Cristobal from Arizona
Dear Global Community,
Where to start...
Americans are complex, passionate, organized, yet troubled individuals, just like everyone else in the world. People seem to hate us, we see Palestinians, for example, burning effigies of Americans in their dusty streets (it seems to be a different group every week, depending on where the president goes and what he says, where he doesn't go...)
People (by people, I mean foreigners) also seem to think they know something about us we, ourselves, don't know....because their news source is The Economist, and our news sources are biased, of course.
The problem might be in our animal nature, in what St. Agustine called the libido dominandi, the will to dominate. Every sentient being, including plants, competes to survive. In order for me to have, I must take. This includes the will to win arguments, to give advice and demand our conversers take it, to be right...or to pretend to be the bigger person by allowing the other person to be right.
If someone has what I want, I might try to take it, and if I lose the challenge and I can't take the thing I want by force or by negotiation, I become resentful.
Envy is another important element in "America hatred"
Competition has always made people hate each other. Or maybe it was the people in power who made the people hate each other in order to make them fight harder against their common enemy. Or in order to make them fight at all. Every nation on earth, by virtue of its existence, is in competition, even if there is no competition. (I mean even if we are dealing with countries on opposite sides of the development line.)
It is easy to turn the "other" into the enemy, for the sake of a common enemy, if for nothing else. This builds camraderie among the citizens....There are many benefits.
I can go on forever. This stuff is too dense to talk about in a single letter. And even if I did talk about everything, I'd still remain an ignorant American who doesn't really know what's going on in the world because I'm too busy ridin' my atv (the foreigners "prawlly" have no idea what the hell that is) and being ensconced in my affluence to see the world as it really is.
Here's another idea. In the states, we only see the more sophisticated foreigners who speak English and have enough money to come here. And since we're students, we are mostly acquainted with those foreigners who decide to go for a degree here. This is like the .0001th percentile. I have Mexican relatives who contemplated how long it would take to get to Spain by bus. This is unfathomable here. There are people in the world who still believe in magic (yes, even in the states) we all know some of the ridiculous things people in the world believe. My point is that we Americans tend to think foreigners are somehow intelligent. Or more intelligent than ourselves. We associate intelligence with Einstein's foreign accent, and since the idiots from the Frankfurt School had the same accent, we thought they, too, were intelligent.
Foreigners came up with such disastrous catastrophes as the Holocaust, Slavery, Imperialism, communism...the US came up with the A-bomb to end all of that non-sense.
Our empire will have been dwarfed by the greatness of the Roman Empire. Let us have our day in the sun. Maybe I should say, We shall have our day in the sun.
"Once more onto the breach dear friends, once more. or close the wall up with our English dead. In peace there is nothing more becomes a man than modest stillness and humility, but when the sounds of war ring in our ears, imitate the action of the Tiger"
-from Shakespeare's Henry V.
About the Author
Name: Cristobal Colon
Age: 26
City: Tempe/Mesa
State: Arizona
Gender: Male
Income: Low
Occupation: Conceptual Artist
0 Comments
Published on Sunday, March 4, 2007 at 7:44 AM.
Where to start...
Americans are complex, passionate, organized, yet troubled individuals, just like everyone else in the world. People seem to hate us, we see Palestinians, for example, burning effigies of Americans in their dusty streets (it seems to be a different group every week, depending on where the president goes and what he says, where he doesn't go...)
People (by people, I mean foreigners) also seem to think they know something about us we, ourselves, don't know....because their news source is The Economist, and our news sources are biased, of course.
The problem might be in our animal nature, in what St. Agustine called the libido dominandi, the will to dominate. Every sentient being, including plants, competes to survive. In order for me to have, I must take. This includes the will to win arguments, to give advice and demand our conversers take it, to be right...or to pretend to be the bigger person by allowing the other person to be right.
If someone has what I want, I might try to take it, and if I lose the challenge and I can't take the thing I want by force or by negotiation, I become resentful.
Envy is another important element in "America hatred"
Competition has always made people hate each other. Or maybe it was the people in power who made the people hate each other in order to make them fight harder against their common enemy. Or in order to make them fight at all. Every nation on earth, by virtue of its existence, is in competition, even if there is no competition. (I mean even if we are dealing with countries on opposite sides of the development line.)
It is easy to turn the "other" into the enemy, for the sake of a common enemy, if for nothing else. This builds camraderie among the citizens....There are many benefits.
I can go on forever. This stuff is too dense to talk about in a single letter. And even if I did talk about everything, I'd still remain an ignorant American who doesn't really know what's going on in the world because I'm too busy ridin' my atv (the foreigners "prawlly" have no idea what the hell that is) and being ensconced in my affluence to see the world as it really is.
Here's another idea. In the states, we only see the more sophisticated foreigners who speak English and have enough money to come here. And since we're students, we are mostly acquainted with those foreigners who decide to go for a degree here. This is like the .0001th percentile. I have Mexican relatives who contemplated how long it would take to get to Spain by bus. This is unfathomable here. There are people in the world who still believe in magic (yes, even in the states) we all know some of the ridiculous things people in the world believe. My point is that we Americans tend to think foreigners are somehow intelligent. Or more intelligent than ourselves. We associate intelligence with Einstein's foreign accent, and since the idiots from the Frankfurt School had the same accent, we thought they, too, were intelligent.
Foreigners came up with such disastrous catastrophes as the Holocaust, Slavery, Imperialism, communism...the US came up with the A-bomb to end all of that non-sense.
Our empire will have been dwarfed by the greatness of the Roman Empire. Let us have our day in the sun. Maybe I should say, We shall have our day in the sun.
"Once more onto the breach dear friends, once more. or close the wall up with our English dead. In peace there is nothing more becomes a man than modest stillness and humility, but when the sounds of war ring in our ears, imitate the action of the Tiger"
-from Shakespeare's Henry V.
About the Author
Name: Cristobal Colon
Age: 26
City: Tempe/Mesa
State: Arizona
Gender: Male
Income: Low
Occupation: Conceptual Artist
Labels: american history, americans, anti-americanism, arizona, artist, foreigners, middle east policy
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