Book Review: "100 Ways America is Screwing Up the World" by John Tirman (2006)
This is the perfect gift for anyone who really wishes that they didn't have to celebrate Christmas in the first place because it's nothing more than an imperialist, capitalist ritual designed to commemorate religion, which, as we all know, is a major cause of all that's wrong in the world.
John Tirman, executive director the Center for International Studies at MIT (and, it should be said, academic home of Noam since 1955), steals an idea from Bernard Goldberg, author of 2005's classic "100 People Who Are Screwing Up America" and tells us why being an American really burns his ass. You can tell by the grim, constipated photo on the back cover that this guy has the weight of the world on his shoulders.
Here are some of the entries offered by Tirman:
#2 Television
#5 Market Mantra: The Tragic Failure of Neoliberalism
#6 Blood for Oil
#15 The American Dream
#40 Billary
#50 Democratization
#53 The Imperialism of Knowledge
#65 The New York Times (and the Washington Post)
#70 The Deadly Reach of Patio Furniture
#85 Las Vegas
#89 "24/7": Abuses of the Work Ethic
I don't know how this guy maintains his sanity having to wake up every day in the US of A, but when you're getting paid into the hundreds of thousands to make a living by hating your country - notwithstanding the fact that millions of parents nation-wide are taking out second mortgages on their homes to send their kids to sit in front of Tirman in Cambridge lecture halls to hear him pontificate - life can't be all bad, can it?
This book is full of omissions, rose-coloured observations and rhetorical flourishes that even conservative satirists couldn't come up with if they were trying to parody the far Left. For instance, in entry #1, "Altering the Earth's Climate", he says (on the first page of the book, no less), "(W)ith climate change, the United States has managed almost single-handedly to be the cause, the obstacle to remedial action, a chronic ignoramus, and an aggressive denier of its monumental culpability". Not a word about, oh, say, China or India to be found in the entire chapter. Then, in entry #28 on SUVs, he suggests that we change the acronym from Sports Utility Vehicles to "Socioecologically Uncool Vehicles".
("Socioecologically", huh? I ought to head down to the local university, sit in on an arts class, throw that one out and see using such a big, concious, enlightened word will help me get the female TA with two lip piercings and not a stitch of makeup over there to go out for a drink after. You know, just to see.)
Here's another good one. In entry #19 on genocide, he says, "(A)fter the Battle of Wounded Knee in South Dakota in 1890, the game was up for the victims, and they gradually were forced into concentration camps - excuse me, "reservations" - and descended into poverty, alcoholism and despair". Not to make light of the issues facing Aboriginal communities, but concentration camps? I think there are a few Holocaust survivors that may have a little something to say about that, Dr. Tirman.
Then, in a chapter about Cuba, (#54), he says that Castro doesn't seem to be "personally corrupt". Oh, really? He blames McDonald's and KFC for people who litter (#62). He says that the "United Nations can be and is a place of relationship building, problem solving and cooperation like not other" (#63) - protestations of the odd Rwandan Tutsi aside, of course. Tirnan also blames the NRA for the militias in Iraq (#66), and takes Disney (#84) to task for promoting "consumer fetishism, racism, paternalism, and adoration of aristocracy" in their childrens' films (although he does begrudgingly acknowledge a lack of what he calls "Christian symbolism or proselytizing") before lamenting the "slow but certain decline of the siesta" worldwide (#89).
I could go on, but I think you get my point.
Now, to be fair, there are a few points that Tirman makes which I agree with, particular when it comes to Paris Hilton (#90), New Age spirituality (#73) and gangsta rap (#56). He also comes up with ten things that America is good for, which I'm sure for him was a stretch (fairness, creativity and human rights among them, which I thought American violated till kingdom come according to Tirman after reading his first 100 diatribes).
Because I'm a fair and balanced guy who likes to give the other side a due hearing, this is going to sit proudly on my bookshelf beside other fairytales like the Marx-Engels Reader and Hugo Chavez' favourite Chomsky tome, "Hegemony or Survival", given to me as a gift a few years' back.
Critical thinking, indeed.
Overall rating: 6.5/10, just for kicks.
posted by Road Hammer @ 9:28 AM
3 comments
3 Comments:
In #89, does he argue that America is screwing up the world because its people work too hard?
Yup.
He says work is generally good, but laments that there's been a sad decline in F'ng the D the world over, which he attributes to that slavedriving Uncle Sam.
Here's an excerpt:
"Try to find a European in August (and even in July) or around the Christmas holidays and you're out of luck. No one is in before nine. But gradually even this graceful tradition is being eroded by the American pressure to keep up. The saddest sign of this is the slow but certain decline of the siesta.
Economic growth in Spain has meant that the once-siesta proud country is giving up the tradition. Too many connections to the global economy, too much pressure for productivity, too many homes now far from business districts. One report describes 'beauty parlours that cater to the sleep-deprived. Silvia Escribano, the owner of a shop called Beauty Boulevard, lets clients catch some Zs in one of the back rooms after a haircut or a back rub. 'It's painful to see them try to stay awake', she says.
The same has come to Mexico, where late-night hours at work for public employees, driven by long siestas, are now not permitted. Two-hour lunches in China are disappearing, too.
Whether or not these changes from a more sensible lifestyle are driven by American workaholic habits, it is notable that workweeks increasingly conform to US standards. Shorter lunches, fewer lunchtimes at home, working weekends and holidays, and never really being away from the office."
Unless Spain has done a 180 in the last 4 months, the siesta is alive and well. Those laze-asses don't open their restaurants before 12:00 and shut down from like 4:00 to 11:00.
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