The Wisdom of Others
Harold Hark
17 July 2003

A stirrer by nature (to be called a polemicist I would need all sorts of qualifications following my name), there two very important subjects stirring will not serve: Israel's occupation of Palestine, and pedophilia.

The Israel/Palestinian issue is pretty self-evident to the non-aligned, but for Jews and Arabs alike, reason takes a back seat to emotion. Worse, the emotion is clouded by the certainty of the religious superiority of Judaism or Islam. I have lost subscribers for daring to post links to articles questioning Israel's policies, even when they were written by Jewish authors. And for the slightest rebuff against the Palestinians, I have received murderous emails.

Pedophilia might be discussed rationally in some parallel universe, but not in the one we inhabit, where sex is regarded by most people with Biblical hysteria.

One brave bloke, none other than Australia's number one national treasure, Phillip Adams, did venture to plop a drop in the ocean on the subject: Paedophilia Inc.

We can expect someone else to venture forth in the next thousand years. In the meantime it's child sexual abuse as usual in our hear-no-speak-no-see-no-evil world.

Everything else, though, is open slather. Here in Australia, our servile, reactionary government adores everything the American government does and considers it un-Australian to be anti-American. Typically, this just fuels anti-American sentiment. Especially for those of us who see America as the Evil Empire. (Ronald Reagan's description of the Soviet Union as the Evil Empire was one of the greatest projections of all time.)

It is usually possible to separate a vile government from its people. We tend to think that people everywhere are the same, that is, they may be hoodwinked by a demagogue for a period of time, but they are basically decent human beings when given the opportunity to think for themselves. Trouble is, this only applies to about half of a population. The other half are the ones who always fall for the demagogue, the Silent Majority who keep reminding us that democratic freedoms cannot be taken for granted.

This 50-50 balance seems to be skewed in America. It's hard not to believe that after tens of thousands of years of painful evolution, we have finally struck a nation where considerably more than half of the people are nothing less than dumb fucking idiots.

A recent article by Simon Schama in The Age, The Unloved American (originally published in The New Yorker), gives us a brief history of how the rest of the world has looked upon America from its beginnings to the present time. If you are like me, in that you grow more gobsmacked over the rote mindlessness of Americans every day, this article will show that the land of the big teeth has ever been thus. Schama presents the zenith of historical hyperbole as he quotes the European writers who have described America over the centuries, and it has never been funnier or more cutting:

In 1776, the English radical Thomas Day had written: "If there be an object truly ridiculous in nature, it is an American patriot, signing resolutions of independency with the one hand, and with the other brandishing a whip over his affrighted slaves."

After the Civil War, European critics pointed to the unprotected labourers in mines and factories as industrial helots [slaves]. Just as obnoxious as the fraud of liberty was the fraud of Christian piety, a finger jabbing rectitude incapable of asserting a policy without invoking the Deity as a co-sponsor. This hallelujah republic was a bedlam of hymns and hosannas, but the only true church was the church of the dollar almighty. And how could the cult of individualism be taken seriously when it had produced a society that set such great store by conformity?

Ring a bell? And that was over 200 years ago! Schama goes on: "...in the 20th century, though the US came to the rescue of Britain and France in two world wars, many Europeans were suspicious of its motives. A constant refrain throughout this long literature of complaint, and what European intellectuals even now find most repugnant is American sanctimoniousness, the habit of dressing the business of power in the garb of piety."

Or the conduct of "Americans at dinner. They wolfed down their food, cramming corn bread into their sloppy maws during meals that were devoured in silence, punctuated only by slurps, grunts, scraping knives and hacking coughs." French observer Jules Huret commented on the national mania for chewing gum or tobacco, deciding that "it was a workout for the over-evolved Yankee jaws and teeth, which needed all the power they could get to tear their way through the slabs of steak consumed at dinner."

For Kipling, Americans were "both ethically primitive and technologically advanced." A legacy so disturbingly evident in the Bush America of today.

Arthur Koestler "bowed to no one in his loathing of cellophane wrapped bread, processed towns of cement and glass...the Organisation Man and the Reader's Digest".

For Charles Dickens, "'America is all Yankee repression and Southern stupor.'" He went further. In the Capitol, he saw: "'the meanest perversion of virtuous Political Machinery that the worst tools ever wrought' - a clamorous gang of fakes, fools and tricksters. His habitual outrage extended to the unrepentant practice of slavery in the South, but he never took the North's support for emancipation as evidence of moral uprightness. The North, he wrote in a letter to a friend, hates the Negro quite as heartily as the South, but uses slavery as a pretext for domination."

As for American governments, they are thought to have all been imperialist. "Why, it was asked, had the engagement of American troops on the Western Front been delayed until 1918? The answer was that the US had waited until it could mobilise a force large enough not just to win the war but to dominate the peace."

And later: "The charge that the US was imposing its cultural habits on the prostrate body of war-torn Europe returned with even more force after 1945. Americans thought of the Marshall Plan (together with the forgiveness of French debts) as an exercise in wise altruism; European leaders such as Charles de Gaulle bristled with suspicion at the patronising weight of the program."

And today: "Among the many anxieties of European friends, as well as enemies, of the US is that Americans are not being told that what lies ahead may be much more testing than a fly-by war and a drive-through peace. But of all the character flaws that Europeans have ascribed to Americans, nothing has contributed more to widening the Atlantic than national egocentricity (a bit rich, admittedly, coming from the French).

"Knut Hamsun put the emphatic celebration of separateness down to a lack of education about other places and cultures and commented, perhaps waspishly: 'It is almost incredible how hard America works at being a world of its own in the world.'"

The Europeans are not let off the hook, but the biggest fish to dangle from it is America.

Until the present time, anti-Americanism has been somewhat forbearing, perhaps seen as a bad joke at worst. But, as Richard Butler said at the Adelaide Festival of Ideas Opening, "with the installation (not the election) of George W. Bush, and the outrageous attack upon the American mainland by al Qaeda" the world has changed dramatically. Using the excuse of the War on Terrorism, American hegemony is no longer covert. The Neo-conservatives who are behind this grab for world domination are neither new nor conservatives. Rather, they are blatant imperialists. The American push to usurp control over the world is no less purposeful than Hitler's.

We are living in a potentially catastrophic era, and this article shows us the historical thoughts of those who would not now be surprised.

Note: Not all is lost with America. We still have The Simpsons. The episode, Pray Anything, puts much of the above invective in perspective.

Also see:
George W. Bush's Resumé.
PARIAH American Connections

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