter, and why, for instance, Scandinavia is not — or for that matter a larger France or an even larger Russia? Instead in his movies and outbursts he retreats into the usual racist or exploitative mantra that serves a psychological need of reconciling what you want and enjoy and won’t give up with a feeling of unease and guilt about your own expanding appetite — or exploding brain.

A final suggestion for these unhappy and privileged few: To end your obsessions with the pathologies of America and the West, find a way to create your own alternative sports, literature, corporations, soft drinks, and filmmaking in the non-West.

It is not that we Americans are mad at what you say. It is just that you have all become so hypocritical, then predictable, and now boring — you are all so boring.

    Victor Davis Hanson Ping ! 

       Let me know if you want in or out

[bitt]

thanks for a great post!

see #3

[Valin]

...The anti-Americanism that we frequently see and hear, then, is often a plaything of the international elite — a corporate grandee, a leisured athlete, or a refined novelist who flies in and out of the West, counts on its globalizing appendages for wealth, and then mocks those who make it all possible

I have TWO WORDS and an appropriate gesture for them.

[mainepatsfan]

Hanson is dead on. They have become very predictable and boring.

[Robert DeLong]

you are all so boring.

As usual Victor Davis Hanson is right on the mark.

[Restorer]

Just one problem with this theory.

The Swiss, before significant development of firearms, and without the longbow, had at least equal success beating up on the knights, leading to a 200 year mercenary reign as the lords of the battlefield.

Solid infantry, with their pikes and halberds, were more than a match for European noble cavalry, as long as the infantry had semi-decent leadership. This, however, was due only to a peculiarity of western cavalry, which eschewed missile weapons completely for greater shock. The cataphracts of Byzantium or the Persian or Mamaluke heavy cavalry, all of which used the bow as well as the lance, would have just shot the Swiss pike squares to pieces, then rode down the remnants.

The Flemings and Scots, among others, had famous battles where infantry wiped out knightly armies, although those were most often based on peculiarities of terrain and on poor leadership among the opposition.

I would also suggest that a knight has a lot more in common with a tank than with a helicopter gunship.

[AmericanChef]

I'd like to see their new commercials: America bad, drink Pepsi. If they ran ads like that, their sales would plummet. Why put it into speeches if they don't have the guts to put it into their advertising?

[Red Boots]

No, these ungracious operators all seem to gravitate to, profit from, and then spite the paradigm that created rich global business, media, publishing, and entertainment conglomerates — and themselves.

Summation of article's theme, for those who don't have time to read the entire lot.

[Owl558]

Capitalism for them and international socialism/ anti-Americanism for the rest of us.

These people are below contemptable.

[Eagles6]

Good one. I was going to post it and found you beat me to it.