Them Again

Why does this not surprise me?

Former "Nightline" reporter Dave Marash has quit Al-Jazeera English, saying Thursday his exit was due in part to an anti-American bias at a network that is little seen in this country.

Marash said he felt that attitude more from British administrators than Arabs at the Qatar-based network.

Marash was the highest-profile American TV personality hired when the English language affiliate to Al-Jazeera was started two years ago in an attempt to compete with CNN and the BBC. He said there was a "reflexive adversarial editorial stance" against Americans at Al-Jazeera English.

Emphasis added.

Because like the big brother who never stopped picking on you, it's always the British.* We have this conflicted relationship with France. But I think it comes from a mutual awareness of our common quirks -- we're both trying to be the dominant moral force for Enlightenment virtues in the world, so there's natural rivalry.

The French gave us the Statue of Liberty. They also gave themselves one, staring east toward its bigger sister. And they scattered other replicas across the country, including this one:

A third replica is the Bordeaux Statue of Liberty. This 2.5 m (8 ft) statue is in the city of Bordeaux in Southwest France. The first Bordeaux statue was seized and melted down by the Nazis in World War II. The statue was replaced in 2000 and a plaque was added to commemorate the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks. On the night of March 25, 2003, unknown vandals poured red paint and gasoline on the replica and set it on fire. The vandals also cracked the pedestal of the plaque. The mayor of Bordeaux, former prime minister Alain Juppé, condemned the attack.

Which, the Wikipedia artfully manages to not mention, was three days into the Iraq War.

Can you imagine the British giving America a Statue of Liberty? French visitors to early 19th century America, such as de Tocqueville and Michel Chevalier, were careful observers and able to see the flow of democratic forces in U.S. society. The British writers who visited practiced a rhetorical scorched earth policy to feed the hunger of the home audience for horror stories about stupid, violent, arrogant, boorish America. The few exceptions were ones who never saw the place but used it as an imaginary ideal to criticize what they disliked in English culture and British governance.



*As always, our friend Canker is a noble exception to that generalization.

Soul of the U.N.

I read this book review more out of interest in the author, Francis Fukuyama, than in the subject, Sergio Vieira de Mello, the U.N. bureaucrat killed in a 2003 al Qaida attack in Baghdad.

But I became more interested in Vieira de Mello as I read. And, if Fukuyama is painting him in accurate tones, he could stand as a platonic ideal of the whole type of international bureaucrats since the day of Dag Hammarskjöld. "More than anyone else at the United Nations," Fukuyama writes, "he embodied the organization’s idealism, as well as its limitations."

Vieira de Mello was born in 1948. The son of a Brazilian diplomat, he was a prototypical global cosmopolitan who grew up in Europe and, as a student, manned the barricades during the événements of 1968 in Paris while studying Marxist philosophy. The young Vieira de Mello was instinctively anti-American and cringed when he heard an American accent. After earning his degree, he found work with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, traveling to southern Sudan, Mozambique and Vietnam, and passionately embracing the United Nations and international law as the embodiments of global justice.

Emphasis added, for the sake of those who cling to the silly notion that America only "lost the respect of the world" in the time of the current incumbent. There is no indication from Fukuyama that Vieira de Mello ever lost that tic. Or his other propensities.

Samantha Power argues that Vieira de Mello underwent a personal evolution that tracked the United Nations’ experiences. In his early days he carried the United Nations habit of being nonjudgmental to an extreme: he dined with the bloody Khmer Rouge leader Ieng Sary; he cultivated a friendship with Slobodan Milosevic (which earned him the nickname “Serbio”). “Chasing the Flame” is critical of Vieira de Mello for, in the words of one of his colleagues, “siding with power” when he helped organize forced returns of refugees to Vietnam and Rwanda. But the book is not entirely convincing in its claim that by the end of the 1990s, Vieira de Mello had concluded that the United Nations needed to shift from peacekeeping to peace enforcement as part of a new, global “responsibility to protect.” If he believed such a thing, he never articulated the view or disavowed the earlier United Nations posture as fundamentally broken, as Kofi Annan was eventually to do.

I'm sure Fukuyama will not take it amiss if, after reading all this I am more convinced that the U.N.'s "idealism" and its "limitations" are flip sides of the same coin.

“Chasing the Flame” argues, as Vieira de Mello himself once did, that the United Nations is often unfairly blamed for failures to protect the vulnerable or deter aggression, when the real failure is that of the great powers standing behind it. Those powers are seldom willing to give it sufficient resources, attention and boots on the ground to accomplish the ambitious mandates they set for it. At present, the United Nations is involved in eight separate peacekeeping operations in Africa alone; failure in a high-profile case like Darfur (which seems likely) will once again discredit the organization. Power (who has been a foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama) makes the case for powerful countries like the United States putting much greater effort into making the institution work.

Emphasis added, again, this time for the sake of those trying to peer into the hypothetical futures of the possible next administrations.

We'll Always Have Berkeley

Damn shame, too. Another day. Teh excitement!

Mightier than the Sword

Neo-Neocon wonders why, historically, writers so often line up with the useful idiots.

[G]ood writers of fiction — and, to a lesser extent, poetry — need to be keen observers of the human mind and heart. ... But there’s a long history of literary “useful idiots,” people whose critical faculties seem to stop where their art ends. For every Emile Zola, there’s a Harold Pinter.

She takes as a sample for analysis the writers whose lives are described in the book "Partisans," the set "who were connected to the influential journal Partisan Review during its formative decades, the 30s and 40s," and who saw little real difference between Hitler's Reich and the Western democracies that opposed it.

Included were such luminaries as Mary McCarthy, Philip Rahv, Edmund Wilson, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Dwight Macdonald, writers who were exceptionally well-known in their day but who are far less famous now.

Ah, well, that might be a "bingo" moment. It takes at least a half century for any given generation of writers to be sorted out into the real craftsmen (and -women) who can use words and ideas to illuminate human experience. And the most popular in any generation rarely make the cut. And it's telling that, before they are even quite cold in the ground, this set of writers is being discussed for its polemics, not its prose.

There are scientists and linguists and politicians who are excellent writers. Perhaps these people were not so much writers as polemicists with sharp quills.

Second, I think there's a particular case to be made that all creative and thoughtful people who came of age in the West just before, during, or just after World War I were, to some degree, shell-shocked and justifiably embittered. Neo describes their naivete:

The idea that our internal enemy — our own government — is more to be feared than any external threat. The idea of the soldier as exploited dupe of evil overlords. And, to a lesser extent, the idea on the part of the most strongly Leftist that a worldwide revolution of the oppressed would be possible, and that what would follow would somehow be better than what preceded it.

But if there was a time when such thought were justified by experience, the 1920s and '30s were it. The agony of it drove some writers to be useful idiots for the right, notably Ezra Pound. (The paradox is, in spite of spinning off in opposite directions, like shards of debris from some cosmic collision, these writers all opposed the Western democracies as they girded to fight Hitler's fascism.) The center had failed in 1914, and the war had scythed through their generation. Pound wrote:

These fought, in any case,
and some believing, pro domo, in any case ...

Some quick to arm,
some for adventure,
some from fear of weakness,
some from fear of censure,
some for love of slaughter, in imagination,
learning later ...

some in fear, learning love of slaughter;
Died some pro patria, non dulce non et decor" ...

walked eye-deep in hell
believing in old men's lies, then unbelieving
came home, home to a lie,
home to many deceits,
home to old lies and new infamy;

usury age-old and age-thick
and liars in public places.

Daring as never before, wastage as never before.
Young blood and high blood,
Fair cheeks, and fine bodies;

fortitude as never before

frankness as never before,
disillusions as never told in the old days,
hysterias, trench confessions,
laughter out of dead bellies.


V.

There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization.

Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
Quick eyes gone under earth's lid,

For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.

Writers, to the degree they are sensitive to human suffering, always will tend to be reflexively anti-war. They saw libraries bombed and cathedrals burned, saw friends and comrades whom they knew to be geniuses cut off in youth by the wastage of battle. They saw the war end and repression and poverty settle over victors and vanquished alike. Writers after World War I would have been intensely anti-war. If you start from there, you can see where they got the will and ability to delude themselves that the new enemy your government wants you to fight is not worse than the war that would be unleashed.

I think Neo gets her hook into something real when she cites Milan Kundera on the contrast between a creative writer's “imagology” and a non-writer's reality. She writes:

Writers, on the other hand, tend to live very much in their heads—dealing with thoughts, moving words around, creating images.

Yes; in fact, writers have that ability to such a high degree that, I think, they can more easily imagine an entirely different way of human existence in the world that is better than this one. Creating and feeling fictional realities is part of their skill set. How much more appealing must a socialist paradise have seemed to them?

As for the practical aspect of getting from here to there, that would be exactly where a writer would be less capable than the average person. To get the reality he sees into being, he has to sit down and hammer it out on the keyboard -- and that work can make you cry, let me tell you, but it's not quite the same as destroying civilization and human nature and rebuilding both from the mud.

Other insights in her post probably are not keepers. Some are not exclusive to writers ("American writers for the most part have had no real experience of living under other forms of government"), some could as easily be used to argue the opposite point ("[W]riters also put great stock in what they read, which in some cases is more real to them than their actual experience" -- but as writers themselves they ought to be more alert to the limitations and deceits of prose).

What Do Wahhabis Want?

[posted by Callimachus]

Victor Davis Hanson on What Does Bin Laden Want?

In 2004, bin Laden objected to our logical conclusion that he instead hated the West simply for its freedom. He posed this rhetorical question: "Contrary to what Bush says and claims -- that we hate freedom -- let him tell us then, 'Why did we not attack Sweden?'"

I think we can now answer that by pointing out that al-Qaida has just put out a $100,000 murder bounty on a Swedish cartoonist who was a little too free in his caricatures of Islam. Note that Sweden has no troops in Iraq or Afghanistan, lets in plenty of Middle Eastern Muslims and wants no part of George Bush's "war on terror."

But then radical Islamists have also threatened Danish cartoonists, Dutch filmmakers, German opera producers, and the pope. All have nothing to do with Iraq or Afghanistan or Israel -- but simply do things that radical Islam finds blasphemous.

So aren't these constantly changing gripes of al Qaeda's just pretexts for bin Laden's larger hatred of Western-inspired freedom?

Of course what bin Laden wants doesn't amount to a hill of catshit if he doesn't have millions of donors in mosques around the world, thousands of angry young men willing to take up arms or go undercover in his crusade, and a well-placed handful of Choam Nomskys to be his useful idiots in the West. Without all that, he's just as pathetic as some impotent loner sitting in his apartment obsessively watching the hit meter on his Youtube videos.

And I'm willing to bet many, if not most, of those people who work for or enable bin Laden don't share his quixotic caliphate dreams. They get to his camp by a mix of paths, personal, political, psychological, or otherwise. Global and local, tribal and doctrinal.

And not just devout Muslims. American college students, for instance.

At the same time, Osama bin Laden presents many good arguments against the president and many of his reasons for disapproving of Bush are similar to those of anti-Bush Americans. Would it be wrong to assume that there is some kind of connection between feelings of the American people and those of Osama bin Laden? As I would love to make this connection, I ultimately cannot because of the actions of our president. If I were to say I agree with bin Laden, that would mean that I agree with a terrorist; under the Patriot Act, I could be labeled a potential terrorist and my phone could be tapped, and every move I make could be watched and analyzed.

This one has just taken the first step. Adam Gadahn went the distance:

A Californian heavy metal fan, who converted to Islam and became the first American to be charged with treason in half a century, has been fingered as the author of Osama bin Laden's latest video lecture - which left the terror chief sounding like an anti-globalisation protester.

The al-Qaeda leader's first video message for three years featured a bizarre rant against America, with references to global warming, "insane taxes", the US mortgage market meltdown and rising interest rates.

American spy chiefs were quick to name Adam Gadahn, the head of al-Qaeda's English language media operations, as the author of large sections of bin Laden's broadcast.

Last October, the 28-year-old "loner" became the first American charged with treason since 1952, for appearing in a succession of al-Qaeda videos under the guise of "Azzam The American", in which he condemned globalisation and made American cultural references.

... A former senior US intelligence official said: "It has Adam Gadahn written all over it." Mike Baker, a former CIA covert operations officer, said the tape left bin Laden with "the title of biggest gas bag in the terrorist world."

No wonder it resonated with the progressive college kid.

Ultimately, for every day he lives, bin Laden draws to him the collective energy and weight of support of every person deeply resentful of anything about America and Americans collectively or individually, of every force in world history currently represented most potently by America, and of every trait projected onto America by some kook's internal psychodrama.

Periodically, circumstances allow this swirling sludge of resentment to gather like a boil and rise up in a corporeal form. It did so in the time of Stalin, and many people rushed to be his supporters, in spite of every ethical and logical objection. Whatever bin Laden is or wants, he's already become much more than that. And, like Stalin, he's learned to tune his broadcasts to lure more moth-brains to his flames.

Histeria Historia

[posted by Callimachus]

When French historians write American history it looks remarkably like ... well, what happens when European media write American stories.

With the illogicality of malice, Mr. [Patrice] Higonnet characterizes Mr. Bush as simultaneously incompetent and omnipotent, feckless and relentless, the bully of his advisers and the dupe of his advisers. Reckoning the sum of these contradictions tells us nothing about Mr. Bush or about America, but it tells us a great deal about the passionate, self-delighting, deeply irresponsible hatred that now prevails even among the most prestigious and best educated precincts of the Left. It is a book that Mr. Higonnet's sympathizers will read with vigorous nods, and everyone else will read with despairing shakes of the head.

The argument of Mr. Higonnet's book, such as it is, can be quickly summarized. America, he writes with an air of having made a great discovery, has done good things in its long history, but it has also done bad things. This by itself would not seem to distinguish America from any other country — for instance, from France, which is Mr. Higonnet's constant point of reference. (Although "Attendant Cruelties" was apparently written in English, it is really intended for a French audience: Both its frequent reference to French figures and events, and its general lack of inwardness with American history, suggest that its ideal reader lives in Paris.)

But America's failures and crimes, to Mr. Higonnet as to most conscientious Americans, seem worse than those of other nations, precisely because America has always held itself to a higher standard. Our promise of democracy was painfully slow of fulfillment. Freedom for white men went along with the inexpiable sin of slavery, with the genocide of the Native Americans, and with economic and social oppression toward women, immigrants, and minorities. The twinship of good and evil in American history is the great American theme — not just for historians, but for novelists and poets and philosophers.

Mr. Higonnet, however, has no new light to shed on this darkness. As he recites the familiar chapters of the American story — the Constitution and the Civil War, Progressivism and the New Deal — he never penetrates even the topmost layers of the mystery. Instead, he continually resorts to a banal formula: "Americans, as individuals and as a people, have frequently moved from nation to nationalism without real understanding." This is shallow enough, but it quickly becomes clear that even generalities like "nation" and "nationalism" — or Mr. Higonnet's favorite alternatives, "inclusion" and "exclusion" — are not being employed in any concrete sense. They are vague, slippery terms, which can be used with equal justice on both sides of every question. Was the American decision to annex the Philippines an example of nationalism — a desire to increase our power and prestige — or universalism — a desire to spread the blessings of republican government around the world? Was the Senate's refusal to accede to the League of Nations, a decision that Mr. Higonnet deplores, a case of vicious exclusiveness — a cynical indifference to the interests of mankind — or of virtuous patriotism — a refusal to tarnish America with the sins of Europe?

In neither case is it helpful to view American history in Mr. Higonnet's Manichean terms. It is the inextricability of good and evil that makes American history so tragic and so moving; and this ancient knot will not yield to Mr. Higonnet's crude separation of sheep and goats. For what really drives his judgments, it becomes clear, is not any true vision of America's best self; it is the proximity or distance of America to the ideals of the contemporary European left. When America acts like a centralized, statist, internationalist social democracy, Mr. Higonnet approves; when it does not, he does not.

I'm confident some of the perenial America-bashers among the overseas bloggers could do a better job at this kind of polemical mucking than the good historian does. He should stick to his day job and leave the dirty work to those who are experienced at it.

Crafty

[posted by Callimachus]

What Chavez learned from Castro, is that socialist totalitarianism goes much, much farther than it has any right to if you wrap it in nationalism.

Good old-fashioned unprogressive nationalism. And no gift is greater than the eternal image of the big bad Yankee bully to the north. You can take away all sorts of freedoms and opportunities from your people, you can aggrandize power and control in your own hands, and if you tell your people what you're really doing -- what they're really doing -- is rubbing America in shit, they'll love you. Enough of them will fall for it every time.

You can always count on confirmation from the world media and the usual gang of American useful idiots. And ham-handed Washington policies that seem to confirm your cheap little charade. It's got to be pretty heady stuff, to keep so many people from noticing or minding that their economy is headed back to the Dark Ages and their political culture is devolving into Franco's Spain.

The Soviets, bless their calcified ideological hearts, never got that. They really tried to transcend nationalism and couch their propaganda in class struggle terms. Of course, in their polyglot empire, a strict nationalist approach would have backfired.

The Things I Learn

[posted by Callimachus]

Oh, so he wants to talk about it after all. Though of course he won't accept the challenge in the field where it was made. Easier to go home and talk tough to the mirror. Including using "anti-Semitism" in quotes where no such term was used. But it wouldn't be Probiglio if he got his facts right, would it?

So let's go see what Probiglio can teach us ignorant Americans. Why, lookie here: Jesus wasn't a Jew. Naw, he was a Palestinian!

Christ was not a Jew. His first tongue (and his last words) were Aramaic. That, I am told, would make him a Palestinian.

I read that, and read it again. And I was astonished at the barrel-full of ignorance in me. Why, it seems my ignorance was so large it should have been knocking down buildings as I walked down the street.

Just consider:

• Here, I always thought language was a different thing from ethnicity. For instance, lots of Jamaicans and black South Africans and Singaporeans and African-Americans have grown up all their lives speaking a flawless English. And here I thought that didn't necessarily mean they were descendants of Alfred the Great. But I was wrong. It does! Martin Luther King Jr. was a good ol' Anglo-Saxon boy!
  
  
• Here I thought Aramaic was a set of regional Semitic dialects of Syria that emerged as the lingua france of the polyglot Levant under Persian rule (much like English was in colonial India) and continued until it was displaced by Arabic in the eighth century. Here I thought a socially active person in Judea in Christ's time would have been fluent in Hebrew, common Greek, and Aramaic. When Christ spoke to the priests in the Temple, he likely would have spoken Hebrew. When he conversed with Pilate, they likely talked in Greek. When he spoke to the masses, he would have spoken Aramaic. Nobody regards any of these tongue-switches as a miracle.
  
  [When Christ died on the cross he cried out his last words, which Matthew and Mark give, transliterated into Greek, as El(o)i El(o)i lema sabachthani. This is Aramaic; the canonical Hebrew would have been eli eli lama `azabtani.]
  
  
• Here I thought the name "Palestinian" historically meant "person of Palestine," which was the name the Romans gave (Provincia Syria Palaestina) to the former Provincia Judaea in C.E. 135, after they crushed the second Jewish revolt. So there were no "Palestinians" in Jesus' day. The Romans got that word from the Latinized form of the people named Philistines, who lived along the coast and were not Arabs or even Semites, and seem to have had cultural, if not ethnological, links with Mycenae in Greece.
  
  
• Here I thought the modern people called Palestinians were descendants of Arabs who moved into the region from traditional Arab lands east of the Jordan after the Muslim conquest in the 630s. And many are descended from Arabs who moved there from Syria and Jordan after 1850. They would have been merely "Arabs," without national identity, until the British revived the name "Palestine" after they took the district under mandate at the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire.
  
  
• Here I thought only two kinds of people were obsessed with proving that Jesus was not a Jew. The first were Christian Jew-baiters and the second were every other kind of Jew-baiter. I thought the kind of intelligent people whose enthusiasm to pry Jesus away from his Jewish context and heritage was so enormous that it overrode the most basic common sense were hard-core haters, people who also were fond of referring to Jews as "Sons of pigs and monkeys." People like Yasser Arafat, who, addressing a press conference at the United Nations in 1983, called Jesus "the first Palestinian fedayeen who carried his sword."
  

But at least I can guess, thanks to this same site, that my ignorance in these matters is an inevitable result of being an Ugly American. I learn, we're all the Ugly American:

I would not, as James has done, limit the R[est] O[f the] W[orld]'s contempt of the President and Americans as a people solely on the head of the President. Yes, as head of that nation he should take note of the culture and attitude of the countries he visits in determining his responses and actions. I agree with James, but would put it slightly differently.

Once again, the American nation and not just its President has confirmed the caricature penned originally by Graham Greene in "The Ugly American".

Some people, you see, separate their powerful distaste for certain American policies or aspects of American life or even individual Americans from their blanket condemnation of an entire chunk of the human race.

And some don't.

Anti-Americanism

This article, by two authors of a recent book on the topic, offers a workable definition of "anti-Americanism." Peter J. Katzenstein and Robert O. Keohane write, "we define anti-Americanism as a psychological tendency to hold negative views of the United States and of American society in general."

I'll take that (with the addition of "and of Americans as individuals"). It's a label that gets thrown around too loosely. It needs a template. Katzenstein and Keohane write that "[b]oth left and right need to rethink their positions" on the roots and significance of anti-Americanism, and that "big explanations" that attempt to trace it to a single cause are doomed to fail.

Overall, it's an intelligent analysis. Here are a few highlights I liked:

Since liberal anti-Americanism feeds on perceptions of hypocrisy, a less hypocritical set of United States policies could presumably reduce it. Hypocrisy, however, is inherent in the situation of a superpower that professes universalistic ideals. It afflicted the Soviet Union even more than the United States. Furthermore, a prominent feature of pluralist democracy is that its leaders find it necessary to claim that they are acting consistently with democratic ideals while they have to respond to groups seeking to pursue their own self-interests, usually narrowly defined. When the interests of politically strong groups imply policies that do not reflect democratic ideals, the ideals are typically compromised. Hypocrisy routinely results. It is criticized not only in liberal but also in nonliberal states: for instance, Chinese public discourse overwhelmingly associates the United States with adherence to a double standard in its foreign policy in general and in its conduct of the war on terror specifically.

Hypocrisy in American foreign policy is not so much the result of the ethical failings of American leaders as a byproduct of the role played by the United States in world politics and of democratic politics at home. It will not, therefore, be eradicated. As long as political hypocrisy persists, abundant material will be available for liberal anti-Americanism.

Yes. The German theologian Reinhold Niebuhr noted the paradox 50 years ago: America cannot at the same time project its world power and maintain the image of an innocent, virtuous nation. Katzenstein and Keohane note correctly that America's domestic innocense was lost long ago, about the time the first election was held.

They also explain something about France that often is overlooked in the general American dismissal of that nation, based on years of hectoring.

Elitist anti-Americanism arises in countries in which the elite has a long history of looking down on American culture. In France, for example, discussions of anti-Americanism date back to the eighteenth century, when some European writers held that everything in the Americas was degenerate.2 The climate was enervating; plants and animals did not grow to the same size; people were uncouth. In France and in much of Western Europe, the tradition of disparaging America has continued ever since. Americans are often seen as uncultured materialists seeking individual personal advancement without concern for the arts, music, or other finer things of life. Or they are viewed as excessively religious and therefore insufficiently rational. French intellectuals are the European epicenter of anti-Americanism, and some of their disdain spills over to the public.

However, as our book shows, French anti-Americanism is largely an elite phenomenon. Indeed, polls of the French public between the 1960s and 2002 indicated majority pro-Americanism in France, with favorable ratings that were only somewhat lower than levels observed elsewhere in Europe.

Finally, they tackle the bogeyman of "Americanization:" An odd sort of defensive reaction against U.S. popular culture, often made by the same people who, out of the other side of their mouths, sneer that America has created nothing new in the world.

“Americanization,” therefore, does not describe a simple extension of American products and processes to other parts of the world. On the contrary, it refers to the selective appropriation of American symbols and values by individuals and groups in other societies — symbols and values that may well have had their origins elsewhere. Americanization thus is a profoundly interactive process between America and all parts of the world.

A few years ago an anti-war blogger sneered that Americans ought to give up claiming "I don't agree with what you say, but I'll die for your right to say it" was an expression of American ideals, since it was not said by an American. She attributed it to the French and to Voltaire -- a common error.

[The quote is first used in 1906, by a woman named Evelyn Beatrice Hall (1868-1919), an Englishwoman who wrote a biography of Voltaire under the pseudonym S.G. Tallentyre. She said it was a paraphrase of Voltaire's words in his "Essay on Tolerance": "Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so too." The quote is so often misattributed that one historical researcher has paraphrased it as, "I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to mis-attribute this quote to Voltaire."]

I wrote to her: "Really, very little of America is original, and almost none of the best of it is. We know that, and it doesn't bother us. Everyone here is from somewhere else, ultimately. Every idea that formed our Declaration of Independence and Constitution was first hatched in some European mind -- a considerable chunk of it from Voltaire, in fact. Doesn't bother us. Many of the men who led the colonies into independence were born overseas. ... Arnold Schwarzenegger is a famous American governor, but he wasn't born here."

Anything But Anti-American

[posted by Callimachus]

The Associated Press report on former German leader Gerhard Schroeder's biography contains an odd and disturbing passage:

"I am anything but anti-American," Schroeder told Spiegel in an interview to accompany the excerpt of the more than 500-page book that goes on sale Thursday.

In it, Schroeder, who led the Social Democrats to power in 1998, recalls the tears in his eyes as he watched television footage of people jumping from the burning World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

Fortunately for my opinion of him, already sufficiently low, Schroeder didn't say those two things together in the interview. The interview (only available in German) did not turn to America, and then only briefly, until the end. Here is what he said. The reporter has been probing him about his fawning treatment of Russia's Putin, which Schroeder defends. Then the reporter notes that he was not so tactful in opposing America.

No, not at all. I am anything but anti-American. Otherwise half of the society in the USA would be also. We have the problem in Germany -- that is admittedly not the problem of your magazine -- in substantial parts of journalism that each essentially justified criticism at America is defamed as anti-Americanism. That is naturally wrong.

My translation. Yeah, sure, Gerhard. You see German journalists all the time rushing to the rhetorical ramparts to defend America. What he's really saying is, "I played on the populist and elitist German resentments of America till my opponents learned how to turn back the trick by pointing out in the media that this was all I really had to offer."

I also could point out that he never makes any sort of distinction between himself and whatever he thinks a genuine anti-American is. But then, this was not an important point in the interview. It's the AP's juxtaposition that I really resent. And I have seen it made by Europeans and others. "Why, how can you call me anti-American? I was very upset on 9/11."

If you saw innocent people blown to their deaths in flames out of tall skyscrapers without warning, and you managed to feel sympathy for them even though they were Americans, that doesn't exactly absolve you of being an anti-American.

State of the Arts

The "New York Times" (can't find this online yet) reports on the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, a massive and wildly uneven three-week festival of performance held each year in Scotland. The scary anti-Semitic component of many performances already has been remarked upon by people not usually scared by such things.

Less surprisingly, the "righteous anger" that NYT's reviewer finds to be the mood and tone of the festival, has Americans and American culture and American religion and American policies as its targets.

But humor aside, the vein that runs through the festival this year is anger: anger at the state of the world in general, and anger at America in particular. Comedians need only display a picture of President Bush to provoke hollow laughter or indignant booing, depending on the context.

One play that has been much admired by audiences is Simon Levy's "What I Heard About Iraq," a stark recitation of actual quotations — some fatuous, some incomprehensible, some terribly sad — from the instigators of and participants in the Iraq war. The play is less a drama than an indictment, an exercise in controlled outrage, and the performers are preaching to the converted. The audiences' anger flashes back through its applause at the end.

Religion and its excesses are another obsession. In one show, the Wisconsin comedian Ryan Paulson describes his strange childhood as a born-again Pentecostal, his religion's emphasis on speaking in tongues forever colliding with his town's keep-to-yourself Scandinavian reticence.

Another show uses man-on-the-street interviews and audience participation to plumb the West's ignorance of Islam. In "According to Jesus," the dark-skinned British comic Jason Kavan, in the guise of Jesus, turns water into wine and then says, "The real miracle was getting hold of these chemicals, looking like this."

And in "Jesus: The Guantanamo Years," another popular attack on the American administration, the comedian Abie Bowman imagines Jesus as a comedian, sent back to earth by "my dad" to try to sort out the world's chaos. But when he arrives at U.S. immigration and describes himself as an unmarried Palestinian fundamentalist with no fixed address who came from a cave in Lebanon, he is sent to Guantanamo Bay and issued an orange jumpsuit, Bowman's costume for the show (along with a modest crown of thorns).

"Welcome to the land of the free," Bowman says. "Conditions apply."

It gets worse. You'll just have to find a print copy.

No mention of any plays or comedy skits about terrorists, Islamic fundamentalists, Iran's freakish megalomaniac president, Saddam's prisons, or mocking Muhammad. I guess the reviewer just didn't get to those venues.

Uncle Gulliver

"They apprehended my breaking loose, that my Diet would be very expensive, and might cause a Famine. Sometimes they determined to starve me, or at least to shoot me in the Face and Hands with poisoned Arrows, which would soon dispatch me: But again they considered, that the Stench of so large a Carcass might produce a Plague in the Metropolis, and probably spread through the whole Kingdom." Jonathan Swift, "A Voyage to Lilliput," in Gulliver's Travels

Uncle Sam, the American Gulliver, peers down at edgy Europe in "Überpower: The Imperial Temptation of America," a new book by Josef Joffe, editor of the scrupulously centrist German newspaper "Die Zeit." The book gets a review by William Grimes here (and last time I checked the review had not been banished behind the subscription wall). Joffe gets an essential truth out in the open that is too often forgotten.

It does not matter what the United States does, Mr. Joffe argues. The mere fact that it can act with impunity causes alarm. To Europeans, the new United States looks like Gulliver did to the Lilliputians: a giant whose intentions are uncertain and whom they would prefer to see bound by a thousand little ropes. "Their motto is: let him be strong as long as he is in harness, be it self-chosen or imposed," he writes.

Understanding that could help a lot of us here in America grasp the otherwise (to us) baffling poll results that show whomping majorities in Europe find America a greater threat to peace than Iran or North Korea. It also explains the perverse rooting for American failure in Iraq among many Europeans who ought to know better. Joffe seems to agree:

European opposition to the current Iraq war, in this analysis, becomes clearer. France and Germany, joined by Russia and China, joined forces to frustrate American designs, not simply on the merits of the case, but also as a matter of principle or instinct. Success in Iraq would only make the United States more powerful and therefore more unpredictable and threatening: "America's triumph would grant yet more power to the one and only superpower — and this on a stage where it had already reduced France and Russia, the E.U. and the U.N., to bit players," Mr. Joffe writes.

There's a danger, of course, in treating Gulliver psychology as though it explains everything. One may oppose the American experiment in Iraq on perfectly principled grounds, or even out of a genuine love for the United States. More likely, based on my discussions with European friends, Gulliver syndrome and principled arguments are so woven into each other they're a seamless fabric.

My German friends especially tell me to just get used to the fact that America is going to be hated and resented, rationally or not, simply because it is powerful. But the taint of irrationality makes the resentment too easy to dismiss. Joffe expresses it well:

Anti-Americanism, Mr. Joffe argues, can sometimes be as complex, paranoid and all-encompassing as anti-Semitism. "Like the Jews who were simultaneously denounced as capitalist bloodsuckers and communist subversives, America gets it coming and going," he writes. It is puritanical and self-indulgent, philistine and elitist, ultrareligious and materialist. When it does not intervene, say, in Rwanda, it is wrong. When it does intervene, it is accused of naked imperialism.

Or, as the "Telegraph" put it in a recent editorial:

Americans find themselves damned either way. If they remain within their own borders, they are isolationist hicks who are shirking their responsibilities. If they intervene, they are rapacious imperialists.

Indeed, many of their detractors manage to hold these two ideas in their heads simultaneously. Yet a moment's thought should reveal that they are both unfair.

The Telegraph editorial was written in response to a recent poll in Britain which reveal the utter contempt most of them have for most of us:

In answer to other questions, a majority of the Britons questions described Americans as uncaring, divided by class, awash in violent crime, vulgar, preoccupied with money, ignorant of the outside world, racially divided, uncultured and in the most overwhelming result (90 percent of respondents) dominated by big business.

Which might sting, but only if you don't know your history. In the 18th century Thomas Jefferson had to work hard to rebut Comte de Buffon's scietific assertion that American mammals -- including, according to some of Buffon's French naturalist followers, Americans themselves -- were degenerate runts. Ninteenth century British publications poured out invective on everything they deigned to notice from the United States. The usual practice of British authors was to take every slander of one American by another in a hot political campaign as an absolute truth, and to present the most degraded characters from the frontier or the slum as the typical inhabitant of the United States.

"Both the travelers and the literary journalists of [England]," wrote Timothy Dwight the elder, "have, for reasons which it would be idle to inquire after and useless to allege, thought it proper to caricature the Americans. Their pens have been dipped in gall, and their representations have been, almost merely, a mixture of malevolence and falsehood."

And this was long before America threatened anyone else's sense of national security. The hatred was strong enough to overpower logic, even then. In 1863 the Very Rev. Henry Alford, DD, dean of Canterbury, wrote a "Plea for the Queen's English" which decried the "deterioration" of English in American mouths. He warned Englishmen to hold aloof from the American way with the language and compared the state of English in America to "the character and history of the nation":

its blunted sense of moral obligations and duties to man; its open disregard of conventional right when aggrandizement is to be obtained; and I may now say, its reckless and fruitless maintenance of the most cruel and unprincipled war in the history of the world.

It was the familiar list of crimes and vices and hypocrisies. Every learned Englishman could rehearse it and many of the finest writers, such as Coleridge and Sydney Smith, bent their considerable talents to spelling it out at length. Except that, coming in the middle of the American Civil War, Alford's screed replaced a now-doubtful entry in the catalogue of American vice with a freshly minted one. As H.L. Mencken noted, "Smith had denounced slavery, whereas Alford, by a tremendous feat of moral virtuosity, was now denouncing the war to put it down."

Eventually America, emerging into a world power, found itself in a world shaped -- or unshaped -- by 300 years of European dominance: Artificial nations strewn across the map of Africa and the Middle East, dysfunctional ex-colonies, all that seething resentment of "the West" in Arab and Asian peoples. Joffe picks up the plot:

The United States is on top for the foreseeable future, in Mr. Joffe's view. That is its inescapable fate. "America has interests everywhere; it cannot withdraw into indifference or isolation, and so all the world's troubles land on its plate," he writes. The problem, as Henry A. Kissinger put it recently, is how to translate power into consensus. Without it, the United States can act, but it cannot succeed.

Kissinger's dilemma seems impossible to solve. How can you convince people they agree with you because they want to, when they -- and you -- know perfectly well you can act without them, or coerce them, or even force them.

But we could do better at it than we have, and we should try. What should the Lilliputians try in return? How about trying to swallow some of the stupid and senseless expressions of contempt. As the "Telegraph" Editorial puts it:

To dislike a country as diverse as America is misanthropic: America, more than any other state, contains the full range of humanity between its coasts.

Kicking and Screaming

When the Cuban novelist Reinaldo Arenas managed to escape to the US in 1980, after years of persecution by the Cuban government for being openly homosexual and a dissident, he said: “The difference between the communist and capitalist systems is that, although both give you a kick in the ass, in the communist system you have to applaud, while in the capitalist system you can scream. And I came here to scream.”

Ian Buruma sets up that anecdote so he can tell you this story about the reaction of the Northern Hemisphere chattering class to the new caudillos of Latin America:

Criticism of American policies and economic practices are necessary and often just, but why do leftists continue to discredit their critical stance by applauding strongmen who oppress and murder their own critics? Is it simply a reverse application of that famous American cold war dictum: “He may be a bastard, but he’s our bastard”? Or is it the fatal attraction to power often felt by writers and artists who feel marginal and impotent in capitalist democracies? The danger of Chavism is not a revival of communism, even though Castro is among its main boosters. Nor should anti-Americanism be our main concern. The US can take care of itself. What needs to be resisted, not just in Latin America, is the new form of populist authoritarianism.

That Chavez is applauded by many people, especially the poor, is not necessarily a sign of democracy; many revolutionary leaders are popular, at least in the beginning of their rule, before their promises have ended in misery and bloodshed.

He comes to this conclusion, which, in a better world would be so self-evident that we would not need an Ian Buruma to remind the left of what the left would realize instinctively:

The left has a proud tradition of defending political freedoms, at home and abroad. But this tradition is in danger of being lost when western intellectuals indulge in power worship. Applause for autocrats undermines the morale of people who insist on fighting for their freedoms[.] Leftists were largely sympathetic, and rightly so, to critics of Berlusconi and Thaksin, even though neither was a dictator. Both did, of course, support American foreign policy. But when democracy is endangered, the left should be equally hard on rulers who oppose the US. Failure to do so encourages authoritarianism everywhere, including in the West itself, where the frivolous behaviour of a dogmatic left has already allowed neoconservatives to steal all the best lines.

The Atlantic Just Got Wider

Jean-François Revel, one of the handful of modern European intellectuals who "got" America, has died. He had serious differences with our policies -- so do most of us, sooner or later. But, essentially, he got us.

"I just looked around, talked to people, to students," he said. "And in the 20th century the information is pretty good, and I read a lot of your press and books."

In the introduction to his "Anti-Americanism" book, Revel wrote that he found an America "in complete contrast to the conventional portrayal then generally accepted in Europe." In particular, he was impressed with Americans' willingness to address and correct their own faults.

He went on to attack those Europeans who said the United States had brought terrorists' attacks on itself through misguided foreign policies.

"Obsessed by their hatred and floundering in illogicality, these dupes forget that the United States, acting in her own self-interest, is also acting in the interest of us Europeans and in the interest of many other countries, threatened, or already subverted and ruined, by terrorism," he wrote.

Hobs-wash

Eric Hobsbawm relishes the images he sees when he looks at the world around him: U.S. economic decline and its soon-to-be-realized loss of predominance to Asia; the "reasonable certainty" of failure of the U.S. "project" in Iraq; and the comeuppance of those fiendish neo-cons. He even claims to be able to root all this inevitable failure and foulness in American history:

The third thread of continuity links the neo-conservatives of George Bush with the Puritan colonists' certainty of being God's instrument on earth and with the American Revolution.

Passing this sort of writing off as "history" is like calling the cyanide-laced Kool-Aid at Jonestown "a soft drink." Oh, sure, after all there was Kool-Aid in it.

Anti-Americans will suck it up like polemical crystal meth, and the rest of us will dismiss it as the bitter drivvel of a Marxist lost causer. Fortunately for "the rest of us," Hobsbawm also recently published an autobiography, which has been thoroughly savaged, and which inadvertently sheds some eerie lights on this historian.

Even the most committed Marxist must surely know that he still, despite all his efforts, bears within himself the contradictions that mark the society he inhabits. And would not such an autobiographer have to explore and then convey how he has always had to struggle to extirpate from himself and his scholarship those bourgeois characteristics the dominant society shoveled into him via the family, the educational system, the job, etc. Given what Hobsbawm tells us about himself it is at least questionable whether he has ever subjected himself to such self-criticism; further, he seems to have been frozen in time, out of touch with and analytically unresponsive to the developments of and responses to capitalism after 1956.

What more ought its readers expect of the autobiography of a lifelong Marxist (p. xii)? Whatever else, surely it would be intended to affect the future of the world, if only by teaching us the ways of a left intellectual and warning us of the difficulties in trying to live such a life even while encouraging us to make the attempt. More ambitiously, it might constitute a political intervention in its own right, as did, for example, Trotsky’s autobiography. The closing sentences of Hobsbawm's book suggest that he, too, conceived of his autobiography as part of the struggle to make the world of tomorrow (p. 418). Unfortunately, he has just revealed that he only hopes his book will help him pass “the test of a historian's life” (p. 417).

Yes, responding this way is a sort of ad hominem, but then Hobsbawm's whole piece is an ad hominem on the United States of America. Besides, it's good stuff.

Ordinary people, working-class people fare even worse. Most of them are unnamed and undescribed. -- Did not Raymond Williams observe that “there are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses?” -- Those that do emerge from the mass are, for the most part, those whom Hobsbawm encountered during his wartime service. Of them Hobsbawm writes,

By and large in my days as a Sapper I lived among workers--overwhelmingly English workers -- and in doing so acquired a permanent, if often exasperated, admiration for their uprightess, their distrust of bullshit, their sense of class, comradeship and mutual help. They were good people. I know that communists are supposed to believe in the virtues of the proletariat, but I was relieved to find myself doing so in practice as well as in theory (p. 159).

“They were good people?” Who is Hobsbawm writing for? Who needs such reassurances? Why do I find myself remembering Robert Graves' anecdote in Goodbye To All That of a British military officer expressing his surprise that the skins of his working-class troops were so white? Hobsbawm does not depict himself as having learned anything from what he terms his “proletarian experience” (p. 158), though the lads did amaze him with their “instinctive sense or tradition of collective action” (p. 158) -- my god, there really was a working class! And then there was the named, described Bert Thirtle, with whom he had to share a room, who even “lacked the social reflexes which I found so striking in my otherwise politically disappointing mates, and which explains so much about British trade unionism” (p. 157). It is, it seems, not only the poor stockinger who needs to be rescued from condescension.

As for his understanding of America, it is, as his own confessions reveal, dismissive and sparse:

Admittedly, Hobsbawm writes from a European perspective. But he has been a regular visitor to the United States since 1960 (pp. 391, 402), and he has taught at a number of American universities. So surely he is aware of the efforts of a series of administrations to roll back the Sixties? And surely he has encountered the culture wars and the political correctness campaign designed to curb those of a progressive persuasion who did find refuge in the American academy? Again, oddly, although he acknowledges the once-Communist historians of slavery (p. 289), the Civil Rights Movement and the subsequent reactions against it go unremarked, Hobsbawm’s great interest in jazz notwithstanding (e.g., pp. 389, 391, 394-402).

But let me leave it to Hobsbawm himself to illuminate the limits of his engagement with and understanding of the United States during one of the most conflicted eras in its history:

Looking back on forty years of visiting and living in the United States, I think I learned as much about the country in the first summer I spent there as in the course of the next decades. With one exception: to know New York, or even Manhattan, one has to live there (p. 403)

--perhaps New York chauvinists would agree with him; as a Briton who has resided in several different regions of the United States, I find Hobsbawm’s dismissiveness too familiar an expression of a certain sort of European superciliousness. Since the United States has constituted such a significant place in Hobsbawm’s life story, it is unfortunate that he has not chosen to engage with it in a more reflective, comprehensive fashion. Again he seems to have opted to remain frozen in his own particular past with its own limiting prejudices.

Just another gray day lived under the leaden sky of a failed ideology.

"The American Enemy"

George Walden begins his review of the English translation of Philippe Roger's "The American Enemy" with a depressing, if juicy, anecdote. When the U.S. invaded Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein, opinion polls around the world showed a plunge in American popularity -- everywhere except France. Why?

The French opposed the invasion vehemently, but the country was already so saturated in anti-Americanism that the index scarcely flickered.

The review is itself a brief history of the warped French contempt for all things American. "Warped" not because America never deserves anyone's bad wishes, but because the French consistently never bothered to look at it before dismissing it. Their hatred of us is irrational -- "a national psychosis " -- and the facts of what we do make little difference.

Walden hits all the highlights: Jefferson's moose, de Tocqueville's valiant swim against the mainstream. De la démocratie en Amérique was printed in France in a mere 500 copies. He's the Europeans who, most Americans agree, got us "right," warts and all, but he's the one the French don't read. But they'll make a best-seller of a book alleging Americans blew up the Twin Towers themselves.

Anti-Americanism increased in bitterness during the interwar years, in inverse proportion to French perceptions of their own national decline. The American role in liberating France earned a nod of appreciation - although obviously it had only come to Europe's aid to enslave her in debt - but with the domination of Marxism in postwar France it was soon back to the old game. Leftists argued that America was the true totalitarian country, more dangerous than the Nazis because of its pretence that its dictatorship didn't exist - the last trick of the devil himself, n'est-ce pas?

"Rabid animals" was Sartre's somewhat rabid phrase for Americans after the execution of the Rosenbergs (Communist spies whose treason has recently been confirmed). His solution was to "break all ties that bind us to America". This he did, refusing to go there, which proved useful, since he never had to justify his increasingly surreal claims about American Cold War atrocities to US audiences. The boycott by the intellectual Left had the effect of sealing France even more hermetically in her anti-American neuroses.

Walden can sympathize, and so can I, with the attempt by France to maintain its independent cultural track in the face of the bulldozer power of the American producers and market in everything from cinema to cheese. I've spent some time in France -- I love it there, frankly. I wish they could, somehow, live like there was no America, as they clearly wish to live.

But that's not the same thing as virulent America-hating. Not by a long shot. And as Roger seems to demonstrate, the hatred goes back a long way before the first Hollywood blockbuster or the first Napa Valley vineyard.

A long way before President Bush, too. Would John Kerry's abilities in speaking French have mattered? Walden thinks not. President Bush "has not improved things," but "French antagonism remains constant, whoever is in charge in Washington -- a malignant infatuation with the force of perverted love."

I was disappointed to learn that President Bush's recent appointment as ambassador to France speaks no French. But then I thought about it and concluded, what's the point of being able to talk to people who won't listen?

For all its amusing vignettes, Philippe Roger's message is sober, and a foreword asks an excellent question: how far is the demonising of America, not just in France but the world over, helping to convert a war of words into a more fearsome conflict?

It is a good question. The "We are all Americans now" attitude in Le Monde, which had a fruitfly's lifespan anyhow, was hardly the only French reaction to 9-11. Philosopher Jean Baudrillard admitted "prodigious jubilation in seeing this global superpower destroyed. ... Ultimately they [Muslims] were the ones who did it, but we were the ones who wanted it."

Spot the Idiot 2

Let me tell you of my recent experiences in an “occupied territory.”

Spoiler: He's going to tell you about his experience as an anti-inaugural protester in Washington, D.C. Doh! I can't believe I gave it away. Trouble is, there are as-yet-undiscovered Stone Age tribes in the Amazon who already can see where this is going.

I had the opportunity to travel with a group of people who were visiting the area of that country to show support for the underprivileged located there. That country was deeply divided between "haves" and "have nots;" those who control the money, influence and military power, and those who represent the marginalized, oppressed and disenfranchised.

Interesting! We're not divided into "haves" and "have-nots" anymore. We're divided into "haves" and "those who represent." Those who represent a whole gaggle of us who the self-appointed representatives think ought to be falling in line behind them, but we're too uneducated to do so. As the recent election map shows, a lot of us are marching to different drummers. So, he seems to say, the have-nots are irrelevant. It's the representatives that matter.

Religion has been used by those in power to stigmatize, segregate, and dehumanize those people of contrary beliefs.

You mean like stigmatizing supporters of current American foreign policies as dupes of a cabal of megalomaniacal Jews and fanatical born-agains? Oh, wait, that kind of stigmatizing now is called "Speaking Truth to Power."

Fear has been used most successfully to promote policy, especially to expand militarism and control dissension.

You mean like fear that an aberrant strain in a great religion would exploit U.S. domestic openness to mount vicious attacks killing thousands of innocent people? Oh, wait, that really happened.

The group I accompanied joined, in essence, a refugee camp, which was set up to isolate dissenters. They were protesting to claim the same rights to occupy and govern the land as those in power. The "non-privileged" were excluded from other "public" areas by their inability to obtain (i.e., by paying) the special pass accorded to the power elite.

Plenty of people attended the inaugural events, from ballrooms to parade route grandstands to seats at the swearing-in itself, without paying a cent. I know some of them. I bet they have less pocket cash than the person who wrote this letter.

On the other hand, the writer seems to confuse "expression" with "disruption." You have a right to protest a public event. You don't have a right to hijack it. How far do you think your right extends? Do you claim the right to block the parade route? To crash the inaugural balls and throw buckets of blood on people? To jump up on stage and take the microphone from the president and start reading Ward Churchill's essay?

Then what degree of rights do people have who want to protest you?

The camp had no toilet facilities, no trash receptacles, no heated enclosures (outside temperatures were below freezing). All entering were searched, restricted items were removed, and some were detained as “suspicious,” all under the justification of “security against terrorism.”

That sucks. Sounds like somebody didn't plan that too well. But I didn't realize it was the government's job to provide free toilets.

The refugee camp was, of course, completely surrounded by the armed military; snipers watched from the rooftops. Because, you see, this occupied area was located in a city – in fact, the capital city of the country.

Yep. About 6,000 cops and 2,500 soldiers and bomb-sniffing dogs. Tightest security in the history of the event. Really depressing, when you think about it. Now, what was the main thing that happened between 2000 and 2004 that might account for that? And who did it?

And what makes you think they were all there to watch you? The military presence surrounded the inaugural event, too; the place you complain you weren't allowed to go. In fact, I imagine there were more snipers around the president than there were watching your protester tot lot. So what's your point?

And it so happened that on the day of my visit, the ruling power was throwing a lavish celebration for its supporters and benefactors – those who filled its coffers in return for selectively beneficial policies. The people in the camp were a diverse group, but were common in the characteristic that they were not benefactors of those policies.

No, they were wanna-be benefactors of other policies, which were advocated by the party that did not make its case well enough to win the election and thus establish itself as the "ruling power." And you are upset about this. In rhetorical circles, this is called "sour grapes."

Additionally (and remarkably) they were also citizens of this virtual police state. However, exercising their right to dissent branded them as “unpatriotic,” “enemies” and “traitors.”

Somebody questioned your patriotism! That ought to be illegal! Fact is, some of us do have doubts about it. We want to be able to distinguish honest dissent from "working for the other side." And what you say and do helps us determine which you are.

As George Orwell put it ["Notes on Nationalism," May 1945],

"The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States ...."

You want to be a contrarian, very well. Hope that works out for you. Or do you simply want to be an anti-American? Don't expect me not to care about the difference. We respect some people who are harshly critical of many things about the U.S. But a lot of us feel, with Rabindranath Tagore, that "He alone may chastise who loves." José María Aznar can tell us things, and expect us to listen, that Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero can't.

We're looking for a little honest appreciation of America, and the kind of criticism meant to make it better here for all of us, not just tear down the nation, or give total power to a set of commissars chosen by you and your friends. Just like your side (the sane ones, anyhow) regard us with suspicion and want to make sure we're not just mindless militarists or greedheads. The more we show you, the better you can judge, if you choose to. We owe it to you to give you enough of ourselves that a reasonable person can discern honest patriots from scoundrels.

As a result, there were unfortunate reports of some of the peaceful protesters receiving unwarranted physical assault from the surrounding “security forces.” The crowd cried, “We’re citizens, too!” which fell on deaf ears.

According to the news reports, the tally was two wounded police officers (cuts and bruises) and "at least 10 arrests." No reports of protesters seeking hospital treatment that I've seen. One of the arrested was a man who broke through security four years ago to shake Bush's hand at his first inaugural. Police got him on the old trespassing warrant.

At one point, some protesters hurled stones onto the parade route. None of them got arrested. Police just closed that one entrance. Sounds like remarkable restraint for a "police state." Even the guy who booed Bush during his inaugural speech at the Capitol and yelled, "Where are the poor? Did you ship them out of town?" got escorted out, but I'm not aware that he got arrested.

Where were the poor, come to think of it? How come they didn't turn out en masse to back up their self-appointed representatives?

As an American, it was extraordinarily eye-opening to witness these restrictions of freedom first-hand. It made me long for the freedoms established as “inalienable” by the U.S. founders.

Well, now let's discover what those "inalienable" freedoms are. I'll need some help with this one. The word "inalienable" isn't in the Constitution, which would be the place to discover what freedoms Americans had or didn't have. It isn't in the Declaration of Independence, either, unless you mean "unalienable," which is Jefferson's word, but with reference to natural rights, not civic freedoms.

Those rights are "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." What exactly were you deprived of that fell under this list? The right to have the government buy you a toilet? [I think Jefferson had that in there, but Franklin and Adams made him take it out.] The right to throw stones at the president? The right to force Washington socialites to stand downwind of your Mall kiosk patchouli?

If only that occupied country, I thought, could kindle those same rights. Then I realized that the occupied territory was actually my country; this was my capital city, Washington, D.C.; this was inauguration day.

That must have been when the weed wore off. Bummer.

Contrary to what we were told to believe, this was not a celebration of “freedom and liberty.”

Thank you for sharing. Next?

Che Trippers

Walter Salles' "The Motorcycle Diaries," with Robert Redford as executive producer, got a standing ovation at Sundance film festival and has been praised in the press as "an inspiring coming-of-age tale and buddy-bonding road trip full of wondrous vistas, earthy humor and universal emotions whose last stop may be the Oscars." When it goes into wide release Friday, it's bound to induce a whole new generation of disaffected youth to hitch their dreams of liberation and freedom to this handsome rebel.

Paul Berman marvels at the strange sort of culture that makes a martyr-hero out of Che Guevara.

Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster. Many of the early leaders of the Cuban Revolution favored a democratic or democratic-socialist direction for the new Cuba. But Che was a mainstay of the hardline pro-Soviet faction, and his faction won.

Che presided over the Cuban Revolution's first firing squads. He founded Cuba's "labor camp" system — the system that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims. To get himself killed, and to get a lot of other people killed, was central to Che's imagination. In the famous essay in which he issued his ringing call for "two, three, many Vietnams."

Che's phrase was echoed, perhaps consciously, in March 2003, by Columbia University professor Nicholas De Genova, a professor of anthropology and Latino studies, at a faculty meeting to oppose the American invasion of Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

"Peace is not patriotic. Peace is subversive, because peace anticipates a very different world than the one in which we live -- a world where the U.S. would have no place. U.S. patriotism is inseparable from imperial warfare and white supremacy. U.S. flags are the emblem of the invading war machine in Iraq today. They are the emblem of the occupying power. The only true heroes are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military."

And he added, "I wish for a million Mogadishus."

I wonder if De Genova is happy now that his wish is unfolding in Iraq. Tonight, almost three dozen little children lie dead on a street in Baghdad, and more lay moaning in hospitals with their legs blown off, thanks to the "Minuteman" heroes who detonated their cars in the interest of an anti-American revolution. Che would applaud.

Che has far more in common with a modern-day Islamist suicide bomber than he does with the people who are fixing power plants, building schools, and lining up to vote in Iraq and Afghanistan -- or with the dissident liberals rounded up and jailed recently in Cuba. Take Che at his word:

"Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become."

And so, in the name of a nasty medieval religious fundamentalism, they are doing across the Middle East. That's the trouble with selling Che to a new generation of youth as a "radical." That steely stare of the young Argentine in those old '60s posters, it's not looking forward. It's firmly fixed on the past. Berman writes:

Che was an enemy of freedom, and yet he has been erected into a symbol of freedom. He helped establish an unjust social system in Cuba and has been erected into a symbol of social justice. He stood for the ancient rigidities of Latin-American thought, in a Marxist-Leninist version, and he has been celebrated as a free-thinker and a rebel.

The current repackaging of Che in the U.S. no doubt has a streak of '60s nostalgia. Those silk-screen Che posters in red and black were icons of "counterculture" interior decoration. As one fawning Web site about him puts it, "Che became the poster boy (literally) for revolution."

Salles' movie apparently trades on many of the mythic themes of Latin American history. I wonder if he didn't overlook one: the vampire. It's as if the '60s generation, bitter under Bush and bypassed by history, is trying to vampirize a modern anti-war youth movement that is otherwise wary of the dippy excesses and failures of 1969. It as if Redford et al have said, "We can plant seeds of Che in their brains -- mix him up with Jack Kerouac and Holden Caulfield and make him every teen's idol -- and 'the revolution' will live on for another generation, even as we totter off to the grave."

I trust the truth will keep the domestic myth-making within bounds. And I pray that the future in Iraq will refute of the kind of insurgent "revolution" Che would have sought.

"[H]e was killed in Bolivia in 1967, leading a guerrilla movement that had failed to enlist a single Bolivian peasant. And yet he succeeded in inspiring tens of thousands of middle class Latin-Americans to exit the universities and organize guerrilla insurgencies of their own. And these insurgencies likewise accomplished nothing, except to bring about the death of hundreds of thousands, and to set back the cause of Latin-American democracy — a tragedy on the hugest scale.