Cagle
Posted on 05/10/2003 11:16:11 AM PDT by Stultis
The awful truth: arrogant America got it right
By Joanna Murray-Smith
May 11 2003
Last week, George Bush appeared on the front page of the International Herald Tribune in military gear. Earlier, he had made an appearance on the USS Abraham Lincoln, which had been deftly positioned for the cameras with the sea in the background, disguising its actual position (off San Diego).
What this told us, not that any of us needed it explained, is that US presidents get away with presenting themselves in the vernacular of Hollywood. The public not only gets, but seems to like, politics with production design.
Subsequently, an opinion writer in the Tribune noted that British journalists who witnessed this absurdity had remarked that if Tony Blair had tried such a stunt "the press would have demanded to know how many hospital beds could have been provided for the cost of the jet fuel". In this regard, Australians owe more to their British antecedents than their American amigos. We don't accept pretension or phoniness in our politicians, even in the pursuit of national pride.
One of the remarkable and fascinating things about living in Europe, as I have for the past five months, is to observe at close hand the vast cultural and political differences that coexist within remarkable physical proximity - a hallmark of the northern hemisphere. America juggles the gravitas of power with the comic absurdity of show-biz. England comes to the party, but laughs behind its back. In Italy, France, Germany, London, they shake their heads in wonder at the world's most powerful democracy's intolerance of criticism, even (and perhaps especially) from within its own borders.
Here, in Italy, where I am living, the people I meet don't talk about the war. In social situations, we all laugh about Bush and his marionette vacant-eyed performances, John Wayne meets Ned Flanders (unlike our own Mr Burns), but no one can quite foresee the opinion of others about the war. Suddenly the neat divisions of pro and anti, liberal and conservative, once written in neat ink, havebeen smudged by reality's thumb-print. The simpleself-definitions of the past don't work in the same way.
Two months ago, one could readily announce one's participation in an anti-war march. Now, many of us are caught in a grey blur. The black and white feelings of recent months have become smudged in the aftermath of what your everyday ingenue (Holly Golightly) might describe as a Very Confusing War. Ideological convictions began to founder at the sight of rejoicing Iraqis. People tried to find nice ways of saying that the casualties were few enough to warrant the outcome. And liberals like me had to ask themselves if in the end American hypocrisy mattered enough to outweigh the actual result - if confused and cynical motives (oil, presidencies, imperialism etc) could diminish the simple humanitarian triumph.
My generation grew up inside the recriminations about Vietnam, in part through the movies. We were raised inside a distrust of political administrations' motivations, their propensity for accurate judgement, for justice. We had engendered within us a pervasive sense of the barbarity of war that was (and is) not only intellectual, but emotional.
No one likes to U-turn in public... on wives or husbands, political beliefs, dinner party opinions. We like to state our case and stay true, fearful that any re-evaluation will make us look like intellectual sissies. It can't have been easy for the communists of the 1950s to watch the tanks roll into Hungary and see that juggernaut crush their belief system - a belief system not only at the core of their political lives, but for many, their entire lives. Hopefulness, conviction, passion, then, as now, must sometimes be sacrificed to reality's infuriating complexity - but it sometimes takes courage to admit it.
Many of us from other Western countries, Australia included, have an entrenched view of America that oscillates between fury and hilarity at its blinkered patriotism, at its presidential high-jinks with Bush as cowboy, complete with wardrobe, at its growing Fox and Friends right-wing self-congratulation and its seeming inability or refusal to search its own soul.
And yet, the World's Policeman did something no one else could or would do. It could have all gone horribly wrong, but it didn't. Civilians died, young men and women paid all kinds of prices and both Western and Iraqi children who lost fathers or homes have had their personal maps drastically redrawn by the hand of fate. But the fear and the torture is over. America, in all its infuriating arrogance, acted. Not so long ago, I dreaded this. And now, I have to admit, I was wrong.
This story was found at: http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/05/10/1052280480071.html
"...Australians owe more to their British antecedents than their American amigos."
Actually, Australians probably have more in common with Americans than with the Brits. Australia was chosen as England's dumping ground for the politically and criminally undesirable, the refuse of their society to be swept under the rug. Likewise, North America became Europe's dumping ground for criminals, debtors, religious undesirables, you name it. And from what Europe considered two trashbins of human debris two mighty nations were created and flourished. Aussies, we're your real cousins, because your original parents disowned you long ago...
Absolutely, positively, 100% correct Travis. Cameras were not "placed" so the shoreline couldn't be seen as some libs are claiming. Only demorats would be bold enough to pull some sort of stunt like that.
If land was in site, does anyone not think that a least one camerman CBS, CNN, NBC, or ABC would've zoomed in on the coast if he had the chance?
Smushed 'em flat, that he did. I loved it, too.
Only if they learn from their mistakes -- which they never do.
Viet Nam was a war led by cynical men, and lost by cynical men. The absolute cynicism with which it was conducted scarred a generation. The men leading it never believed in it, and never believed it could be won.
This is one of the outcomes of this war. Having seen what is possible when your leadership is committed to victory, who has not wondered what might have happened had the Viet Nam War been led by moral men, committed to victory?
This is the price of electing empty suits to positions of leadership. Does anyone not notice that they were Democrats?
And liberals... had to ask themselves if in the end American hypocrisy mattered enough to outweigh the actual result - if confused and cynical motives (oil, presidencies, imperialism etc) could diminish the simple humanitarian triumph.
Why does she imagine that her confusion is ours? We didn't awaken yesterday to discover Iraq on our map. This day has been coming for a long time. I was aware of Saddam since the seventies, and I have been expecting bad things from him for decades, I have been wondering how we would ultimately confront him. I have never doubted, since the seventies, that we would eventually have to confront him. And I am nobody. This is not about oil, this is not about presidential politics, this is not about imperialism (try and locate our fantasy empire on the fantasy map and let me know what you find). This is about a mass killer with dreams of grandeur.
I have heard friends say "This isn't about saving Iraqis, we don't care about them"... And the truth is that the person speaking doesn't care about them, but others have been aware and looking for a way to settle this thing for a long time. We finally did it. Events and personalities and circumstances have finally come together in a way that has allowed it to happen. I make no apology for wanting this day to come, or for believing that this day had to come.
I only wonder why it is that the intellectual elite are always confused, and always way behind the curve on these things?
Oh, puh-leeeze. Imagine that; Euro-Coms laughing at an extraordinarily successful American conservative president. What's wrong with that picture?
While the Euro-Coms (+ one leftover-from-the-sixties Red Aussie) laugh at Bush and his successes, American liberty-lovers double over and guffaw at the blissfully-ignorant "laughers" for all their naive underestimation of him.
I don't believe this is accurate and is probably an outright lie. My recollection is that the president's flight time from the Naval Air Station to the Lincoln was 45 minutes. At a speed of 500 or so knots, that would make the distance at least several hundred miles off shore and this is one of the reasons a jet was used instead of Marine One. It is a lot safer to fly in a jet over that much water and land in an aircraft which permits ejection in case of dire emergency.
This is one of the most ill tempered admissions of being wrong I've ever read but what more can you expect from a journalism school graduate? One of the dirty little secrets of that profession is that the people who go into it generally would never be able to make it in any real work. Nice try at salvaging a bit of credibility, but the writer remains an ignorant blow hard steaming sack of s**t.
I have concluded that "elites" are, by and large, merely celebrities. They are experts mostly in the sense that
an "ex" is a has-been, and
a "spurt" is a drip under pressure.Ex-spurts of that sort herd together for safety in numbers, never daring an independent thought which might--horror of horrors--net them bad PR.
And reporters emphatically belong to that category of ex-spurt. And they all herd together and accuse conservatives of exactly the intellectual sloppiness and conformity of which they themselves are exemplars.
So when did the Feds arrest Michael Moore? I thought it would have been bigger news....
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