Letters to the Editor
-
Blame America 2.0
Actually what they hate us for is our imperialistic attitude that what's good for America -- and American business -- is good for the world. Tied to that is the arrogance of the American Christianist missionaries who believe that the only True religion is that of Virgil Goode and Pat Robertson, who's been known to combine both business and the pulpit in some shady dealings with shady dictators. Neither of these attitudes could remotely be called "liberal."
If we've been imposing secular American values on the Islamic world, it's been at the behest of corporate America. The two best-known logos in the world are Coca-Cola and Mickey Mouse, and the last time I checked, neither of those are hotbeds of liberal thought. Hollywood may make the movies, but it's the corporations that produce the films that distribute them overseas, not the actors or directors who might occasionally send a check to the ACLU. The people that run these corporations are looking for ways to make a huge profit, and that's not something liberals are known for.
As far as religion is concerned, it's the muscular evangelical church that has to answer for several centuries of attempts to undermine the Muslim faith, not the secular humanists. As far as I know, there hasn't been a wave of left-wing university professors going over to Africa to read aloud from Walt Whitman and Susan Sontag in an effort to convert entire villages to the Harvard Faculty Club.
If anything, the so-called "volcano of anger" toward America since before and after September 11 has been directed not at the freedoms we have or our democractic form of government, or Paris Hilton, for that matter (although they might have a case on the last one), but at our arrogance in presenting ourselves as the Greatest Country in the History of the World. For the most part, many countries aspire to those freedoms but on their own terms, not some boilerplate imposed on them by the home office, the mother church, or the 82nd Airborne. The idea that our Western materialism, capitalism, and evangelism is somehow the fault of the liberals is laughable. If anything, liberals, whether they're in Hollywood, the media, Congress, the non-profit sector, or the universities are the ones who have been preaching tolerance, diversity, and respect for other religions and cultures and cringe at the idea of America being presented to the rest of the world from the business end of a satellite dish or a McDonald's drive-through. It's the conservatives with their smug arrogance about their "traditional family values" that include Wal-Mart and the Baby Jesus that run a greater risk of angering and repulsing other societies.