Too Much To Dream

By the way

I have been reading here and there that polls in other countries -- like the UK, Canada, and so forth -- are starting to show an upsurge in support of the US military actions in Iraq. I can't remember where I read them. (Feel free to leave links in comments. Remember to use correct html.)

(By the way, I am listening to a CD I picked up at Walmart, one of those cheap-o collections of old songs. It's swing, and then the next one coming up (I have a 3 cd changer) will be Big Band hits, and then a cd collection of the Ken Burns Jazz special. I just felt that the time was right for it. Later I may crank up the dvd player and put in Fellowship of the Ring. Yeah.)

Anyway, I had read on someone's blog that they had been reading polls that show that support for the US-led war in Iraq was increasing in places like Canada and the UK, and I forget where else. Probably not France, though I sense the attack by thugs on the British war hero cemetery in that country are starting to awaken some of the French from their cynical, postmodern coma. But when I read these accounts of increased support from previously not-all-behind us places, a thought occurred to me:

Everybody loves a winner.

This is not a cynical observation, but a statement of fact about human nature. We need to think seriously about this. Americans have been culturally anxious about the friendliness of the citizens of other countries towards us for quite some time, there is no getting around that fact. While the stereotypical American is supposed to be a xenophobic buffoon, the cultural elite that controls American media (and therefore American culture, at least the face Hollywood puts on it and presents to the world) is as slavishly adulating of other cultures, especially that of Old Europe, as medieval peasants in the presence of the king.

The problem is, this is the stance of a loser. Despite evidence of the enervation and even decadence inherent in much Old World culture, which is part of what our ancestors fled here to get away from (and people are still fleeing), there is the sense that the Old Cultures are Our Betters. It does not seem to have entered the heads of the easily-impressed American intelligentsia that "old cultures" can grow as senile as old persons.

But people aren't fools, deep down. They know a loser when they see one, and despite the so-called love of the underdog and worship of the victim that modern Western culture is supposed to contain, it's the underdog who triumphs against the odds that they care about, not the victim who sits there and whines. The antics of the real sad-sack victimists in society aside, most ordinary people want to enjoy good news and victory, even if only vicariously.

That is what is behind a great deal of contempt for American culture that we got and are still getting from the "Old World," and that includes the Middle East. Things are even more visceral and simpler in that part of the world, despite all the surface complexity. Remember the "Arab street"? Remember how we were all supposed to fear, over here, an uprising from the Muslim masses if we finally quit slipsliding around and confronted them? Remember how quiet the "Arab street" was after we pretty much took over "fearsome Afghanistan" in a month, and watch as the "Arab street" will fail to do more than burn a few polyester stars-'n'-stripes knockoffs in the town square on their lunch hour after we mop up in Iraq. I am not saying this to show some kind of arrogant contempt for Arab culture (not that I think that there is anything wrong with arrogant contempt), but to show that these people will respect us when we stop dicking around with the diplomacy and the irony and the self-deprecation that is so attuned just to our own culture and show that we are serious. When we say "stop that" we have to be able to show that we mean it. The world is a three-year-old child testing it's parents' boundaries; you can't give it an inch or you'll get to endure tantrums the rest of your life. It's only common sense.

Posted by Andrea Harris at April 4, 2003 12:13 AM