Robin and I both found a lot to talk about after reading this essay by Maria in Crooked Timber about how Europeans view America. I was surprised at how much I still take for granted as an American, even though I'm married to a Brit. I had a particularly strong reaction to her sentence, "I found it almost unbelievable that T.V. Americans seemed to drink orange juice every day when we had it just for Christmas, went shopping just for fun and could afford to keep their enormous fridges constantly full." I didn't even realize that, until very recently (the last couple decades or so), most Europeans had what we here call mini-fridges, and that many considered OJ (and oranges) a luxury item.
I can't help but wonder if this sort of unconscious conspicuous consumption isn't what the radical right cabal currently in power is really referring to (and encouraging citizens to covet and protect) when it uses buzzwords like "freedom." It would certainly seem to fit, as one of their first exhortations after 9-11 was not to take care of each other but to go shopping (and not the fundraising variety either), and disproportionate media concern in Katrina's aftermath has been paid to the looting of stores where, as Julia points out, goods are presumably insured anyway. If uncontrolled hyper-capitalism is indeed the new definition of "freedom" (rather than, say, those freedoms enshrined in the First Amendment) - and it would appear to be ingrained in many Americans' systems now, given that Katrina victims in New Orleans believed they needed a ticket or some sort of payment in order to be rescued! - one begins to see why a lot of folks around the world may just resent American citizens' obliviousness to how the rest of the world works and consequently "hate us for our freedom."
I can't help but wonder if this sort of unconscious conspicuous consumption isn't what the radical right cabal currently in power is really referring to (and encouraging citizens to covet and protect) when it uses buzzwords like "freedom." It would certainly seem to fit, as one of their first exhortations after 9-11 was not to take care of each other but to go shopping (and not the fundraising variety either), and disproportionate media concern in Katrina's aftermath has been paid to the looting of stores where, as Julia points out, goods are presumably insured anyway. If uncontrolled hyper-capitalism is indeed the new definition of "freedom" (rather than, say, those freedoms enshrined in the First Amendment) - and it would appear to be ingrained in many Americans' systems now, given that Katrina victims in New Orleans believed they needed a ticket or some sort of payment in order to be rescued! - one begins to see why a lot of folks around the world may just resent American citizens' obliviousness to how the rest of the world works and consequently "hate us for our freedom."
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