... the depth of the hostility that Bush provokes outside the US when he says things like:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/01/20040120-7.htmlAmerica is a nation with a mission, and that mission comes from
our most basic beliefs. We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions
of empire. Our aim is a democratic peace -- a peace founded upon
the dignity and rights of every man and woman. America acts in this
cause with friends and allies at our side, yet we understand our
special calling: This great republic will lead the cause of freedom.
The urge to puke and throw things is almost overwhelming.
Special calling??? Lead??? And the rest of us: chopped liver? adoring but rather dim, complacent followers?
Yeah, well, it can get damned hard to lead when nobody's following. Which is pretty much what happened last March, and is happening in just about every other respect you can imagine. There is not a single thing I can think of that I would want to follow the US on -- not health care or any other social security policy, not the culture of guns, not immigration policy, not tax policy, not anti-drug policy, not the treatment of criminal offenders, not the treatment of any kind of minority group, not foreign policy, not protection of individual freedoms, not nothin'.
In any sense other than the constant threat of the exercise of brute force, whether military or economic, the US is so utterly irrelevant to the rest of us out here that the guffawing reflex pretty much overcomes the gag reflex when we hear things like that, of course.
I mean, we have great compassion for the 43 million USAmericans without health coverage, the people in the US who live in fear of the violence in their neighbourhoods, the people on death rows in US states, the children living in cars, the women unable to access reproductive health services, everyone else in the US who does not enjoy the rights and freedoms and security many of us enjoy. Our laughter at Bush is bitter, for both us and them.
And our governments just go about the business of
engaging with the world, through bilateral and multilateral efforts to ... well, as it says in the Inter-American Democratic Charter of the Organization of American States (just one of the international institution that Canada works through to improve the world by encouraging respect for the rule of law and democracy --
and to learn from other countries):
http://www.oas.org/charter/docs/resolution_en.htmThe strengthening of democracy requires transparency, probity,
responsibility, and effectiveness in the exercise of public
authority, respect for social rights, and freedom of the press,
as well as economic and social development.
Obviously the demagogic bluster of a Bush about the rest of the world is designed to divert USAmericans' attention from the fact that he is entirely uncommitted to "strengthening democracy" at home.
Transparency in the exercise of public authority? respect for social rights? economic and social development? Didn't hear much about that would advance any of those goals in the State of the Union.
And abroad? In Iraq, women had had equal rights under civil family law for many years. In Iraq under the US's authority, it appears that women will
lose those rights, they will be made subject to a particular misogynistic version of a religious law, with the acquiescence of the US.
Freedom? Democracy? "Dignity and rights of every man and woman"?? Ask an Iraqi woman. Ask a Colombian peasant farmer. Ask anyone whose despotic government the US has ever installed or propped up.
Bitter laughter will be the response, I'm afraid.
.