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
"Mistakes were made."
She also spends most of the article running down Bush as a braindead moron, then admits at the end that he was right and she was wrong, which makes me wonder how anyone could be so much stupider than a braindead moron and still remember to breathe.
I also concur with the earlier poster who noted the vapidity of self-proclaimed leftist "intellectuals." In my job, I have to read news all day long, and I see the focus group-tested buzz words and tortured arguments of the left as they are faxed out from the DNC in press release form, then wind their predictable way into news stories, filter down into NY Times and Washington Post op-eds, and eventually get regurgitated back from the public in the form of letters to the editors and calls to talk radio. And all those people who are repeating all those silly notions and phrases that were spoon-fed into their empty noggins think that they are great thinkers, so much deeper intellectually than that moronic Harvard MBA we have in the Oval Office. My pet peeve has always been the combination of ignorance and arrogance, and that seems to be all the ingredients you need to create an "intellectual" these days.
LOL! Many a lefty is moody. It's a good thing.
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