Falterman: Eye on Eric
Press Action
Tuesday, January 28, 2003
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/hand01282003/
Eric Alterman recently went searching for anti-Americanism in Europe and reports his findings in the current issue of The Nation. He tells us that there still are pockets of anti-Americanism but that most Europeans generally like Americans, American institutions, American companies, and even Ronald Reagan. But they’ve grown tired of President Bush after only two years because he’s too much of a cowboy.
No way you’re anti-American if you love Bruce Springsteen, Alterman writes. The French loved Bruce at a recent concert in the Paris ‘burbs, which makes them okay, Alterman says, even if it is the historic home of cultural anti-Americanism.
Given how Alterman looks at Bruce as the true bluest of Americans, I’m worried how the tone of his article would have been had Alterman come upon Bruce playing to a half-full, unappreciative crowd at the old French hockey arena. Perhaps Alterman would have come home equating Europeans to the worst anti-Americans of them all — Chomsky, Cockburn and Vidal.
Alterman has been policing the world for anti-Americanism since the 9/11 attacks and he has found that, outside of the Middle East and Central Asia, the greatest purveyor of anti-Americanism is, um, America.
In his infamous Dec. 9 column in The Nation, Alterman wrote: “If Alexander Cockburn, Noam Chomsky or Gore Vidal has ever had anything balanced or nuanced to say about America’s role in the world, I’ve missed it.” Speaking your mind about how you think America should be gets folks who really don’t like true democratic American debate a little scared. Tell Ari Fleischer that we have the perfect cop to police those unpatriotic American leftists.
Speaking of unpatriotic, later in the same Dec. 9 piece, Alterman lists some of his favorite political U.S. commentators and refers to them as the “patriotic left,” which leaves the rest of the left as unpatriotic, I guess.
Anti-Americanism is a contrivance used as a weapon by those in the United States who are interested in maintaining the current social and political order against those people attempting to take advantage of the freedoms of the American system to create a saner and more peaceful world. Anytime you read or hear someone use the term anti-American to describe someone or a group of people, unless they are being ironic, dismiss everything else they have to say. It’s a term for the philosophically weak and one that would have withered away a long time ago in a truly democratic society.
Alterman should quit wasting his time searching for anti-Americanism, even if he is conducting the exercise as a way to reveal the extent of anti-Bush administration sentiment in Europe. Working to create a more perfect society, as Chomsky, Cockburn and Vidal and others of the “unpatriotic left” are attempting to do, is the American way. Don’t knock their idealism. That would be anti-American.
-- Mark Hand