Lawrence of Cyberia in A Nation Without Mirrors and Bruce Cumings in We look at it and see ourselves note the same malady of self-serving bias behind the revisionism manufactured by the United States of Scare-merica it then uses against countries that dare throw monkey wrenches like independence into the cogs of its American empire bulldozer.
The root of this mass hysteria is “the common assumption that the US has been an innocent bystander” in global wildfires and takes to arms only in self-defence or in the rescuing of defenceless others. That this is still subject for debate mocks reason and the powers that be are laughing all the way to the World Bank and personal offshore accounts.
Here’s what made me laugh recently, one from a comic I’d never heard of before stumbling upon this routine on HBO as I channel-surfed for a sleep aid. Lewis Black, a regular on The Daily Show which I don’t watch even as a cure for insomnia, kept me up past my bedtime. In a bit on the Ugly American he recalls flying into the U.S. and being bombarded from all sides by messages proclaiming it to be the greatest place in the world. He guarantees that if someone stopped by your desk every morning to tell you he’s the greatest you would slay him by week’s end. He then cautions the audience not to be so sure the ads are true, that there are countries in the world that actually give their citisens shit – take Canada for example – where people get national health care.
If you support parasitic insurance companies and oppose medical care for the poor you’re probably not laughing. Take the Netherlands then, where in Amsterdam you might stop into this cafe for a toke but in America are thrown into the poke, and depending upon the calibre of legal representation you can afford may well be forced to do time on the racist wheel of justice. I lifted the photo link from Robert Archambeau’s A Monkey on a String, or: the Heart of Dutchness or why despite liberal drug laws some Dutch still complain the place is too conformist for their tastes. But back to Black’s routine.
He saws an old hymn on a sceptic’s fiddle that goes, “The Jews created guilt. The Catholics codified it. And the Protestants transformed it into tension.” But is Black a classicist mining tradition or setting the audience up for, “If they couldn’t find the weapons [of mass destruction], which is the reason we went to war, then why couldn’t they make something up? Why did they stop lying? My government has always lied to me, and I’m comfortable with that. They could have done it so simply. Just send two kids to Kinko’s and say you wanted a picture of a camel with a nuclear weapon on his back.” So-called rebels like Black who put the bias behind the lies on life support make it all the more insidious. Bill Maher does this repeatedly.
The other item that gave me a chuckle is the news that toy Chinook helicopters have become popular with Pakistani children thanks to the military’s earthquake relief efforts, a hearts and minds campaign that picked-up steam only after it was pointed out by many experts that the U.S. was missing out on a valuable opportunity. How difficult is it to grasp that dropping yellow food parcels identical to unexploded cluster munitions tends to make people hate you but providing aid and comfort fosters good will?
“Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, said that ‘the only way to win hearts and minds is if you deliver the goods. It’s not a PR campaign.'” Karen Hughes, go home.