The Other Side.

It's traditional, I believe, for BBC journalists from time to time to write saccharine little tributes to the country they have insulted so solidly for several happy years. Still, this from Rob Watson (helpfully offered by Marc of USS Neverdock fame) is unusually friendly, and not wholly empty. There's the usual post-modernist dash, designed to express the writer's a) lack of bias or b) humility when faced by grand issues, but some things he says are nearly true.

However, I can't help but feel that though he makes a good point about US nationalism not being of the dangerous kind (to be honest it's depressing that people here need to be told about this), his expression lays the US open to charges of mindlessness, which the BBC in other contexts exploits fully.

'It is not the unhealthy nationalism of "our country is better than your country", after all most Americans have never stepped outside the place, but rather an expression of "life here is good, whoopee".'

'Life is good, whoopee' is a short step from Voltaire's Pangloss, but a long way from the grit which underlies the US' real character- as demonstrated by their outstanding response to 9/11. I also notice the sideswipe made at insular Americans, yet do BBC correspondents ever consider that many a European has never stepped outside his/her own country (eg.Slovakia, Poland, probably France too) above a couple of times at best?

This, however, is better:

'As a European, what I found most refreshing here was the remarkable lack of envy in American society.

When Americans see someone doing well, they do not grumble about it being all right for some, instead they say, one day that could be me.'

If someone thinks I should here be pointing out the BBC's pro-US, anti-Europe bias, I would say that envy is what I would call a natural human condition. The US is an exception to this and Watson rightly points it out. That's not disparaging Europe but noticing what's there, what's notable.

Oh, but last among the post-modern touches I'll note is this example:

'It may all go back to Thomas Jefferson's claim in the Declaration of Independence in 1776 that the pursuit of happiness is among life's unalienable rights.

Whether it is or not, I have no idea, but certainly most of the Americans I know are in hot pursuit of the happiness thing.'

Now did we really need that bit about Watson's non-plussed reception of the principle of the pursuit of happiness? Do we really care what he thinks about it? Would we be happy to hear if Watson said 'I don't know what I think about the right to freedom from torture'. If he'd read his dystopian North American novelists as BBC US correspondents are supposed to have, he'd have recalled what Margaret Attwood wrote in the Handmaids Tale (notable for its depiction of a society succumbing to very European-like birth rates) about there being two kinds of freedom: freedom from and freedom to. The US chose the latter and that's as rational a thing to do as to choose the former, yet not to BBC/European minds.

I think, as the old Crusader said to Indiana Jones at the end of the trilogy, the US has 'chosen wisely', and, by observing at least some of the consequences of that choice made by the Founders of the USA, Watson is halfway to knowing it.