[lit-ideas] Re: Has Europe removed its Welcome mat?
- From: Eric <mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 05 Oct 2010 05:26:06 -0400
On 10/4/2010 11:09 PM, Mike Geary wrote:
I am so deeply disappointed in Obama. Still in Iraq, still in Afghanistan,
health
care reform close to a joke.
It's likely that when Obama became President, he learned in classified
detail all the issues and factors that Bush had to deal with, his hair
began to gray, and Gitmo remained open.
Mike: Or maybe I projected all my aspirations for a decent country onto
him who is only himself, a politician.
Of course you did. You refuse to acknowledge that there is no "decent"
country of any importance, that the world theater offers only various
national postures of resentment and oppression. That's what your purely
"moral" evaluations are -- projections of your character and history
onto a world more complex than any of us can imagine.
Not having TV made it easy to see the tragic theater, even as I was
spared the images and yelling pundits. Ignorant as I am, I could still
discern the arc of deception and its point, namely to divide Americans
into belligerent camps, teach them to hate stereotypes of each other,
and obstruct a sense of national identity that could improve things.
National identity? Americans? It's difficult to use the phrase without
some hyphenate. White-Americans. African-Americans.
Left-handed-Lesbian-Latino-Americans-with-Right-Eye-patches shunning
those who have patches on their left eyes.
"The world is becoming one," you write. Precisely the point of tragic
theater: one powerless, ever-resenting hive of tiny factions incapable
of addressing any issue with clarity or mutual compromise. In the
background, nations vying for dominance through industrial espionage,
propaganda, resource monopolies.
You see national identity as a fascist threat, summon images of Hitler,
but miss that tolerant national identity -- freed from hate theater --
succeeds through diversity and compromise cohering through that
identity, doesn't lead to the goose-step but to hope. The Moon Landing,
even during the carnage of the Vietnam War, gave that kind of hope.
Subtract the Vietnam War. Imagine a Moon Landing in peace time. You want
that kind of hope too, maybe not a milestone exploration but some
heightened social justice, but you seem unwilling to accept that it
involves being proud of being American (or for others, being Canadian,
being British).
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