Among those who have lost the capacity to think, statements like this are still to be found:
In essence, what we are witnessing is a pseudo-rejection of the USA. All this “I hate America as much as you hate America!” baloney is a cultural phenomenon, little to do with any meaningful or cultivated sense of “politics”. Across Europe, gigantic music stores stuffed to the gunwales with American pop, rock and urban do a sideline in hipster books. Virtually without exception these dazzling paperback digests are rabidly anti-American (Why do we hate America? ),
A 'left of centre' blog quotes this as if it were some insightful commentary. What these unnamed ‘hipster books’ are is anybody’s guess. Probably, these putative ‘hipster[?] books’ (note on rhetoric 101: left thought is always ‘merely fashionable’) are ones containing criticisms of the actions of the US government. Now various unreflective numbskulls seem to think that there is a contradiction between consuming American culture and being critical of the U.S. government. This ‘contradiction’ is unworthy of consideration. Allow me to quote myself:
A colleague tells me of a video made by one of his students ostensibly about ‘Anti-Americanism’ in the U.K. The video consists of footage of anti-war protestors juxtaposed with tracking footage of acres of MacDonald’s, Burger King and other U.S. companies. It illustrates, suggests the student, British hypocrisy in simultaneously hating and loving ‘America’. Meanwhile, a protest against the Iraq war in France can be lazily referred to as an ‘anti-American’ demonstration at the consistently puerile ‘No Pasaran’ site. Elsewhere, in a discussion at Crooked Timber, criticisms of Starbucks were taken to be ‘really about’ attitudes to ‘America’. Such examples are utterly quotidian, routine, legion*.Anyway, it seems obvious to me that enjoying burgers and protesting at what you consider to be an imperialist war are two different things, and not two ways of relating to a single abstraction called ‘America’ [….]An American, conversely, can like fish and chips but hate cricket, hate Labour and love the Beatles. They are not entertaining tortured, contradictory attitudes towards “Englishness’.
Elementary logic, perhaps, except for those whose thought has been impoverished by the crushing presence of doxa or have simply fallen victim to a generalised irrationality..
Seriously, after reading yet another bold denunciation of the non-entity Mr George Galloway, or some self-congratulatory demolition of a clueless sap from the Socialist Worker’s letter’s page one can only say, as one might to the police nicking a down-and-out on Tottenham Court Road, haven’t you got anything better to do? One can only wonder for whom these tedious repetitive denunciations are staged. And one can only hope, if only from irrational and lingering nostalgia, for a left blog that wishes to talk about social injustice, class and capitalism, that has some sense of this world’s obscene inequalities of wealth and power and never tires of drawing attention to these; that never tires also of pointing out the strategies whereby the powerful and the privileged legitimate and reproduce their rule, and that replies to the tyranny of what merely exists with reminders of what has been and what might be; that instinctively tries to disrupt the ‘obvious’ reading rather than rallying to its defence, and that aspires to that impossible point from which the world as it is can be seen in its terrible privation . So here’s an empty link, a link that holds open a place for such a blog, a vacant position. Keeping such a link open might be more important than many of the predictable stuff which currently purports to fill it, and which is plastered, like so many over-familiar facsimiles, over the virtual walls of the blogosphere.