David Bircumshaw
Spectare's Web, A Chide's Alphabet
& Painting Without Numbers
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/
>But I do notice a change in tack in your thinking - you now seem to be saying
something along the lines of, evil is everywhere, look at all the bad things
close to home etc. A religious view, if nothing else, and certainly a view
which is starting to step out of the political. If I relate this to my argument
re America then I would say that, yes, of course there are very bad things all
over the world being done by all sorts of people but that is not what I am
talking about on this thread, I am talking about the specifics of American power
and action.<
Tim. thanks for that, it's a sensitive and thoughtful post.. Yes, I have slipped away from the political towards the religious,
partly because of my sense of the impotence of current politics, in the party sense. There just isn't anyone to vote for, on the
national scale. So maybe my thinking now is an example of displacement, but I read Christianity as, in some ways, being an example
of that. I am also very aware of the philosophical incoherence of the religion, I had a long chat tonight with my Russian mate
Yevgeny about this, he's Orthodox and a physicist and works over here so he can support his wife and family back in Russia, he
lectures at the university and lives in a bedsit. Like me, he's become a political pessimist, he knows too well from the former USSR
what attempts at creating social perfection can turn into: disaster. Vicky and I have turned into quasi-Methodists, we're not
members but Adherents, that's the technical phrase, because we are desperate to hold to some sense of identity in the welter of this
world, and our North Midlands forebears were such so have we become, it's a very liberal and progressive church so our going there
doesn't involve any compromise of views. The specifics of US power are so complicated I cannot deal with the subject anymore, the UK
is in all this up to its neck, we wouldn't even have this facility to talk if it wasn't for these matters. The troubles are close to
home, yes, but they are worldwide too. I don't know what to do about them, and maybe never had, but have only lately really realised
the fact.
Thanks again for your post.
All the Best
Dave
----- Original Message -----
From: <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Saturday, November 20, 2004 1:35 PM
Subject: Re: anti-american
I was sorry to see the exchange between Dave and Lawrence and Robert descend
the way it did but I have to say, Dave, I think you let the hangover of a
previous gripe influence your response to Lawrence.
But I do notice a change in tack in your thinking - you now seem to be saying
something along the lines of, evil is everywhere, look at all the bad things
close to home etc. A religious view, if nothing else, and certainly a view
which is starting to step out of the political. If I relate this to my argument
re America then I would say that, yes, of course there are very bad things all
over the world being done by all sorts of people but that is not what I am
talking about on this thread, I am talking about the specifics of American power
and action.
It is those specifics which are important to me as an individual because I,
like most Brits here, have grown up in a North Atlantic world in which American
culture has played almost as important a part, in shaping the way I look at
things, as the Brit one. And though I consider myself to be internationalist
first, European second and British a poor third - I'm another of those half
Irish I'm afraid - I am all too well aware of being part of a greater America. My
shelves bulge with American music, books and art. Most of the films I watch
were made in the US. My biggest enthusiasms re poetry over the past 15 years
have been North American etc - therefore the things that America does in the name
of our so-called western values, hit home, hard. But of course there is a
difference: I have not had the stars and stripes stuffed down my throat every
morning and I have not grown up in a society where anyone who does not believe in
God is considered some sort of weirdo. And I long for fairness and economic
equality of course, socialism etc, the little tradition even has some
respectability here, and find the american fear of it to be perverse.
So what has been the result of all those books and talks and wisdom and
science and riches and humanity and vales re freedom? - Strutting soldiers and
torturers. Greed and hubris on a disgusting scale. Rampant nationalism that we in
Europe find both comical and idiotic, and worse, dangerous. A peculiar
penchant for violence that contradicts everything a Western civilisation is supposed
to stand for and a lack of respect for the freedom and wishes of others that
is so self-righteous that it beggars belief. I could go on and on with this.
I'm thoroughly depressed by them and I dread to think what the rest of the
century has in store. They have created so many enemies, sometimes carelessly, but
often purposefully too - the ultimate in political cynicism - and they can now
use the existence of those enemies to justify every spiralling rhetoric
towards what ever war suits at the time.
Tim A.
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