in d-fens of uh-merica

In Defence of America

America. Uh-merica.

The excesses of American Culture are well-documented and so ubiquitous as to not need seeking out.

They probably don’t need much talking about, either, at least from me.

Anyone who has spent any amount of time with Americans can reel off probably half a dozen cliches about them: loud, friendly, don’t understand irony, insensitive to other nationalities and cultures, and so on. And then are the terrible things that Americans do when they do go overseas: like invading sovereign nations in the middle-east, the far east, and so on, in the name of peace and democracy (to this you might add a somewhat unscrupulous attitude to the regimes of their near neighbours, I suppose). And, you know, setting up Starbucks and McDonalds franchises based on the Wal-Mart business model. Things like that.

But this is not the America that I know. The America that I know has given us Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemmingway, Dorothy Parker, Martin Luther King, Jazz, Hip-Hop, about eighty per cent of rock and roll, Don DeLillo, Ani DiFranco, Gil Scott-Heron, Hunter Thompson.

At any rate, these are some of the people I think about when someone who is talking to me is complaining about America. I do this because such complaints are often voiced in this country and are so tedious as to not need thinking about. Yes, the War In Iraq is a Terrible Thing, sure, W. is a joke, boy, it sure does suck the big one that our own government are such toadying lickspittles.

Of course, these are all valid opinions, and I suppose that a healthy disrespect about The Great Satan is a good thing in a country like Australia.

At any rate, there are these people, usually in my acquaintance pretty solid members of the bourgeoisie, who are not really in a position to do anything about their grievances, and at any rate are so much a part of the ‘system’ that some part of them has to realise that a strong United States is a necessary but not sufficient condition to their Quality of Life.

And then there are the people for whom talking about all of this is not a joke. I have the greatest degree of admiration for them, and I wish them the best in their continuing struggle against global capitalism and to a lesser extent middle-class values, and whatever else is on the agenda.

But I also wish America the best, too. I hope that it can be a country that lives up to its promise, and that its manifest inadequacies don’t continue to overwhelm the better parts of its nature.