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 | American Optimism Posted by Barbara Branden on 10/04/2004, 5:48pm | |
www.melaniephillips.com/diary/ September 1, 2004 Optimists and reactionaries by Melanie Phillips Having just spent three weeks in the US, I was struck once again by how similar and yet how very different that country is from Britain. The thing that really hits you between the eyes is the optimism. You meet it again and again in everyday situations, particularly in the cheerfulness with which Americans deliver any services that are required. Instead of the surly jobsworths of Britain who are always doing you an enormous and onerous favour, American waitresses, counter staff, car park attendants and the rest all convey the impression that they are actually delighted to share the human race with you. This sunny attitude is surely rooted in America's belief in itself as a force for good in the world, the certainty that American values can make the world a better place. This, of course, is precisely what gets up the nostrils of the cynical, sour, negative Brits. And maybe this helps account for the astonishing and irrational hatred of President Bush. For the dominant force in British society is the opposite belief, that this country's values are rotten and have to be replaced -- and indeed that the whole edifice of western culture is oppressive and coercive and has brought only misery to the rest of the planet. It is a profoundly reactionary viewpoint, anti-progress, which is increasingly having the effect of returning us to a pre-modern state of social anarchy -- despite the fact that it is espoused by people who call themselves 'liberal' or 'progressive'. There was a time, of course, when liberal progessives believed they had a mission to improve the world by promoting values such as truth, law, justice, morality and freedom. That, of course, is precisely what Bush believes he must do (and, for that matter. so does Tony Blair). For that, he is denounced and vilified as a war-mongering imperialist. Democratic nation-building is now regarded as the new fascism. But the fact is that Bush has stolen the clothes from off the progressives' backs. Ironically, it is now Bush, the man of the right, who is the optimist who believes in building a better world. It is the left, by contrast, who now believe in preserving the tyrannical and murderous status-quo. In this respect, indeed, Bush is not conservative at all but an old-fashioned liberal radical (which is why truly reactionary conservatives such as Pat Buchanan hate him too, and have ended up singing from the same hymn-sheet as the progressives.) And by golly, do they hate him. For although Britain has far more comprehensively lost its nerve and moral fibre, the culture of irrational hatred, lies and sheer unadulterated spite is raging in the US too like a forest fire. In a Borders bookshop in New York, I leafed through the following new titles: 'The I Hate (Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld, Condi Rice) Reader -- Behind the Bush Cabal's War on Terror'; 'The Book on Bush: How George W (Mis)leads America'; 'All the President's Spin: George W Bush, the Media and the Truth' (sic); 'Billionaires for Bush: How to Rule the World for Fun and Profit'; 'Now They Tell Us: The American Press and Iraq'; and the number one New York Times bestseller (natch): 'Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right' (yes, really). What madness is this, where fashionable books overtly promote hatred? Please don't get me wrong. I am not an uncritical Bush fan by any means. I think he presides over an administration that compounds its manifest incompetence and mistakes in many areas by an arrogance which prevents it from listening to good advice. But at least he understood one important thing on 9/11 -- the most important thing. And that is more than can be said for John Kerry, the Democratic party and the legions who now march behind the sickening banners of hatred and lies. | ||
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