Quotes and reviews

There are some writers and some who review their work who clarify better than most the observations of the 'outside' world on the United States of America.
These comments speak for me.
(With thanks to the "Weekend Australian's Review" section of Oct 4-5 2008, Miriam Cosic and Ronald Wright.)


Miriam Cosic reviewing Ronald Wright new book "What is America?"

"American contradictions exist at many levels. A country whose core values are freedom and equality was built on violent dispossession and the slave trade."

"The wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth cannot give adequate health car to its citizens or rescue them after natural disaster".

"...Screens the realities of conquest, the unconscious use of words that call "all white victories battles and all Indian victories massacres" as the Grand Fire council of American Indians told the mayor of Chicago in 1927. "White men who rise to protect their property are called patriots, Indians who do the same are called murderers."

"America is different, White says. "There is no other country in the Western world where half the population are creationists. There's no other Western democracy that executes so many people. There' s no other Western democracy that has no universal health care."

"Christianity can be all things to all people and this kind of American Christianity is very much that Puritan fundamentalist extremist strain of the people who lost the English Civil War and got booted out of Europe," he says.

"The strain flourished in isolation and informs that heartland of America (ie Republicans)."

"The American frontiersman came to rely on his gun for protection and his own reading of the Bible to explain the world."

"The Marshall Plan turned Europeans away from fascism and towards liberalism and prosperity after WW11, with an effectiveness beyond the dreams of the architects of the Iraq war."

"(This) was the moment at which the US admired for bravery in war and generosity in peace , eclipsed Britain as world leader."

"The secularisation and amelioration of religious certitudes, which Europe has experienced, did not play wout in the US."
The horrors of two world wars, experienced on home soil, had something to do with it. "Europeans did finally wake up and realise they had to organise a new order based on co-operations."
"And the ability of sophiticated thinking to permeate society must also have had an effect. The essential anti-intellectualism of the frontier mentality has prevented that in the US."
Puritan fundamentalists don't want to deal with intellectuals who know that the scientific facts don't support what they believe in. That self reliant man with his gun and his Bible doesn't need the soft city elite to explain the world to him."
"In fact those liberal elites so despised not only by the heartland but by those politicians and commentators who enjoy stirring it up are more akin to Europeans than they are to the rest of their coutnrymen. So polarised has the US become between liberalism and libertarianism that Americans vote as they are barracking for their football team."

"The whole Jeffersonian ideal of American democracy is based on the assumption that people will acquaint themselves with the facts and vote accordingly. Half the electorate isn't doing that. "