Phil Elmore: Individual Authoring Services

How To "Dominate Culturally & Economically"
A Guide To Being Delightfully Xenophobic

I love America. Sadly, there are plenty of people who don't. It seems that every last country in the world regards the U.S. with contempt, fear, awe, and jealousy, though perhaps not in that order. And when you think about it, why shouldn't they? America is the country that gave the world the M16 assault rifle and the Lawn Dart, Road House and Gone With the Wind, the Chevrolet Corvette and the AMC Pacer, the Internet and WWF Wrestling. America's lecherous hillbilly president wags his finger and lectures the world while bullying the American people, deploys troops at the drop of a whopper, bombs aspirin factories when he's caught with his hand in the nookie jar, and generally makes us look like slobs.

Only in America could you, on the same day, witness the introduction of software that will change the world and see the Jerry Springer Cam strapped to the head of a trailer-park mutant who's dating his half-sister's mother and who sings karaoke at transvestite bars. In America, unlike most of the rest of the world, it's generally legal to own a gun, express your opinion without breaking speech laws, and watch live pornographic streaming video from the Netherlands, all while driving a sport utility vehicle. Despite the resounding failure of American public education, it is American businesses producing life-changing innovations in technology, medicine, and agriculture. This nation is the lever moving the rest of the world. Despite its flaws -- and it has many of them -- you won't find another country with America's blend of freedom, individualism, crass ugliness, innovation, sincerity, hypocrisy, and general wonder.

That combination -- America's flaws and its virtues -- bothers a lot of people. Our freedom bothers some, who lobby in the United Nations for stricter control on those whacky, cowboy Americans -- and our standard of living bothers others, who demand that American's "unfair" use of "the world's resources" places them at a disadvantage. Some nations rightly hold a grudge because America's whoring leaders have a nasty habit of lobbing missiles at them, while many are motivated simply by envy.

Take Canada, for instance. Canada suffers from a national identity crisis, because while it occupies the north half of North America, people are talking about the U.S. when they say "America." Canadians are envious of our stronger economy, and whether they'll admit it or not, they're jealous of our freedoms. Did you know Canadians don't have freedom of speech? I own more than one book that is banned in Canada, and if you're a Canadian and you're caught publishing an opinion the Canadians have legislated as "hateful" or otherwise politically incorrect, you can go to jail.

Canadians are constantly pushing their noses into American politics, when they're not dumping their useless quarters into our economy for the sole purpose of preventing me from doing my laundry. Yes, the Canadians have nationalized healthcare, and the strong American dollar means you can get cheaper laser eye surgery there -- but be grateful you're not on their national waiting list for something really important, something that, left untreated, might kill you while you're waiting. Canadians spend a lot of time telling the U.S. it needs stronger gun control, too -- to which I respond, "Shove it up your maple leaf, eh? This isn't your country, no matter how much you'd like it to be, if only for the sake of your economy."

Watch television in any other country in the world, and if you say to yourself, "Wow, this show really sucks," there's an eighty percent chance that you're watching that nation's locally-produced programming. Is it any wonder that Canadian television is mostly American reruns of The A-Team in between news broadcasts about American politics? In fact, the only people other than Americans who have ever managed to produce network television programs that don't make you want to scoop your own eyes out with a spoon are the English, who gave the world Monty Python -- but who burned up any credibility that granted them by also giving the world Benny Hill.

An incredibly arrogant Englishman named Nick, who was also a lot of fun in political conversations, once told me how horrible American news was, because we Americans didn't seem to know there was a world outside our borders. I gather he was distressed at the lack of coverage on the day-to-day goings-on in other nations, and this isn't the first time I've heard a foreigner voice this complaint. Well, rest-of-the-world, I've got breaking news for you: your reporters may spend a lot of time concerned with what everyone else is doing, particularly the United States, but we have our own business to which we must attend, and quite frankly, local news in Outer Gambia or England or France or Australia just isn't that important, unless it's about an upcoming season of Survivor.

The French -- whom I once heard branded a nation of "surrender monkeys" -- could be unfairly stereotyped as an arrogant, irritating people with delusions of their own importance. That wouldn't be fair, but it is true that the French are so insecure that they police their language, rooting out nasty foreign words that threaten their supposedly lauded heritage. As you can imagine, this pogrom includes a great many American words relating to technological innovations. And those technological innovations give the French a hard time. The internet, for example, is an American thing, regardless of how many other nations jump on the WWW bandwagon. Americans made the internet possible, and Americans drive its most important and most interesting (not to mention a lot of its most useless and offensive) content. The French, of course, believe the rest of the world should be subject to its Frog Law, and have sued American auction companies that sell products illegal in France. One wonders if there's a Maginot Line tall enough to keep out the rest of the beret-eschewing barbarians one supposes must be clamoring at the golden gates of Paris.

The French, of course, aren't the only country who despise us just for being us. Beijing has a Starbucks. I wouldn't have thought much of that except to think, "Wow, even in godless communist China you can get a decent mocha," but some of the Chinese are protesting Starbucks' existence as an example of "American economic and cultural domination." Imagine that -- coffee as a force for world domination. If I'd known it was that easy, my jittery, trigger-happy, headache-plagued, caffeine-loaded soldiers would be marching on Washington right now. And the Chinese aren't the only ones fighting the mountain-grown foot soldiers of the New World Order; in the United States, America-loathing protestors, particular the we-hate-the-WTO crowd, spend most of their time trashing Starbucks outlets in an effort to save the world from frothing milk.

More absurd than laws governing just how many hours of Knight Rider can appear on German television in a week, more unsettling than the English laughing through blackened teeth over spleen-and-kidney pie while yapping about our national elections, more irritating than a planet full of covetous United Nations representatives lecturing the United States about freedom, are those who live within the aegis of American liberty while loathing the very nation that shields them. To be blunt, I expect other countries to suck. I expect their standards of living to be lower, their movies to be incomprehensible, and their change to be incompatible with our Pepsi machines. I expect their cars to be more reliable if they're Japanese or German, but I don't expect them to understand the individualism and classical liberalism on which this nation is built, nor do I care if they disapprove of my country. But people living in this great nation, people born in America, really ought to know better than your average foreigner what makes America great. They are an example of what comes from too little xenophobia; they have allowed the hatreds of foreigners to consume them, and have become strangers in their own strange land.

Those who embrace the intellectually bankrupt philosophies of Marx and Lenin, those who view capitalism as morally wrong and corporations as a greater threat than intrusive, abusive government -- these are the people who worry me most. For them, it is 1984. Freedom is slavery, they will tell you, and Capitalism -- the freedom to buy and sell and trade of your own free will -- is the greatest evil. They preach against the evils of commercialism and American waste while carrying cellular phones and driving Toyota Land Cruisers. They wear hundreds of dollars worth of designer clothes while hurling bricks through the windows of corporate coffee shop franchises, all the while ignorant of their thundering hypocrisy. They enjoy a remarkable amount of freedom to disrupt and destroy and vandalize and terrorize in the name of freedom, all the while doing their best to trample the very real freedoms that make their impotent tantrums possible.

I love America. I love it despite its large and very real flaws, despite its social problems, societal ills, and historic mistakes. I love it despite the ugliness and ignorance sometimes demonstrated by its citizens, and I love it despite its sometimes brutal treatment of its own people. Loving your country doesn't mean ignoring its bad qualities -- but it does mean appreciating and understanding its good ones.

I speak a bit flippantly here, but I hold no hatred for any other nation or its citizens. I also hold no ill will towards those of my fellow citizens who seem to hate and despise the nation that witnessed their births. But I cannot and will not tolerate the endless litany of evils --some justified, but most unfounded -- attributed to this nation without standing up and defending it. We as Americans are not perfect, but we are a sincere and usually honorable people, and we are better than we are usually portrayed. We do not deserve your hatred, and we do not seek your harm.

I love America. I hope you do, too.

Phil
4 December, 2000