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Jul. 28th, 2002 08:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jlhThis is a reply to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
alexmalfoy. It got too long for a comment, so I moved it here. Hopefully it doesn't sound defensive, as that is far from how I feel.
The fact that I actually know how many electoral votes South Dakota has and why it's important should tell you that yeah, I'm politically active, though mostly at a local level. (Giuliani may have handled crisis well but he ignored the NYC school system for eight years.) Washington I find a tougher nut to crack. I have plenty of friends who worked in the Clinton White House--that's when I got the habit of POTUS--and I know very well how slowly things move down there and how difficult it is to affect foreign policy as a constituent except at the voting box and through pressure. My Congressman is Jerry Nadler, a left-leaning Democrat, and my Senators are both Dems (Hillary, and Chuck Schumer) so I don't need to send them very many letters. (Even the fact that I know who my representatives are off the top of my head shows that I'm more politically aware than most of my countrymen, sadly.)
So let me be just a bit of a devil's advocate. Americans, by nature really, are not internationalists. For the man-on-the-street, the model is still a skewed version of WWII: once things get to the point where it's a big mess, we reluctantly come in to clean things up. Clearly, Vietnam still has most of the country spooked about getting involved in anything happening over our borders. Heaven knows, we have plenty of domestic problems and most Americans in general would like POTUS to concentrate on them, rather than what is happening in, say, Namibia.
The attitude toward other countries (and this really came up around the time of Bosnia) is "Why do we have to be the ones with the answer? If you look to us to fix things, then you'll have to live with the decisions we make." I don't really agree with that--I think things should be more collaborative--but there is a certain logic to that thought. It is on the US to stop making things worse. Unilateralism is short-sighted and unproductive. However, not every problem on the globe is the result of something that we did, nor to we have to be the ones to figure out how to fix it. I can separate the dumb stuff we've done from the dumb stuff others have done but as most Americans have a rather shaky grasp of recent history they can't, and they get resentful about being looked to as some sort of uber-cop. Our reply to some of the criticism, particularly in European newspapers, is "Yes, and what are you doing about it? What would you rather we do? Why don't you act as well?" While I don't completely agree with that statement, I admit to the frustration behind it.
I thought of this when I was reading your post on Africa. One reason we don't have as much coverage of Africa over here is a spheres-of-influence thing; we have really a great deal of coverage on South America, which I would say we did have a big hand in completely fucking up thanks to the tight relationship between certain Secretaries of State and the United Fruit Company, among other reasons. A lot of Africa's issues, though, are the after-affects of colonialism. The recent meeting did get coverage in the US--mostly surrounding Qaddafi's speech, of course, but still, that was coverage--and I hope that they will be able to organize and figure out what they need and want so that the aid that goes to Africa, and the people working there, can actually do some sort of good.
alexmalfoy. It got too long for a comment, so I moved it here. Hopefully it doesn't sound defensive, as that is far from how I feel.The fact that I actually know how many electoral votes South Dakota has and why it's important should tell you that yeah, I'm politically active, though mostly at a local level. (Giuliani may have handled crisis well but he ignored the NYC school system for eight years.) Washington I find a tougher nut to crack. I have plenty of friends who worked in the Clinton White House--that's when I got the habit of POTUS--and I know very well how slowly things move down there and how difficult it is to affect foreign policy as a constituent except at the voting box and through pressure. My Congressman is Jerry Nadler, a left-leaning Democrat, and my Senators are both Dems (Hillary, and Chuck Schumer) so I don't need to send them very many letters. (Even the fact that I know who my representatives are off the top of my head shows that I'm more politically aware than most of my countrymen, sadly.)
So let me be just a bit of a devil's advocate. Americans, by nature really, are not internationalists. For the man-on-the-street, the model is still a skewed version of WWII: once things get to the point where it's a big mess, we reluctantly come in to clean things up. Clearly, Vietnam still has most of the country spooked about getting involved in anything happening over our borders. Heaven knows, we have plenty of domestic problems and most Americans in general would like POTUS to concentrate on them, rather than what is happening in, say, Namibia.
The attitude toward other countries (and this really came up around the time of Bosnia) is "Why do we have to be the ones with the answer? If you look to us to fix things, then you'll have to live with the decisions we make." I don't really agree with that--I think things should be more collaborative--but there is a certain logic to that thought. It is on the US to stop making things worse. Unilateralism is short-sighted and unproductive. However, not every problem on the globe is the result of something that we did, nor to we have to be the ones to figure out how to fix it. I can separate the dumb stuff we've done from the dumb stuff others have done but as most Americans have a rather shaky grasp of recent history they can't, and they get resentful about being looked to as some sort of uber-cop. Our reply to some of the criticism, particularly in European newspapers, is "Yes, and what are you doing about it? What would you rather we do? Why don't you act as well?" While I don't completely agree with that statement, I admit to the frustration behind it.
I thought of this when I was reading your post on Africa. One reason we don't have as much coverage of Africa over here is a spheres-of-influence thing; we have really a great deal of coverage on South America, which I would say we did have a big hand in completely fucking up thanks to the tight relationship between certain Secretaries of State and the United Fruit Company, among other reasons. A lot of Africa's issues, though, are the after-affects of colonialism. The recent meeting did get coverage in the US--mostly surrounding Qaddafi's speech, of course, but still, that was coverage--and I hope that they will be able to organize and figure out what they need and want so that the aid that goes to Africa, and the people working there, can actually do some sort of good.
