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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
October 24, 2004
Letter to USA, III
The Americans get a lot of unsolicited advice from abroad. They also provide unsolicited help in troubled places around the world; it hardly started with the administration of George W. Bush. They are the hyperpower (note definite article stipulating the singular); we the inhabitants of the Rest of the World would hardly dream of telling adults in the other democracies how to vote. They're not important enough. The only people in the whole world who showed an interest in our recent Canadian election were the rock star Bono and the Hollywood filmmaker Michael Moore. But they are twits (harmless and dangerous respectively). Now if for some unimaginable reason a bunch of Spaniards or Hungarians or Australians or worse British started an e-mail campaign to tell individual Canadians how to vote there might be some resentment. We might have sent letters back of the sort the Guardian newspaper has been receiving in England. For that paper tried to organize its readers to e-mail randomly-selected voters in Clark County of the swing state of Ohio begging them to support Kerry/Edwards. Their responses from the U.S. ranged from the droll: "Feel free to respond to this email with your advice. Please keep in mind that I am something of an anglophile so this is not confrontational. Please remember too that I am merely an American. That means I am not very bright. It means I have no culture or sense of history. It also means that I am barely literate so please don't use big fancy words." To the less droll: "May you have a tooth capped. I understand it will take at least 18 months for your great medical services to get around to you. Have a great day." Thank you Guardian -- a leftwing paper even by media standards. I had no objection to their meddling but was pleased that they did it in a way guaranteed to win Mr. Bush a few precious votes in a very tight state. The miscalculation in the Guardian's little essay in advice-giving began at the intentional level. The paper is not merely anti-Bush; it is also anti-American. And when people who don't like what America is any more than they like what America does presume to give Americans advice that advice must necessarily be condescending. Not that it hasn't been welcomed in some quarters of the USA. For the Americans invented anti-Americanism just as they invented much else that is flourishing in our post-modern world. Their current exports include that Michael Moore and his Hollywood -- a whole industry of skilled professional publicists who hate Main Street America far more than the average Jihadi in Fallujah or Riyadh. And with a hatred that goes beyond physical murder to the destruction of souls. This is one of the mysteries of Hollywood to the person who sometimes glances at the income charts for bigscreen movies. Has anyone else noticed that whenever they follow their better judgement and make a film that "pushes the envelope" for cynicism leftism violence and pornography it flops? But when they make the kind of movie that makes Hollywood impresarios sick -- i.e. the uplifting kind with wholesome milk-fed babes and boys who love God mom and apple pie -- they cash in. Yet they persist in making the pornography. What can one say about this puzzling behaviour? At least that they're not greedy enough. That they're not proper capitalists. That they don't care enough about money. They're idealists who believe that corrupting public morals is more important. Full disclosure: As a United Empire Loyalist I myself descend from the very first generation of American anti-Americans. I personally was able to get over it -- it's amazing how one's attitudes evolve over 228 years. But many of my Canadian countrymen never will get over it -- being raised from infancy on an anti-American serum that is dispensed in our schools and colleges like flu shots much of it from the innumerable aging but still pony-tailed Yankee-born draft-dodgers who came here during the Vietnam era. These are people who like many in the States itself go apoplectic upon discovering that any member of their class is capable of voting Republican. So let me say this to any moderate mainstream swing-vote American readers I may have. The people who hate you are telling you to vote for Kerry and Edwards. I love you and I say: Vote for Bush! David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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