Today’s Mirror, a left-of-centre tabloid in the UK with a circulation over 2 million, has a front page headline “Mourn on the 4th of July”. Writer John Pilger, a campaigning firebrand on progressive causes for years, lets vent his anti-Americanism.
It’s extraordinary to me how rampant anti-Americanism has become in the last few months. I disagree with a lot the Bush administration does, but that doesn’t turn me against the US (after all, look around the world at the alternatives).
Fortunately, there are some intelligent voices making the opposite case. Joe Klein has recently finished his peregrination through Europe for The Guardian. He reckons anti-American sentiment arises because of the deep-rooted confidence of US society and culture. “America doesn’t have an identity problem. It has a powerful national religion: Americanness. It has a national ideology, too: informality. It is threatened neither from above nor below; it is threatened for the moment from the outside, by terrorists, but that has only served to strengthen the national sense of community… The true power of Americanness is that it beggars ethnicity: we luxuriate in the mongrelisation of our bloodlines — at least, a constant majority of us do; we believe that the things we have in common are far more important than those which divide us.”
And he accurately slaps down those who argue that Britain must choose between Europe and the US. “Why not mix and match? Why not take the freedom of the American labour market and combine it with an aggressive re-employment programme for those who are sacked, for example?”
Good reflections for the 4th.