The intellectual origins of America-Bashing

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Terrance" <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, October 26, 2003 4:29 PM
Subject: Re: The intellectual origins of America-Bashing
>
> > > The Cold War is not over - ...in one corner of Gaul a small village
> > > remains
> > > defiant...
>
> Defiance? Shall we talk of defiance?
>
> It was not a statue of Marx or Lenin
>   or some French critical "text" impaled on the top
>   of the Eiffel or Ivory tower that the Chinese students
>   in Tiananmen Square raised as a symbol of their
>   resistance, their hope, their love for Democracy,

The Chinese longing for democracy forgot that Lady Liberty was for the white
Americans only, not for the Blacks. And that the Western governments weren't
interested in that protest at all, as long as the good business with Chinese
government was going on.

>  it was the gift of the
>  French to the poor, low, tired, fragments of nations
>  tossed upon these American shores, the Statue of Liberty.
>

 In 1886 the USA hardly were a "poor, low, tired" fragment of a nation.

>   In Prague, 1989, it was not Marx but Jefferson that the
>   students read in the streets.
>

Wasn't Jefferson a slave-owner too? Something the Czechs had forgotten.

> American dissent and protest during the Vietnam War is unique in modern
> history because the people forced the most powerful government in the
> world to change its foreign policy.

More spin -- it wasn't the Tschechago-protest in 1968 but the military
defeat
that made the US-forces to withdraw. "Tschechago" was used by the protesters
to point to the fact that while the Russians were ending the Prague-Spring
of
1968 the USA were far from being a decent democratic country granting free
speech to everybody. I think Pynchon's "criminally insane"-remark from the
SL-Intro is still a good judgement pointing to both sides of the Iron
Curtain.

Read Jerry Rubin's "Do It," Abbie Hoffman's "Woodstock Nation" or Tom
Hayden's "Trial."
Read Mary McCarthy, Daniel Ellsberg or Eldridge Cleaver.

Listen to Chikago's first double-lp "Chikago Transit Authority":
**Prologue, August 29, 1968 -- Actual recording, Democratic Convention
(Chikago 29, 1968). Black militants exhorting demonstrators: God Give Us the
Blood to Keep Going"; March begins; Police attempt to disperse marchers;
Chant:
"The Whole World's Watching."

Otto