"I loathe America, and what it has done to the rest of the world" . . .

[OneBlueSky]

a column from a couple of years ago that I recently ran across in my bookmarks . . . as applicable today as it was then, if not more so . . .

http://www.opinion.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2003/05/08/do0801.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2003/05/08/ixopinion.html

(snip)

My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me, like a disease. It rises up in my throat like acid reflux, that fashionable American sickness. I now loathe the United States and what it has done to Iraq and the rest of the helpless world.

(snip)

America uses the word "democracy" as its battle cry, and its nervous soldiers gun down Iraqi civilians when they try to hold street demonstrations to protest against the invasion of their country. So much for democracy. (At least the British Army is better trained.)

America is one of the few countries in the world that executes minors. Well, it doesn't really execute them - it just keeps them in jail for years and years until they are old enough to execute, and then it executes them. It administers drugs to mentally disturbed prisoners on Death Row until they are back in their right mind, and then it executes them, too.

They call this justice and the rule of law. America is holding more than 600 people in detention in Guantánamo Bay, indefinitely, and it may well hold them there for ever. Guantánamo Bay has become the Bastille of America. They call this serving the cause of democracy and freedom.

- more . . .

http://www.opinion.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2003/05/08/do0801.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2003/05/08/ixopinion.html

[krkaufman]

1. Wonders how she feels now....

... now, that we've put * back in office.

[indepat]

2. By our works we are known

[TallahasseeGrannie]

3. I have a hard time with this one

Yes, there are many truths in her statements.

But I could come up with a laundry list very similar for many nations.

For example, I loathe the way the Saudis treat their women. But I won't allow myself to loathe the country.

Our country has done great wrong at times. We have done great good. One of the great good things we did was help get Britain's butt out of a very big sling in the last world war. And Britain's own past is far from illustrious when it comes to empire and imperialism.

I just don't see any reason for this kind of crap to be written. I know I might be in a minority here. I am not blindly waving the flag.

We need to face up to our wrongs and right them when possible, but this is wallowing in a real swamp of disgust. Life is not this black or white.

Grannie..stepping into flame suit.

[rockymountaindem]

4. I agree with you.

The Europeans most of all have no right to rag on America for "imperialism". Just ask India, Algeria and Mozambique, they'll back me up on this.

[TallahasseeGrannie]

6. Basically humans suck

all races, all cultures. Nobody has a monopoly on suckiness.

But we are trying, and sometimes we make strides.

I'm relieved someone agreed with me. I was getting out the marshmallows.

[wryter2000]

5. I agree

What's more, most folks from Canada I talk to keep reminding me that this is a wonderful country that has fallen into the control of some very evil people. If Canadians feel that way, why should I start hating the US?

[Tom Yossarian Joad]

7. I don't know, Grannie, I could have said all the same things with

the title "Why I miss America."

What we live in today is not the country I love or grew up in.

Peace.

[TallahasseeGrannie]

8. But "why I miss America"

assumes that this is a temporary situation, that we have not always been this way and that we may, indeed prevail again.

It is so much more hopeful, less despairing. I don't have patience for despair. I'm too old, I guess. No time for it. My days are limited and I have to use them well.

I guess it is the hopelessness that got to me. Also, stone throwing from very fragile national glass houses.

You know, I always enjoy your posts.

[Mz Pip]

9. I'm with you on this one

I do not hate my country. We are a county that does good as well as bad and sometimes we need to be reminded that we are not all bad. It is just unfortunate that the bad is so high profile these days.

Like Bill Maher said, "I don't hate America; I'm embarrassed by America."

Mz Pip
:dem:

[Booster]

12. Perfect. Bill Maher speaks for me also. I love my country, but am

truly embarrassed by the current regime. We will get out of this mess and be an even better country for it. I wouldn't want to live anyplace else, but a good part of our society is engulfed in a sickness like I have never before seen and we are the ones who need to change things.

[TallahasseeGrannie]

17. Well said

Bill Maher isn't my favorite guy (he's kinda sleazy for my taste) but he has that spot on.

I, too, believe we will come out of this. England survived Cromwell. We will survive the radical right.

[Tom Yossarian Joad]

11. I enjoy yours (posts) as well...

I think a lot of the reaction has to come from the "voice" that the reader assigns to the piece as he or she begins to read.

I saw it as a cry of concern for the current path our country is on. In that respect, I certainly share the concern.

But, I'm certainly with in the fact that I don't believe that the "fat lady" hasn't sung yet.

[TahitiNut]

10. What other countries do is NOT my responsibility.

We claim America is a democracy. In making that claim, WE TAKE PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY for the behavior of our government! I do NOT surrender the power to set a "standard" for that behavior to some dictatorship or monarchy somewhere else in the world. It is just not sufficient to be "better than pond scum"!!

Quite frankly, the kneejerk reaction to criticisms of our nation's behavior of "but look what ____ did" is the ethical equivalent of some seven-year-old saying "Timmy did it first!" It's juvenile, if not infantile.

[bryant69]

15. I don't think this criticism is justified

I don't think Tallahassee Grannie is trying to exonerate the United States for what it has done by her comments; given her other posts I'm sure she's jsut as critical of our foolishness as you might be.

The question is whether we are ready to give up on it and decend into hatred of America or whether we believe there is still a possibility of rebuilding and healing the United States.

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

[TahitiNut]

16. I didn't say she did.

However, any response to criticisms of loathsome behavior of our government that makes reference to other countries opens the door to apologetics and disregard. There're only two things that are relevant: (1) we're responsible for the behavior of our own government, and (2) we're responsible for setting the standards for that behavior. Attacking a 'messenger' criticizing that behavior is irrelevant and a red herring.

[TallahasseeGrannie]

19. It is a juvenile response

the whole "he did it first" meme. And I know this intimately, as a middle school teacher.

And yet it is a very human response. No, it doesn't let us off the hook for our behavior. We ARE a democracy and therefore we do bear the burden of responsibility.

But it is not juvenile to frame our wrongs against the backdrop of human behavior. We aren't the first society to scale the slippery slope of fundamentalism and slide down. From Cromwell and the Puritans to the European fascists and islamacists... we appear to yearn, as a species, for easy answers and clear cut norms.

My problem with the writer is perhaps more one of sensibilities than content. I can call my son lazy, but no one else had better do it! It is just bad manners to write an essay about how you loathe another country. She has some valid points, for sure. But if I wrote the same thing about how I loathe Iran (I don't) I believe I would get slammed here on DU and I would deserve it.

I think it is alot like individual challenges like losing weight, giving up drugs, etc. Shrinks tell us we have to love ourselves and accept ourselves before we can really effect positive change in our lives. I see such self-hate in our country and I think that is an enormous threat when it comes fo effecting change culturally and politically.

[Karenina]

24. Please allow me, TallahasseeGrannie

with love and respect, to present the view of the "accident" from another corner of the intersection. May I suggest that your views are informed by "American exceptionalism?"

Margaret Drabble is a highly respected, well-educated, award-winning writer, a 66 year old woman whom I would hardly describe as "juvenile." This is a 2 year old piece which shows her to be "ahead of the curve."

Indeed the representation of Americans' "superior truth and justice," as recently presented by Karen Hughes, only to hide behind "well we're just HUMAN" while the citizens of your country continue to tolerate the RAPE of a weaker nation and simultaneous destruction of a generation of YOUR OWN youth is seen on this side of the pond to be... well errr... JUVENILE. And SEVERELY FUCKED UP.

Americans are currently regarded by the ROTW as a menace to the survival of homo sapiens on this globe, and rightly so. Your *PTB have not taken ANY RESPONSIBILTY for the atrocities being commited in your names. Nor have you citizens risen up in sufficient numbers with a big, red FULL STOP sign. Battered wife syndrome.

And speaking of manners... :rofl:

The Queen's garden was destroyed.
Gloved hands were offered the President of Slovakia.
Your Veep wore ski attire and a woolen cap with "STAFF" embroibered on it at Auschwitz.
Your oh-so-articulate *dauphin referred to "Slivio Baloney"

And THAT's just the tip of the dangerous, reckless, who-CARES-what-YOU-think-or-how-YOU-feel *iceberg representing you on the world stage... I would dare conjecture that you have neither been to Iran, are closely associated with any of her natives, nor know much about it other than the bite-sized pieces offered for consumption by the *CM$M. They have been directly affected by misguided American foreign policy for DECADES. America has well-earned their hatred.

Every day that American citizens ALLOW the rape of Iraq to continue heightens the contempt. "Kick their ass, take their gas" is no secret in these parts. Never mind the genocide your *MIC is perpetrating. Operation Iron Fist, indeed.

The "norms" are the same as they were in kindergarten.

ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW I LEARNED IN KINDERGARTEN

(a guide for Global Leadership)

All I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate school mountain, but there in the sand pile at school.
These are the things I learned:

* Share everything.
* Play fair.
* Don't hit people.
* Put things back where you found them.
* Clean up your own mess.
* Don't take things that aren't yours.
* Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody.
* Wash your hands before you eat.
* Flush.
* Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
* Live a balanced life - learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.
* Take a nap every afternoon.
* When you go out in the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together.
* Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: the roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
* Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup - they all die. So do we.
* And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned - the biggest word of all - LOOK.

Everything you need to know is in there somewhere. The Golden Rule and love and basic sanitation. Ecology and politics and equality and sane living.

Take any one of those items and extrapolate it into sophisticated adult terms and apply it to your family life or your work or government or your world and it holds true and clear and firm. Think what a better world it would be if we all - the whole world - had cookies and milk at about 3 o'clock in the afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap. Or if all governments had as a basic policy to always put things back where they found them and to clean up their own mess.

And it is still true, no matter how old you are, when you go out in the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.
http://www.robertfulghum.com/>

If you do NOT hate yourselves for the horror that has been commited in your names, you are truly a very, very sick populace.

[TallahasseeGrannie]

28. You have some very valid

points in my opinion.

One thing, however (this is self-serving and does not delve into the truths of which you speak)...

If you go back and reread the exchange and the use of the word "juvenile" you will see I was addressing that to myself and not the author.

Everything you say makes sense, including the bad manners issues.

But I am still old-fashioned enough to think an "I loathe America" theme is also bad manners. My example of Iran was pulled from a hat, but there is a country that figures very negatively in my background, and that is Germany. Because of policies not yet a century old my husband and therefore my children have no living ancestors and no records of their existence, (with literally all but one exterminated) and that stain can't be erased quite as easily as many would believe. There is still hatred. But I am a pragmatic person and believe that this is a HUMAN failing rather than a German failing. And all the ills you list we could tit for tat into most countries past, or present. Even gentle Norway at one time hosted the most violent cultures of Europe.

I don't know...maybe I just don't have it in me to loathe anyone. I want us all to work together and do better, but I don't hate. I just can't.

I've enjoyed talking with you!

[Karenina]

37. Thank you for correcting me!

I misread the reference, forgive me.

Suffice to say, I identify closely with your family history. Every day I am reminded of the horrific loss, as the homes from which people were seized are marked by plaques with names, dates and fates of those murdered.

I agree with you most deeply and profoundly about our human failings and am lately quite distraught that history's lessons remain unlearned. Our entire global system has been converted into a zero-sum-competition-over cooperation meat grinder. It bodes most ill for ALL of us.

These days, I'm also too exhausted to hate. Exasperated, frustrated, angry, depressed more accurately describe the swirling emotions. How does one address hatred without addressing the conditions that spawn it?

Thank you for your response, TG! :yourock:

[lonestarnot]

34. Every child is not guilty because a few brats bully the rest into some

crap! I for one take no responsibility for the crap they have sewn as I have NEVER been a part of THEIR America. I love America and have been fighting them since the day they stole office in 2000. I will share none of their guilt, but will be quick to point out they should be tried for an assault on America and the world-at-large.

[bryant69]

20. I suppose it depends on how you take the tone of the origional post

Saying I hate America doesn't really fall under the heading of criticism in my opinion. It's a value statement about America. America stinks. America is hateful.

How is one to judge the value of America?

One way might be in comparision to other nations - this is a probablamattic way of doing it, but it is just as problemattic to say that America plays by it's own rules and isn't rquird to go along with anybody else.

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

[TahitiNut]

22. "A finger pointing at the moon."

I often find the phrase "a finger pointing" to be helpful in maintaining a sense of perspective. I think of the times, when I had a Labrador Retriever ("Bo"), that I'd try to point to something I wanted him to see. When he was young, like most puppies, he'd look at my finger and perhpas try to nip at it. When he got older, he'd actually look at whatever I was pointing at. It took me some serious contemplation to realize how intelligent that learning was -- for a dog.

[Mutley]

13. dupe.

wrong spot

[Mutley]

14. I agree with you also.

I don't hate America. I just hate what has been done to it.

[Retired AF Dem]

18. Grannie you don't need a flame suit

with me. :)

[Greyhound]

21. I think the writer is referring to the amerikan government, not the

American people. BTW I also believe it is relevant to point out that WWII was a very big exception to amerikas usual MO. We (our government) have consistently been a force for evil on the planet.

"Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles? In the same way, every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will know them by their fruits."
Matthew 7:15-20

What kind of tree has amerika been? :banghead:

[Fla Dem]

26. Add me to those who are not ready to "Hate America". How do you hate a

Country and it's people? Maybe Germany when the Nazis were in power, because the people knew what was happening and only a few resisted. The remainder gladly turned in their neighbors, friends and co-workers, to garner favor with those in power.

I hate our government now, for what it has done and is doing. But America, I don't hate it.

[smirkymonkey]

31. I agree with you Grannie!

Throughout history, the story has always been the same - whoever is on top pretty much acts ruthlessly toward those they wish to dominate.

We just happen to be "it" right now, and although I despise what our government is doing and I am pretty much disgusted by our current cultural climate, my defenses go up when I hear a bitter rant like that.

I have a theory that most Europeans who revel in "American Bashing" are really just projecting the shadow side of their own cultural ugliness on to us. After all, almost all of us are descendants of Europeans, Africans, Asians and various other nations. Americans didn't kill and destroy the native people of this land, Europeans did.

[Kailassa]

23. Loving a country

has nothing to do with thinking it's perfect. The goverments and the people of my country have done attrocious things. I still love my country though, and that love inspires me to work to make it better.

Love is why we have two eyes. One to see the thing we love as it is, and the other to see it as it could be.

[MODemocrat]

25. I Love America, Its the "leaders" who are loathsome

The Bush admistration has disenchanted a lot of people, including me, but America itself cannot be held responsible for all the misdeeds of our hateful leaders. It's so sad what they're doing to our liberties. :cry: :cry:

[Karenina]

27. What I find most interesting

is what appears to be a double standard vis-a-vis German citizens and the atrocity their hateful leaders committed before they were born...

[TallahasseeGrannie]

30. I think what we are attempting to

do is point out hateful behavior, past and present.

If the author had simply titled her piece "I weep for America" or "I am afraid of America" etc. I could have been on board

but instead she maintains: My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me, like a disease. It rises up in my throat like acid reflux, that fashionable American sickness. I now loathe the United States and what it has done to Iraq and the rest of the helpless world.

I supposed that she likes to think of gentle, pastoral England, the quiet isle with no Navy that never once set sail to rape, conquer and imprison. Today we still are slopping about in the messes that the Brits made in the middle East, particularly the partition of Palestine.

And the crack about "acid reflux" the fashionable American sickness? Ah, the Brits...known for their digestive supriority!

And known for their gentle treatment of the Irish, my own ancestors.

No, it still just rubs me wrong. Can't help it! And I will happily agree to disagree with those who have no problem with it.

[smirkymonkey]

33. It's the bitterness and hypocrisy that rub me the wrong way as

well. I don't see this as a balanced, well thought out diatribe, it's more of a hateful rant. If an American had written something like this about another nation we at DU would be all over them.

We should be responsible for our government - but as most of us here know we have tried and done everything in our power to stop the current government and the atrocities being committed in our name to no avail. I take umbridge at sweeping generalizations toward ALL Americans when so many of us are trying to end this tyranny.

Yes, there are a minority of flaming fundamentalist idiots that help to keep thes people in power, but the "powers that be" have pretty much conspired in keeping the Bush Administration in power and so far there has been very little we can do to stop them.

[muriel_volestrangler]

35. I think you're blinded by the "loathe America" words

and are missing the others:

I hate feeling this hatred. I have to keep reminding myself that if Bush hadn't been (so narrowly) elected, we wouldn't be here, and none of this would have happened. There is another America. Long live the other America, and may this one pass away soon.

And here's an opinion poll from around the time she wrote the piece:

A new nationwide PIPA/Knowledge Networks poll finds that 68% continue to approve of the decision to go to war with Iraq. President Bush gets high marks for his leadership, with 74% saying that he is showing strong leadership in dealing with the situation in Iraq. Fifty-eight percent believe that "as a result of having won the war with Iraq...President Bush is...in a stronger position to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."

http://www.pipa.org/whatsnew/html/new_6_04_03.html

Over two thirds approved of the war, then. That's what made the generalisation reasonable.

[TallahasseeGrannie]

36. exactly

[Karenina]

38. Just a tiny point...

she's a writer! ;-) Her piece is meant to elicit a response. The feelings she describes in the moment that she channeled this rant are not necessarily static...

[sadiesworld]

29. The US no longer executes

those who committed their crimes as minors.

Thankfully.

[fishnfla]

32. Looks like AQ hates Britain too

The difference being, it is using her own citizens to commit terror on each other.I think this writer is misdirected in her hatred, and misaligned in her sickness.

Which is why alot of Britains were caught by surprise after the London bombings.

[Zuni]

39. Luckily, the supreme court banned the DP for minors

in the states it was still legal