¡No Pasarán!: The New-Old Objectification

The New-Old Objectification

posted by Joe @ 11:15

In Sunday’s Telegraph, Niall Ferguson continues to flog his notion that present day America can be compared to the British Empire, on that he’s admitted is different because it is not an empire. One of the fantastic differences between the Telegraph and pathological nature of the BBC’s editorial ideology is that the Telegraph invites comments far more directly and without making a show of “letting you” Have Your Say, albeit with heavy editing by beeboids.

“The usual” view is always present. It has this vision of the world being a playground where all the children need to be equal for their own good despite the fact that some have given the world a reason to be on the “time out bench.” For the likes of these folks, even the Darfur genocide doesn’t get you an off-side whistle while “the good” in the world spend years on end trying to define the meaning of genocide anew.

Maybe it's because they are ignorant, arrogant, parochial and jingoistic.

Maybe it's because they have either invaded or forced regime change in more than 200 countries, many with democratically elected goverments.

Maybe it's because they would rather spend their time watching non-stop 'news' of such luminaries as Britney Spears and Anna Nicole Smith, than to bother to discover what their own government is doing to them and to other populations of the world.

As ever, the implied self-as-high-culture tries to form comparisons to American low culture. Low-culture to low-culture are quite typically strenuously avoided for the reason that they might produce some actual empathy. However, the matter of low-brow behavior cant be entirely hidden:

I am an American living in Britain and I have been abused many times by British people trying to get their jabs in at Americans. Mostly from teachers, believe it or not!

Believe me, I know. The inability to dislodge the prejudice for a person and a nation is a telling and ubiquitous feature of American dealing with Europeans’ lectures on a daily basis.

The difference is refreshing and enormous, and show a great breadth missing at the BBC. Between the highly predictable notes left by readers are those like the following:

As I see it, having visited the United States, the great advantage it's citizens possess is the ability to succeed, should they so wish. There is no class culture, consequently those who are successful are admired and indeed encouraged to achieve more. Envy and jealousy simply do not exist. It is something the rest of the world cannot understand and this is manifested by the so called "hatred" expressed against a country which is totally different to the class system which dominates all other nations.

Well, there’s always a “root cause” argument to be made too.

People hate America because they want the romance of the hammer and sickle, or the romance of a martyr.
...
The truth is it's not the US that's arrogant, it's the romantics that want a cause that exaults humanity into some kind of superman, when what is actually being offered is the chance to be ordinary.

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Monday, February 26, 2007

The New-Old Objectification