Hey, Americans
Posted: July 8th, 2005 | 4 Comments »We’re deeply grateful, if occasionally mystified, by the huge outpouring of emotion you’ve sent our way. Now, if you could redirect some of that emotion towards stringing idiots like this up by their testicles, we’d be even more grateful. Live8 happened because, believe it or not, there are more important issues in this world than terrorism. If you really do care about us, we’d appreciate it if your media would actually listen to what we have to say, and not merely use this as an excuse to put your government’s stupid, pointless crusade back on the agenda. Having now had a brief local reminder of what war can be, we don’t like it very much, and we’d like it to stop. All of it. Ta very.
Actually, by showing how a country deals with terrorism without histrionics, Britain’s already doing the best job of preventing Bush/Fox/et al from using this the way that they’d like.
But trust me, there are plenty of us Americans who are ashamed and enraged by the actions of our government and media.
Being an expat and seeing the display of wankery from American cablenewsers — not just the ignorant bastards in the Faux News studio, but the arses who got on the last plane out of JFK and now think they’re experts on Britain after 18 hours in the country — makes me feel very, very foreign.
I’m another American who seconds your response. It’s amazing to see what people will support in the name of their country as soon as their patriotism is challenged and they have the horror of terrorism fresh in their minds. It’s as if America just couldn’t handle the senseless violence of 9/11. As you’ve implied, people here are more concerned about freedom-rhetoric than their actual freedoms, more loyal to the people in their government than the idea of a just, reasonable government itself.
Flags are a good example here. American flags used to be complex symbols that embodied living, changing ideas and principles. At this point, nearly the only people who fly flags here are those who are absolutely unwilling to question what it means and agressively attack those who do.
Tragic doesn’t even begin to describe it all.
Let me just check that comments are working again…