roachboy

there is a huge list of actions that explains why folk might well detest the american state. my experience, however, is that people in other places make a hard distinction between the people and the state.

as for the list, you could start with even a cursory history of american foreign policy during and after world war 2 and move in almost any direction, from cultural imperialism to economic domination to incompetent marketing...seriously, you could go in any direction and compile your own wonderful list of things the american state and/or its empire have done to alienate people around the world. enough so that even the things the amerians try to do that are helpful are not taken at face value: and why should they be, really?
add to it, over the past 4 years, the new frontiers in ignorance and arrogance embodied by the bush administration-- bull-in-the-china-shop concerns are not unreasonable.

what is strange in all this is the persistence of the split amongst many americans between how they understand themselves and where they live, what that country is in action, in real time, and how where they live is seen from other places. of course, this split is carefully managed, and is critical for the engineering of domestic consent for the state. whence the recurrent whining from the right about how they are misunderstood internationally and the about the international community.
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__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite