inappropriate images of President Bush?

[pynchonoid]

In Britain, War Concern Grows Into Resentment of U.S.
Power 
Anxiety Over Attack on Iraq Moves to Political
Mainstream 

By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, January 26, 2003; Page A14 

LONDON -- In a recently televised satire here titled
"Between Iraq and a Hard Place," George W. Bush is
depicted as an idiot who can't seem to grasp why
Saddam Hussein isn't cooperating with the U.S.
timetable for war. American democracy is defined as
"where there are two candidates and the one with the
most votes loses," and Britain's role in the
forthcoming military campaign is starkly simple:

"What is it that the Americans want from us?" asks a
British official.

"From us?" replies an army general. "Dead bodies."

[...]

"There's no question the anxiety is moving into the
mainstream," said Raymond Seitz, a former U.S.
ambassador to Britain who is vice chairman of Lehman
Brothers Europe. The debate here, he said, has
shifted. "It's not about how you deal with weapons of
mass destruction or how you combat the threat of
terrorism in the world, it's about how do you
constrain the United States. How do you tie down
Gulliver?"

Opinion polls show that support for military action
against Iraq is at its lowest level ever among the
British public. The Guardian newspaper and the ICM
polling group found last week that 30 percent of
respondents now support the idea, down from 42 percent
in October. Opposition has risen from 37 percent to 47
percent.

Other signs of the swing in mood: efforts by the
tabloid Daily Mirror to build circulation with an
all-out campaign against an attack on Iraq; the
sold-out success of "The Madness of George Dubya," a
north London theatrical satire that depicts a
child-like president in pajamas with a giant teddy
bear; and the continuing bestseller status of Michael
Moore's book "Stupid White Men," a blistering critique
of the United States.

Criticism of America here begins with Iraq but quickly
broadens to accusations that Washington is aiding and
abetting Israeli repression of Palestinians and is a
gluttonous society of large cars, fast food and
environmental degradation seeking cheap Iraqi oil to
feed its consumption habits.  [...] 

Much of the outrage is indeed aimed at Bush, whose
colloquial speaking style and Texas accent don't go
over well here. A cartoon in last Sunday's Observer
newspaper depicted him as the Lone Ranger and Blair as
Tonto. When Blair expresses doubts about the Iraq
campaign, Bush replies: "Shut up, Tonto, and cover my
back."

"Bush is a gift for anti-American cartoonists,"
Timothy Garton Ash, director of the European Studies
Center at St. Antony's College at Oxford University,
said. "If Bill Clinton were still in the White House,
I suspect it'd be a very different story." [...] 

Next month, when the Oxford Union debates the
proposition that "This House believes the U.S.A. is
the greatest barrier to world peace," one of those
speaking in favor will be Paul Robinson, a lecturer in
security studies at the University of Hull. He is a
former military intelligence officer who calls himself
a right-of-center conservative, yet he argues that the
Bush administration is destroying the long-standing
international consensus that nations shouldn't wage
war unless they are seriously threatened. "We are just
becoming naked aggressors," he said of the United
States and Britain.

Americans in Britain say they still are welcomed here,
but feel increasingly challenged to take a stand
against war in Iraq. When Melvyn P. Leffler, a history
professor at the University of Virginia, and John
Arthur, a philosophy professor at Binghamton
University in New York, arrived last fall to spend a
year teaching at Oxford, they went to visit a British
friend of Arthur's and spent most of the night arguing
over Iraq. "I was stunned to realize that people here
seem more fearful of American power than they are of
the oppressiveness and hideousness of Saddam Hussein's
regime," Leffler said.  [...] 	

read it all:

<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43665-2003Jan25.html>

-Doug

=====
<http://www.pynchonoid.blogspot.com/>

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