Timothy Garton Ash (Guardian Utd): American blues

[Jack Rabbit]

From the Guardian Unlimited (UK)
Dated Thursday November 18

American blues
Our liberal cousins are in despair. Defenders of the Enlightenment unite!
By Timothy Garton Ash in San Francisco

I 'm getting seriously worried about anti-Americanism. Anti-Americanism in America, that is. Here are just a few of the things that I've heard travelling through blue, ie liberal, America over the two weeks since George Bush won the election. "The truth is, they just are stupid." (A New Yorker, of people in the red, ie conservative, states.) "The snakes." "Fascism." "Christian fascism." "I wanted to make a film about a time when young Americans fought against fascism and not for it." (A producer, explaining why he commissioned a film about the Spanish civil war.)
For some days after John Kerry conceded, Democrats were telling me that the vote may have been rigged. The Diebold automatic counting machines were manufactured by a Republican crony; perhaps they were programmed to undercount Democratic votes. The Democrats' own exit polling showed them well ahead in counties they then lost. And so on.

Some felt impelled to apologise to the rest of us. If you go to the website sorryeverybody.com, you can see a young American holding up a hand-written sign saying "Sorry World (we tried) - Half of America." Others, despairing, talked of emigration. A liberal radio host told me he had started looking at homes in New Zealand. "Oh yes," said another journalist, "a lot of my friends are talking about New Zealand." Visits to the Canadian immigration website soared - giving a new meaning to the cartoon map that showed the blue states of the west and north-east coasts joined with their northern neighbour in the "United States of Canada", and separated from "Jesusland" in the south. There's also jocular talk of the blue north seceding from the southern states of the Confederacy, thus reversing the story of the American civil war.

"For years I've looked down on countries that mix religion and politics - as in the Middle East - and now we've become one," Heather from Lafayette emailed CNN. While the right claimed this as a victory for "moral values" - down with abortion, gay marriage, stem cell research and gun control - a letter-writer to the New York Times said values were indeed the issue: "But the values in question are those of the liberal, secular modernity that defined and animated western culture over the last century of social and economic progress, and that now appear to be under at least as great a threat from within the United States as they are from forces like radical Islam."

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