...And there's something else that haunts me. Scalzi got a couple of other interesting comments, not from defenders of the law but from people outside the US chiding him for a sort of collective guilt.
Commenter annika: "Your pose right now is pretty sad, all considering. You are a pompous ass who believes himself humane. Leave the world alone and spare us your tripe."
Commenter jj: "I think you a the moral cowards. You and the bunch of US Americans Netizens that think the can safely influence the world behind their computer screeens. You should be out on the streets. But you are too far from the streets. The only people on the streets of the USA are the disenfranchised. You have for over 50 years built your homes on the basis of isolation and distance form the streets (on streets, there lives "niggers"). You have comitted yourselves to nothing but consumerism. Now reality is eating you up alive. Through 9/11 and Iraq. "May you live in interesting times.""
It's probably because I'm a political idiot, but I have no idea what I should have been doing that they're accusing me and other Americans of not doing. Europeans have these very European-labor-movement ideas about general strikes, and some people have proposed 1960s-style campus takeovers, or general smash-shit-up rioting, but I'm not sure how that addresses the general problem of Republicans fomenting fear in the heartland. Those things are scary shows of power; you don't reduce fear that way. Nixon won in '68 and '72, in the latter case by a massive landslide.
But it still haunts me. I feel as if the deterioration of American liberal democracy, and the things America has done without my moving to stop them, morally taints me in an indelible fashion. In some sense I am an evil person by way of being American regardless of how good I am personally. I think part of the rarely-acted-on "I'll run to Canada" fantasy is the idea among ashamed Americans that we can somehow lose that taint by rejecting Americanness. But of course I know that I'm never more an American than when I'm in another country.
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Re: hey Matt
Date: 2006-09-30 09:52 am (UTC)Commenter annika: "Your pose right now is pretty sad, all considering. You are a pompous ass who believes himself humane. Leave the world alone and spare us your tripe."
Commenter jj: "I think you a the moral cowards.
You and the bunch of US Americans Netizens that think the can safely influence the world behind their computer screeens.
You should be out on the streets.
But you are too far from the streets.
The only people on the streets of the USA are the disenfranchised.
You have for over 50 years built your homes on the basis of isolation and distance form the streets (on streets, there lives "niggers").
You have comitted yourselves to nothing but consumerism.
Now reality is eating you up alive. Through 9/11 and Iraq.
"May you live in interesting times.""
It's probably because I'm a political idiot, but I have no idea what I should have been doing that they're accusing me and other Americans of not doing. Europeans have these very European-labor-movement ideas about general strikes, and some people have proposed 1960s-style campus takeovers, or general smash-shit-up rioting, but I'm not sure how that addresses the general problem of Republicans fomenting fear in the heartland. Those things are scary shows of power; you don't reduce fear that way. Nixon won in '68 and '72, in the latter case by a massive landslide.
But it still haunts me. I feel as if the deterioration of American liberal democracy, and the things America has done without my moving to stop them, morally taints me in an indelible fashion. In some sense I am an evil person by way of being American regardless of how good I am personally. I think part of the rarely-acted-on "I'll run to Canada" fantasy is the idea among ashamed Americans that we can somehow lose that taint by rejecting Americanness. But of course I know that I'm never more an American than when I'm in another country.