It’s not as though the US government is particularly laissez faire about how other people run their countries.
thank you for your advice sparc, i’ll take it to heart. (heh nice name btw. :P)
**
The U.S. has maintained every relationship in the world that it needs or wants to maintain. And who says the U.S.A. hasn’t practiced moderation in its international dealings? I think the American response to September 11 was a perfect example of just that.
Not ratifying the Kyoto treaty, or not being what Kofi Annan wishes we were, makes the U.S. unreasonable and immoderate? Uh, OK.
When was the last time someone from England or France stayed up at night, worrying about what Americans thought of them or their country’s policies? Why would you expect that Americans would, then?
Calm down. I was responding to the quote below of yours, not bemoaning American diplomacy in relation to a specific example –
Where did I say that exactly?
I imagine politicians throughout the world wonder about the repercussions of their (foreign) policy decisions and how they will effect diplomatic and economic relationships with other states. I expect that the US leadership does too, but it doesn’t always appear that way.
Maybe not what the Americans think of us specifically, but there have certainly been things that my government has done on the world arena that have made me cringe. And if you were to criticise them, I’d react in a reasonable fashion and agree with you. Not fly off the handle with knee-jerk defensiveness.
Sorry if you see that as knee-jerk defensiveness. I saw it as a question.
I wasn’t just referring to you, Milossarian. Though “Why should America give a rat’s red ass what Europe or Europeans think of it or its policies?” seems a tad defensive.
by the by
Milossarian
Location: 200 mi. from Felch
Surely there must be someone closer than that? 
Hmm… Hyperbole or complete BS? Should Americans only agree when people criticize their country? I see differences of opinion and people who don’t like to be stereotyped, I don’t see anybody going “SHUT UP EURO-FAGS, USA is #1!!! WE COULD TAKE OVER YOUR COUNTRY!” If this is what you call “patriotic flurry” I could show you stuff that would give you a heart-attack.
At the core of any stereotype you’ll find a bit of the truth. Are there loud, obnoxious, jingoistic, my-country-love-it-or-leave-it Americans who don’t care to critically think about issues, but instead take a face value the sound bites that public figures and the media feed them? Absolutely. Given a country the size of the United States there are bound to be those types. Do they represent the average American? I don’t believe so. The average American is a hard-working, industrious, fairly non-descript person who cares first and foremost for his family’s welfare. The world at large is something we consider in broad-brush strokes (for good or evil). We don’t really give much thought to what the country’s reputation is around the world. It isn’t so much out of arrogance, but rather from a sense of “What difference does it make to me what the Belgians think of America? Is that going to have an appreciable effect on my take-home pay? Is it going to ease my retirement? Is it going to have an effect on whether Social Security is going to be around to pay me?”
Those railing against President Bush can take heart, though. Americans tend to vote with their wallets. The first President Bush attempted to show his connection to the common man and to show how best to stimulate a lagging economy by going out and buying a pair of socks. The effort was too little too late, and despite skyrocket high poll numbers in the area of foreign affairs GHWB lost the general election because of the economic situation in the country. GHB is facing the same situation and I predict that he’ll meet the same fate. As a matter of personal opinion, I could tolerate the elder Bush because he at least seemed to be an affable, well-meaning dunderhead (sort of like Gerald Ford). Bush the younger comes across as a mean-spirited, vindictive, frat boy bully who has all of a sudden found himself in charge of things. He managed to run a few companies straight into the ground, let’s all hope that he has the good graces to not to the same thing to the country.
**I was going for colorful. See? It has the word “red” in it. 
**Last I knew, we did have a Doper from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. He or she would be closer than me. I’m in the far-northern-Lower. And Felch is about dead-smack in the middle of the U.P. No, really. Get a map.
I meant someone closer to be felched by
plnnr
That just about describes every person in the western world. Americans in my experience do tend to be harder workers though.
Actually, it describes just about every person on the face of the planet, which was meant to show that for all the cultural and superficial differences that separate us from our European or Asian or African brothers, we’re all pretty much the same at the most basic (and most important) level.
:smack:
No argument here.
What bothers me as an American about our foreign affairs mindset is that we proclaim ourselves to be defenders of “Truth, Goodness and Freedom around the World” while most of the time we are protecting our economic and political self interest with little regard to changes in TG and F.
This is true of all administrations in my life time, but the dichotomy seems much more glaring in this one.
Defending our interests is not wrong. It’s what we are supposed to do. But why do we have to make ourselves look so hypocritical?
I do give Bush and Co. high marks so far for Afghanistan. They have done a reasonable job of balancing our interests with helping the people of Afghanistan. If they keep the focus on nation building, they will continue to earn high marks in my mind. But, I see that focus slipping and I don’t see many other occurences of actual balance.
Maybe other countries do this politcal two-step too, but it just isn’t broadcast to the ends of the earth by CNN. I just don’t see other countries saying the equivalent of “We’re going to force you to do it our way, but it is for your own good.” as much as we do.
it seems that the government is aware of the US’s declining image abroad:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/americas/2161748.stm
funny how I never saw this on CNN
**
So you can’t tell right from wrong in your world?
**
I’ve yet to see an advertisement convince me to try something I wasn’t already inclined to try in the first place.
**
Because the American public just didn’t care about him in 1988. Now we do.
And when we have the embargo we’re accused of punishing the innocent. We just can’t keep everyone happy.
Marc
Funny how you probably weren’t looking.
[urlhttp://www.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/07/30/wh.image.office/index.html
You might want to check your facts before you make smart remarks.
Dammit. Will a mod please fix that?
A fascinating article about Saddam and his mindset:
The gist of it is that no, he’s not insane exactly, but he’s coming from a very very different place than Westerners and indeed, much of his own country. According to author Mark Bowden, he’s basically a person who thinks tribally and is suspicious of outsiders, considering the whole nation his tribe and himself the absolute patriarch. It’s so obvious to him that anybody within or without Iraq who questions it he simply tunes out. His control is so absolute and his primitive dream of a pan-Arabia so complete that even those who have the nearly suicidal bravery to let him know his plans will fail cannot convince him otherwise.
As for the U.S. supporting him in the past, there was a time when it probably seemed to make sense:
"While he served as vice-chairman, from 1968 to 1979, the party’s goals had seemed to be Saddam’s own. That was a relatively good period for Iraq, thanks to Saddam’s blunt effectiveness as an administrator. He orchestrated a draconian nationwide literacy project. Reading programs were set up in every city and village, and failure to attend was punishable by three years in jail. Men, women, and children attended these compulsory classes, and hundreds of thousands of illiterate Iraqis learned to read. UNESCO gave Saddam an award. (bolding mine) There were also ambitious drives to build schools, roads, public housing, and hospitals. Iraq created one of the best public- health systems in the Middle East. There was admiration in the West during those years, for Saddam’s accomplishments if not for his methods. After the Islamic fundamentalist revolution in Iran, and the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979, Saddam seemed to be the best hope for secular modernization in the region.
Today all these programs are a distant memory. Within two years of his seizing full power, Saddam’s ambitions turned to conquest, and his defeats have ruined the nation. His old party allies in exile now see his support for the social-welfare programs as an elaborate deception. The broad ambitions for the Iraqi people were the party’s, they say. As long as he needed the party, Saddam made its programs his own. But his single, overriding goal throughout was to establish his own rule.
“In the beginning the Baath Party was made up of the intellectual elite of our generation,” says Hamed al-Jubouri, a former Command Council member who now lives in London. “There were many professors, physicians, economists, and historians—really the nation’s elite. Saddam was charming and impressive. He appeared to be totally different from what we learned he was afterward. He took all of us in.” </fair use>
…and another American trait is to think the best of people so after he turned into the tyrant, we probably gave him the benefit of the doubt for too long afterwards.
Besides, he was fighting Iran, and anybody that did that was sort of our friend, riiiiiight?
Are there really no British or French or other European weapons in his arsenal now? Weren’t other Western governments aside from our own taken in by this dissembler, this seeming reformer, and the schools and roads and hospitals? I’d be interested in what side the rest of the Western world’s government’s took in this long war of the 80’s.
As for cowboys, I’m from NYC but even I know that their independence wasn’t supposed to be based on gun-using violence against innocents, but a resourceful fight against the harsh elements. And folks do know that a great many cowboys were black and Latino, right? I’m not sure that the cowboy mentality is well-understood out there, or even in America anymore. Rambo wasn’t a cowboy.
This page is a little dippy but it’s interesting:
http://users.ricc.net/ramrod/gazette3.htm
Mark Twain’s “Roughing It” is also a good read, although it’s set a bit before the prime of the cowboy. There was some lawlessness out West, sure, but there were also lawmakers and lawmen and women who were outraged by it and tried to make sure the damage was minimized and civilization, as they saw it, extended and maintained.
Cowboys are still around, and a lot of them write poetry. Warning: this page plays music at you!
http://clantongang.com/oldwest/trade.htm
Enjoy!