Thursday, June 16, 2005
EXPLAINING ONESELF
I've seen it asked in different forms over time, and thought I'd finally say something about it -- and in doing so, perhaps explain myself a bit better:
Q 1) How is that the ONLY right-wing Americans one hears of in Britain are American bloggers living here?
A 1) It may be that that American you think is "left-wing" may actually be more moderate and/or conservative than he/she is leading you to believe. Mostly, he/she probably just wants a peaceful life. It's much easier to nod along and say, "Yep, Bush is a dunce" (although, we now know his college average was higher than John Kerry's), than to have to try to explain why you think that perhaps the point about the U.S. being the second coming of Nazi Germany is a tad too strong. For when faced with someone who holds such views, it is almost pointless having a discussion. It's far easier (and less confrontational) simply to smile and then saunter off.
Q 2) Given that most of the Americans one meets in person in Britain are actually left-wing, why don't they have blogs, too?
A 2) Yes, there are indeed truly "left-wing" Americans all over the place. They have their views, too. However, they probably find most of what they see and read on TV and in the media here comfortably coinciding with their own views. That being the case, why bother blogging when you already agree with the likes of the Independent's Robert Fisk and the Guardian editorial page?
Beyond that, let me add the following. . .
I am -- don't fall over friends -- a Democrat. I voted for Bill Clinton twice and Al Gore (while living here) in 2000.
When Gore lost I was gutted. My wife didn't get peace for days on end. (This was before blogs, remember.) It was close, and we know about the court case. But I never paid attention to that. The bottom line was "W" had won. I was not a happy camper.
But I calmed down over the coming weeks and months of course, and retreated into my life. And I may indeed have then been one of those "left-wing" Americans one believes are the only Americans here. I know that if they asked, I told everyone I met that I was a Democrat and was unhappy Bush had won. After all, those were both true.
But I was never a Bush-hater. I always felt that such obsession puts one on the road to madness. You make your case. Then you win, or you lose. Two or four or six years later, one gets another chance. It's called American democracy.
Like many others experienced in their own ways, my life retreat ended on September 11, 2001.
There is no need to re-address feelings and attitudes and all the rest in the aftermath of that. We all remember. Let's just say that my personal outlook was not much improved by those attacks having been directed at where I was born, at buildings and an area of Manhattan where I had spent a lot of time, and that people we knew had lost loved ones in those buildings.
Nope, it didn't help.
And the attitudes of many here didn't help either. I remember an article written in the days afterwards that appeared either in the Evening Standard or one of the national tabloids. In it an American woman who lived here wrote of how disgusted and sickened she was at the response of so many to the attacks -- worst of all, that Americans somehow deserved it. She wrote how, suddenly, for the first time since she had arrived here years earlier, she felt alone, and wanted "to go home".
I never felt alone as she claimed to feel. And home is where my wife is. But I was damn disgusted, too, as the idiocies seemed to cascade down upon us unceasingly.
One that I will always recall was the Ambassador Phil Lader appearance on the BBC's "Question Time". There to discuss the attacks in front of what was to be -- presumably -- a thoughtful studio audience, he was sandbagged by a crowd that instead included a number who apparently had block-booked, and did so in order to get into the event and air their anti-American agenda and insults. (The BBC denied the former.) Members of that group so beset Lader that, stunned, he practically ended up in tears. However, to the great credit of our many friends here, the BBC admitted to receiving some 2,000 complaints over that program, and apologized for the program deteriorating into what it became.
The complaints and apology proved all was not lost. Yet what was also troubling was how so many in the British mass media were becoming increasingly at ease with "intellectuals", "scholars" and "activists" who possessed what can only be described as "interesting" takes on American policy and just about anything to do with Americans as people. Indeed, nothing was off limits: Americans are fat; they are idiots; they are racists; they are gun-lovers; they are hypocrites; they hate Muslims; they drive cars; they drive SUVs; they are Christians (oh, the horrors that some actually are Christians!). You name it. Of course, if an American so much as quietly mumbled "boo" about disagreeing with someone who thinks it's approved by a holy book to crash a hijacked plane suicidally into a building, he is deemed to be "intolerant".
There we were. Although the attitude was not universal of course, while in the U.S. during September and October 2001, as Americans tried to figure out what to do next and worried about what further attacks might be in the pipeline, in too much British and other media, Americans were simultaneously ceasing to be "people". Instead, Americans were more than ever before just human representatives of some Zionist-defending (or, just replace "Zionist" with a three letter word starting with "J"), environment rubbishing, globe-gobbling, imperialist corporate state. I also found increasingly that a large segment of the population here really did have no clue about America other than what they see and hear in that media. That is not a criticism; it's just a fact: Americans are, somehow, "a quick read"; everyone else in the world is, of course, "complex".
What the? Looking for somewhere sanity might be found (it sure wasn't in most newspapers, on radio, or TV), I retreated to the net. (Amazing that sentence, isn't it? Looking for sanity on the internet?)
I found one site I liked was the Wall Street Journal's "Opinionjournal." I don't know how I found it. I just ended up there at some point. It was a newspaper I had never read when living in the States, and had previously considered little more than a narrow-minded mouthpiece of the Right. Yet suddenly there I was, reading from that paper? And in general agreement with what I was reading?
Much had indeed changed. With the British press providing increasingly easy pickings for lunacy regarding America, I found myself emailing three or four "tips" to Opinionjournal's BoTW Today. Editor James Taranto/ and staff (maybe it was my surname that he liked) even chose to use two of them. And when the Wall Street Journal's Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and later killed after he had come across certain "critics of America" in Pakistan, I turned to that paper's site -- not to CNN or anyone else -- for details.
Beyond reading U.S. papers on the net, I began streaming the Voice of America's broadcasts. More importantly, looking for some TV media that reported on the U.S. in a watchable manner, that was not full of "journalists" who either had a tremendous axe to grind with the U.S., or possessed what I considered a thoroughly cartoonish view of the country, I was perpetually disappointed. Sky News wasn't bad. ITV was okay. The BBC was not nearly as horrific as was often made out. But none of them ever quite nailed it down. And even though based in the U.S., CNN International might as well have come from anywhere. (I'm sorry, but it was and remains just ghastly viewing. Only its sports programs are halfway decent.)
In desperation, I even started watching CNBC Europe. That channel carries lots of U.S. news (mixed in with business news) direct from the U.S. And as a WSJ reader, I stumbled upon CNBC's weekly airing of "The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board", which was shown (as I recall) mostly in the early morning hours of Saturday or Sunday mornings. I often taped it. That little half hour filled the viewing black hole ever so slightly.
I had not been the only one to "discover it" in the wake of September 11, of course. British TV bureaucracy suddenly noticed it, too -- and didn't like what they saw. As a result of a few viewer complaints, CNBC was forced to pull the program in Europe by British "TV regulators" because it supposedly "violated" British administrative "broadcasting standards" about mixing the title of product and a news program.
Ah, yes, Islamists could holler all manner of insults at a former U.S. Ambassador on a prime-time BBC 1 program, but the need to protect the British public from the horrid scarring they would receive if exposed for a moment to a "business product named" (meaning a newspaper) cable/satellite TV available discussion program emanating from the U.S., which was distributed via continental Europe (CNBC is not based here) and shown mostly around 6 AM on weekend mornings, was obviously pressing. Interestingly, that "ruling" also came down at the very same time one could not fail but to trip over any number of channels catering to the needs of just about every "group" in Britain, most also presenting news and discussion, much not in English -- including on a channel called al Jazeera. However, as mainstream British media here was reminding me constantly, it was the increasingly "evil" Bush administration that supposedly found weak reasons to "silence dissenting views".
Apparently, BSkyB satellite's decision to add FOX to its system was acceptable to "regulators". (Although, for how long, one wonders?) As the threat of the campaign in Iraq loomed, one morning FOX was suddenly there among the news channels, and has been there ever since. While I still don't love FOX -- it is just a bit too flashy, trashy and unserious at times -- as long as they carry it (cable doesn't) BSkyB will have my business.
Earlier, through "BoTW", I discovered the post-September 11 world of "the blog". Through them I noticed also how America was full of other Americans like myself -- in particular, Democrats who wished to see reasonableness triumph, people who while we might have disagreed with Republicans on certain policies, shared with them the simple fact that we were both in "the game". Outside that "game", the Islamists wanted all of us -- whether Right, Moderate or Left -- dead.
I started wanting to "vent" more formally. I wrote a couple of short pieces for a conservative web site. While not a "conservative" technically, I believed -- and still do -- that we as Americans are all united by one thing: While we might argue over "policy A" or "policy B", overall America and democracy and freedom are worth defending. Period.
And I found that conservatives, far more than my liberal friends and increasingly even moderate Democrats, seemed to better understand that. The President of the United States, a man I did not vote for, I found increasingly to be not the person I had thought him to be. As I took the time to stop sniggering at him (as most of us did in September and October 2001 especially), I saw a man who could barely keep himself from crying at press conferences. And his speeches were not those of an imperialist or a warmonger or a hater. Indeed, his September 20, 2001 speech to the American people is up there with many an F.D.R. address. It was magnificent.
And his actions and those of this administration since have been relatively consistent with what they (and many of us out here) believe is a way forward. For example, a few people out here actually heard this president say that the campaign of Iraq was not just about the threat of WMD and what it might mean in the wrong hands in the wake of September 11, 2001, but also about a new start in the Middle East -- one that might just prevent future "September 11s". Such multi-tasking was and is clearly too complicated for many in the media.
But don't think for a moment that it started with Iraq. This president was also criticised brutally previously for going after al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Perhaps most media-covered of all in opposition to that was a group that was formed just after the September 11, 2001 attacks on NYC and Washington: "Stop The War". The war they first wanted to "stop" was not in Iraq, but in Afghanistan. "Stop The War" and a myriad of lookalikes merely found a second life due to the concluding of the over decade long confrontation with Saddamite Iraq.
Given their track record since September 11, 2001, that many in the media proved too comfortable with the utterly over the top rhetoric coming from groups like that and others engaged in the "anti-war" and (yes, too often downright) anti-American protests in Europe in February 2003, was not surprising. It was sad. That was what finally led me to start this blog -- just before the battle of Iraq began.
I took me weeks to get maybe 40 visits a day -- most of them from family and friends. I didn't care; I was saying my bit. It served also as a way of communicating directly, too, with people "back home". I knew others would eventually see it, too, and some might agree with it. And some definitely wouldn't.
Today this site gets between 250-400 visits a day. I'd do it exactly the same way if I got 2,000 or even 20,000. I just do this for myself. While I do have some fun and at times "overplay", unlike many blogs, I try to be grounded and reasonable. If those traits existed more widely in the general world media, I probably wouldn't have started this blog in the first place: It's my little corner of the world from which I can have a polite "rant".
As for Britain: I love Britain. One British person thought so much of me, she married me.
And I love America.
And while as humans we don't always -- can't always -- get everything right, if there isn't "something higher" in this life, why are we all arguing -- politely, hopefully -- anyway? We learn, over time.
I always liked these lines by Francesco Petrarca. Around 1370, looking back on his life, he wrote of himself:
I've seen it asked in different forms over time, and thought I'd finally say something about it -- and in doing so, perhaps explain myself a bit better:
Q 1) How is that the ONLY right-wing Americans one hears of in Britain are American bloggers living here?
A 1) It may be that that American you think is "left-wing" may actually be more moderate and/or conservative than he/she is leading you to believe. Mostly, he/she probably just wants a peaceful life. It's much easier to nod along and say, "Yep, Bush is a dunce" (although, we now know his college average was higher than John Kerry's), than to have to try to explain why you think that perhaps the point about the U.S. being the second coming of Nazi Germany is a tad too strong. For when faced with someone who holds such views, it is almost pointless having a discussion. It's far easier (and less confrontational) simply to smile and then saunter off.
Q 2) Given that most of the Americans one meets in person in Britain are actually left-wing, why don't they have blogs, too?
A 2) Yes, there are indeed truly "left-wing" Americans all over the place. They have their views, too. However, they probably find most of what they see and read on TV and in the media here comfortably coinciding with their own views. That being the case, why bother blogging when you already agree with the likes of the Independent's Robert Fisk and the Guardian editorial page?
Beyond that, let me add the following. . .
I am -- don't fall over friends -- a Democrat. I voted for Bill Clinton twice and Al Gore (while living here) in 2000.
When Gore lost I was gutted. My wife didn't get peace for days on end. (This was before blogs, remember.) It was close, and we know about the court case. But I never paid attention to that. The bottom line was "W" had won. I was not a happy camper.
But I calmed down over the coming weeks and months of course, and retreated into my life. And I may indeed have then been one of those "left-wing" Americans one believes are the only Americans here. I know that if they asked, I told everyone I met that I was a Democrat and was unhappy Bush had won. After all, those were both true.
But I was never a Bush-hater. I always felt that such obsession puts one on the road to madness. You make your case. Then you win, or you lose. Two or four or six years later, one gets another chance. It's called American democracy.
Like many others experienced in their own ways, my life retreat ended on September 11, 2001.
There is no need to re-address feelings and attitudes and all the rest in the aftermath of that. We all remember. Let's just say that my personal outlook was not much improved by those attacks having been directed at where I was born, at buildings and an area of Manhattan where I had spent a lot of time, and that people we knew had lost loved ones in those buildings.
Nope, it didn't help.
And the attitudes of many here didn't help either. I remember an article written in the days afterwards that appeared either in the Evening Standard or one of the national tabloids. In it an American woman who lived here wrote of how disgusted and sickened she was at the response of so many to the attacks -- worst of all, that Americans somehow deserved it. She wrote how, suddenly, for the first time since she had arrived here years earlier, she felt alone, and wanted "to go home".
I never felt alone as she claimed to feel. And home is where my wife is. But I was damn disgusted, too, as the idiocies seemed to cascade down upon us unceasingly.
One that I will always recall was the Ambassador Phil Lader appearance on the BBC's "Question Time". There to discuss the attacks in front of what was to be -- presumably -- a thoughtful studio audience, he was sandbagged by a crowd that instead included a number who apparently had block-booked, and did so in order to get into the event and air their anti-American agenda and insults. (The BBC denied the former.) Members of that group so beset Lader that, stunned, he practically ended up in tears. However, to the great credit of our many friends here, the BBC admitted to receiving some 2,000 complaints over that program, and apologized for the program deteriorating into what it became.
The complaints and apology proved all was not lost. Yet what was also troubling was how so many in the British mass media were becoming increasingly at ease with "intellectuals", "scholars" and "activists" who possessed what can only be described as "interesting" takes on American policy and just about anything to do with Americans as people. Indeed, nothing was off limits: Americans are fat; they are idiots; they are racists; they are gun-lovers; they are hypocrites; they hate Muslims; they drive cars; they drive SUVs; they are Christians (oh, the horrors that some actually are Christians!). You name it. Of course, if an American so much as quietly mumbled "boo" about disagreeing with someone who thinks it's approved by a holy book to crash a hijacked plane suicidally into a building, he is deemed to be "intolerant".
There we were. Although the attitude was not universal of course, while in the U.S. during September and October 2001, as Americans tried to figure out what to do next and worried about what further attacks might be in the pipeline, in too much British and other media, Americans were simultaneously ceasing to be "people". Instead, Americans were more than ever before just human representatives of some Zionist-defending (or, just replace "Zionist" with a three letter word starting with "J"), environment rubbishing, globe-gobbling, imperialist corporate state. I also found increasingly that a large segment of the population here really did have no clue about America other than what they see and hear in that media. That is not a criticism; it's just a fact: Americans are, somehow, "a quick read"; everyone else in the world is, of course, "complex".
What the? Looking for somewhere sanity might be found (it sure wasn't in most newspapers, on radio, or TV), I retreated to the net. (Amazing that sentence, isn't it? Looking for sanity on the internet?)
I found one site I liked was the Wall Street Journal's "Opinionjournal." I don't know how I found it. I just ended up there at some point. It was a newspaper I had never read when living in the States, and had previously considered little more than a narrow-minded mouthpiece of the Right. Yet suddenly there I was, reading from that paper? And in general agreement with what I was reading?
Much had indeed changed. With the British press providing increasingly easy pickings for lunacy regarding America, I found myself emailing three or four "tips" to Opinionjournal's BoTW Today. Editor James Taranto/ and staff (maybe it was my surname that he liked) even chose to use two of them. And when the Wall Street Journal's Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and later killed after he had come across certain "critics of America" in Pakistan, I turned to that paper's site -- not to CNN or anyone else -- for details.
Beyond reading U.S. papers on the net, I began streaming the Voice of America's broadcasts. More importantly, looking for some TV media that reported on the U.S. in a watchable manner, that was not full of "journalists" who either had a tremendous axe to grind with the U.S., or possessed what I considered a thoroughly cartoonish view of the country, I was perpetually disappointed. Sky News wasn't bad. ITV was okay. The BBC was not nearly as horrific as was often made out. But none of them ever quite nailed it down. And even though based in the U.S., CNN International might as well have come from anywhere. (I'm sorry, but it was and remains just ghastly viewing. Only its sports programs are halfway decent.)
In desperation, I even started watching CNBC Europe. That channel carries lots of U.S. news (mixed in with business news) direct from the U.S. And as a WSJ reader, I stumbled upon CNBC's weekly airing of "The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board", which was shown (as I recall) mostly in the early morning hours of Saturday or Sunday mornings. I often taped it. That little half hour filled the viewing black hole ever so slightly.
I had not been the only one to "discover it" in the wake of September 11, of course. British TV bureaucracy suddenly noticed it, too -- and didn't like what they saw. As a result of a few viewer complaints, CNBC was forced to pull the program in Europe by British "TV regulators" because it supposedly "violated" British administrative "broadcasting standards" about mixing the title of product and a news program.
Ah, yes, Islamists could holler all manner of insults at a former U.S. Ambassador on a prime-time BBC 1 program, but the need to protect the British public from the horrid scarring they would receive if exposed for a moment to a "business product named" (meaning a newspaper) cable/satellite TV available discussion program emanating from the U.S., which was distributed via continental Europe (CNBC is not based here) and shown mostly around 6 AM on weekend mornings, was obviously pressing. Interestingly, that "ruling" also came down at the very same time one could not fail but to trip over any number of channels catering to the needs of just about every "group" in Britain, most also presenting news and discussion, much not in English -- including on a channel called al Jazeera. However, as mainstream British media here was reminding me constantly, it was the increasingly "evil" Bush administration that supposedly found weak reasons to "silence dissenting views".
Apparently, BSkyB satellite's decision to add FOX to its system was acceptable to "regulators". (Although, for how long, one wonders?) As the threat of the campaign in Iraq loomed, one morning FOX was suddenly there among the news channels, and has been there ever since. While I still don't love FOX -- it is just a bit too flashy, trashy and unserious at times -- as long as they carry it (cable doesn't) BSkyB will have my business.
Earlier, through "BoTW", I discovered the post-September 11 world of "the blog". Through them I noticed also how America was full of other Americans like myself -- in particular, Democrats who wished to see reasonableness triumph, people who while we might have disagreed with Republicans on certain policies, shared with them the simple fact that we were both in "the game". Outside that "game", the Islamists wanted all of us -- whether Right, Moderate or Left -- dead.
I started wanting to "vent" more formally. I wrote a couple of short pieces for a conservative web site. While not a "conservative" technically, I believed -- and still do -- that we as Americans are all united by one thing: While we might argue over "policy A" or "policy B", overall America and democracy and freedom are worth defending. Period.
And I found that conservatives, far more than my liberal friends and increasingly even moderate Democrats, seemed to better understand that. The President of the United States, a man I did not vote for, I found increasingly to be not the person I had thought him to be. As I took the time to stop sniggering at him (as most of us did in September and October 2001 especially), I saw a man who could barely keep himself from crying at press conferences. And his speeches were not those of an imperialist or a warmonger or a hater. Indeed, his September 20, 2001 speech to the American people is up there with many an F.D.R. address. It was magnificent.
And his actions and those of this administration since have been relatively consistent with what they (and many of us out here) believe is a way forward. For example, a few people out here actually heard this president say that the campaign of Iraq was not just about the threat of WMD and what it might mean in the wrong hands in the wake of September 11, 2001, but also about a new start in the Middle East -- one that might just prevent future "September 11s". Such multi-tasking was and is clearly too complicated for many in the media.
But don't think for a moment that it started with Iraq. This president was also criticised brutally previously for going after al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Perhaps most media-covered of all in opposition to that was a group that was formed just after the September 11, 2001 attacks on NYC and Washington: "Stop The War". The war they first wanted to "stop" was not in Iraq, but in Afghanistan. "Stop The War" and a myriad of lookalikes merely found a second life due to the concluding of the over decade long confrontation with Saddamite Iraq.
Given their track record since September 11, 2001, that many in the media proved too comfortable with the utterly over the top rhetoric coming from groups like that and others engaged in the "anti-war" and (yes, too often downright) anti-American protests in Europe in February 2003, was not surprising. It was sad. That was what finally led me to start this blog -- just before the battle of Iraq began.
I took me weeks to get maybe 40 visits a day -- most of them from family and friends. I didn't care; I was saying my bit. It served also as a way of communicating directly, too, with people "back home". I knew others would eventually see it, too, and some might agree with it. And some definitely wouldn't.
Today this site gets between 250-400 visits a day. I'd do it exactly the same way if I got 2,000 or even 20,000. I just do this for myself. While I do have some fun and at times "overplay", unlike many blogs, I try to be grounded and reasonable. If those traits existed more widely in the general world media, I probably wouldn't have started this blog in the first place: It's my little corner of the world from which I can have a polite "rant".
As for Britain: I love Britain. One British person thought so much of me, she married me.
And I love America.
And while as humans we don't always -- can't always -- get everything right, if there isn't "something higher" in this life, why are we all arguing -- politely, hopefully -- anyway? We learn, over time.
I always liked these lines by Francesco Petrarca. Around 1370, looking back on his life, he wrote of himself:
. . . My youth was gone before I realized it; I was carried away by the strength of manhood; but a riper age brought me to my sense and taught me by experience the truth I had long before read in books, that youth and pleasure are vanity -- nay, that the Author of all ages and times permits us miserable mortals, puffed up with emptiness, thus to wander about, until finally, coming to a tardy consciousness of our sins, we shall learn to know ourselves. . .We all have our own individual "journey". So, you've now heard something about mine. After all, having clicked over here, you were indeed owed something of a half-detailed explanation of what I am about. Many thanks for taking a little of your precious time on this earth to come by. ¶ by Robert, 6/16/2005 12:03:00 PM
