Comments on: God bless America (and screw everyone else)

by: Colin Campbell

Thu, 01 Feb 2007 19:13:48 +0000

I laughed at your first line. I struggle with this one, having lived in the US for over ten years. I have many friends there, but it is just so easy. Although Americans are not as insular as other countries like Japan, for most Americans, the world starts and stops at the borders. Dangerous out there, with all those wacky muslims, commies…running around trying to overrun our way of life. It is very easy to play to this audience, hence so much baloney from US leaders. They are not speaking to the world, just their backyard, giving them what they want.

by: Administrator

Wed, 24 Jan 2007 10:17:42 +0000

I agree with you about compulsory voting Kieran and you’re right about the French Revolution. People like Thomas Paine, who had a strong influence on the US constitution, were inspired by ‘liberte, egalite, fraternite’ and in today’s context would be regarded as the maddest of mad lefties. In fact of course the French Revolution was mainly the work of the middle class who would have regarded the prospect of the peasant majority taking power with almost as much horror as the aristocracy.

It’s a widespread flaw in the rhetoric of democracy. it was all very well for Aristotle to stroll about talking about the rights of the citizen but he didn’t have women in mind … and the reason he had so much free time was that Athens had a huge slave population to do all the hard labour.

I read Webb’s reply to the State of the Union speech today with interest. He got on to the human cost of the Iraqi occupation but I looked in vain for any recognition that this cost was mainly being born by the Iraqis. To read Bush and Webb, you’d think the only people suffering in Iraq are Americans.

When I start getting more than 20 comments a day you can start worrying about clogging up my comments .

by: Kieran

Wed, 24 Jan 2007 07:45:57 +0000

I personally (not to clog up your comments page, but whatever) blame the French Revolution for imparting a lot of ideas into the nascent American republic way back when. I’m no academic, but I strongly suspect the magical/mythic speech that we hear to this day in Presidential speeches owes a lot to the very close historical proximity of the two revolutions - I think the young US took up a lot of that stuff and forgot it wasn’t the only one.

If George the Third had been a little more forthcoming and the French a few decades late in letting those wild ideas of theirs out into the world, I suspect the US might have evolved into a peaceable little commonwealth nation (albeit a very rich one).

You said in another post that you’re somewhat of an isolationist at heart. I’d tend to sympathise with that view, and wish the US would have exercised a bit more of that over the years, cause frankly it has no goddamn right to behave as it does.

by: Kieran

Wed, 24 Jan 2007 07:37:16 +0000

Re. the point in the first or second paragraph, it’s worse than that: as my good American friend would attest, the Bush administration (and I would argue, most any administration) only really acts on behalf of the top one percent. Top ten per cent, if we’re being generous. So while poor Americans (forget middle class, they won’t have one in a generation) may be lucky enough to avoid the bombing raids of those in Iraq, they certainly know which way the cookie crumbles.

I’d advocate compulsory voting as the only way to save America’s ageing democracy, but it’d be a futile argument of course. Hell, we’ll be lucky to keep ours (compulsory voting, that is).