Dear Swarthy Foreigners; hands across the ocean

Dear Swarthy Foreigners;

While I decided to limit my internal (US) posts about 2004 I read some foreign based blogs and English edition news articles and decided you and yours needed some help to with this election. So I have decided to help any foreigners who actually read my blog (I know there may not be that many) understand how the US electorate thinks

#1) Ignore CNN. And for that matter Ignore Fox news, MSNBC, BBC, AFP… or any other large news operation and what they say. Actual factual information is utterly and totally boring. So these news organizations have to provide “commentary” and “analysis” which would be very good if it was based on some form of rhetorical logic. In the case of the American media model there are two problems “Does it sell” and “media bias”. Based on these two issues news will be twisted to help them get better ratings/sales and get more money. Now those of you with a state run system have something a bit different, it’s called a lack of accountability. When journalists aren’t accountable for what they say, there is really no accounting for what they say. As people get vested into positions of privilege (the same goes for politics and education) they begin to eventually think more and more like other people around them (their contemporaries). So, in the case of the American news media an “Alliance of rednecks, religious zealots, and ultra catholic Hispanic immigrants” storyline applies well for two reasons. It most certainly sells well. A lot of folks (about 55 million + at last count I saw) don’t want to think they lost because they were wrong. These people will happily consume this line of malarkey because it makes them feel good. It also works within the biases of the respective news organizations. At a CNN most of the reporters are probably in that 55 million, but at Fox Rednecks, religious zealots, and people who want them to keep supporting republicans are their audience. Now, in state run media land they may in large part rely on like-minded American media institutions (its cheaper) for their ideas, but many of them think Americans are dumb. So any information that confirms this fact will make them happy, and thus their trumpeting this should be ignored.
#2) Polls have a fatal flaw. Their sample is people who would waste 30 minutes to an hour taking a poll. Most Americans have a better use of their time; many more are disdainful of politics all together this means at BEST poll responders are only representative of 2/3rds of the population. Then we have issues of the questions, and how they were worded. Some questions are worded in a confusing manner. Which question is used by the data consumer (a good example of this a poll said most Americans wanted the surplus to be used to shore up social security, but by a larger margin they responded that if you could shore up social security and give them a tax cut by all means do both. The news media only reported the former response of the poll, rather then the later). People can (and often do) lie to pollsters. The polls can also have an inaccurate sampling, in the case of the exit polls a large number of city voters were samples as well as a large number of female voters. This means that their worldview would be over represented in the poll.
#3) the only supporters who “Bring home the bacon” are those you can’t count on. A look in the big cities shows a large portion of neglect under the leadership of folks who benefit from the urban poor always giving them a job. When the establishment power structure is overthrown (take a look at New York City) things get better. So, if Bush was the candidate of the “values voters” that means they are even less likely of getting anything serious that they want.
#4) what are Moral Values? That’s a question big enough to drive a Mac truck through. To me freeing people (Iraq, Afghanistan) is moral. While allowing genocide to happen while administering a “global test” (Sudan) is immoral. Taking disproportionate punishment on a (largely) democratic country is in my mind Immoral. But to the minds of others it is moral because the UN is doing it. A candidate who used forged testimony, fake witness, and met with the enemy during a time of war and refuses to apologies for those actions, indeed speaks proudly of them does not share my moral values. I could probably spend several hour listing all the policies John Kerry supported that I viewed as Immoral without actually getting into matters of faith and piety. One could quite reasonably say John Kerry supported “cutting and running” and “everything the president did was wrong, but if I did it would be right” and these thoughts could oppose the values of most Americans.
#5) Our respective democracies have a different genesis. In the US of A Who you are matters, just not to the same extent as it does in Europe. This is why socialistic policies have done better there then here. And this is also why those largely born of privilege ( the John Kerry, Teddy Kennedy, Howard Dean, Rockefeller family, George Soros) of this country support socialism. While people who are trying to get money want a shot at getting the life of privilege. There isn’t the same engine of social utility here in this country. As our democracy is hardwired differently what would seem obvious in some parts of Europe, are just silly notions here in the states.
#6) George W Bush is not Satan. A lot of you Europeans especially have problems with the Bush foreign policy (especially the Bush doctrine) and to that I have a word to say “tough”. When it becomes necessary to trade with every thug dictator that the United States refuses to deal with due to their vileness it speaks a great host of negatives upon you. Zimbabwe, Iraq, Sudan, Iran, Cuba, and I can keep going with the list of the purveyors of evil in this world that the European governments happily go into the breech where the US public ethos would never go. But take heart, American Corporations follow your rapacious desire for the capital taken from the serfs of Marxism and religious fundamentalism through their European branches. Ignoring Rwanda was wrong, but the American president who did that thought like the European leadership so what does that say about you? Removing Saddam Hussein was right without the weapons of mass destruction. Saddam was a bad man who has killed at least a million of his own people. Global society has weekly allowed men like him to butcher his people for centuries. That trend needs to end. While President bush isn’t the bookend to stop it, he is the harbinger of it. Now coming to a new world consensus is an ugly ugly process… but when we accept a bare minimum standard for “world leader” we will all be better off.
#7) Americans aren’t any more ignorant about other countries they don’t have convenient access to then Europeans. The “ignorance gap” is largely based on the fact most Americans don’t have the opportunity to go to another country. In other parts of the world going to another country is something you can easily do on your lunch break. When we set the bar on countries that don’t meet the regular news fair in your country of origin Americans and Europeans are equally as ignorant.
#8) Yes Virginia Americans are more religious then most of the rest of you. But what has that religiosity meant to those people? That’s the question. Catholicism when taken to its religious purity lends itself to the best moral argument for Green-Social-Democratic policies. In America choosing another religion is easy, many of us have done it multiple times. In Europe that, and a lot of the other social strata are much more set in stone. In America religiosity has been used as a founding principle of American individualism. Elsewhere faith is more often used to justify why things are the way they are.
#9) “White Man’s burden” we did not have generations of Americans benefiting from owning another persons country. While oppression has occurred in other countries that fell under American occupation, this was never a full time thing. So it never really poured into our psyche and made us gunshy of the use of our power. Things like Vietnam had much more of an impact, but only on those in the anti-war camp of the issue.
#10) America is simply an idea, and as such people will always have a debate over the meaning of that idea. France is a place, a culture, an ethnic history but America is a dream. Belgium is a little swath of earth carved out of history but America is an idea. Everyone who becomes a citizen, and becomes part of our system is an equal part of that dream.