30 July, 2004

Normalization

For everyone who may have noticed how crazy the blog was yesterday: I sincerly, from the bottom of my heart, apologize for the fact that the same post was, well, posted like some seven times. See, as the story goes, everytime I tried to post, the page "cannot find page" would show up, leading me to think that the post had not posted to the site, and after trying again and again I finally gave up and emailed the post to myself, thinking that I would have to put it up the following day. Lo and behold, when I checked the blog today, I saw that the post had actually made it to the site, multiple times. I have since cleaned everything up, and now the whole site is once again in efficient order.

Anyway, I am here in Chiclayo, a city only an hour away from Chepén, and am sitting around chatting on the internet, tryin to waste time till my bus leaves for Lima. Everyone I talked to gave me the impression that Chiclayo was basically Chepén (boring and ugly) only bigger. Steve especially lead me to think this way, as he had mentioned that he had had to waste time here before and found it absolutely dull. Well, I should learn never to trust anyone who had problems hacking it at my university (Steve is a graduate of U of C, but almost didnt make it) cause as I have discovered, Chiclayo is a bustling city....in fact, as I am sitting here typing away at the keyboard I can hear the sounds of many people on the sidewalk and the cabbies honking their horns. Yes, Chiclayo has real taxis, not those half-assed mototaxis that are just glorified motorcycles with a two-seater on the back. I just finished eating at a nice restaurant, 3-stars by Chicago standards, and the food was good, the waitstaff friendly and the floors were very, very clean.

In other news, I have found an article by Bruce Bawer who does a review of a recent spat of books about anti-americanism. Money quote: When European journalists and intellectuals aren’t relishing the latest windy jeremiad by one of these cranks, they’re busy congratulating themselves for their appreciation of nuance. That’s their term of choice for what they have and America doesn’t. Americans, they argue, are possessed by naïve, simplistic ideals, while Europeans are more aware of real-world complexities. Actually the opposite is closer to the truth. Yes, America is built on an idea, namely liberty; but far from being divorced from reality, it is an idea that Americans have realized, developed, and successfully exported for more than two centuries. We have demonstrated the depth of our commitment as a people to this idea by waging a revolution, a civil war, two World Wars, several smaller wars, and the Cold War in its name. It is, in short, an idea that is utterly indissoluble from our own living, breathing, everyday reality. By contrast, much of Western Europe is founded on an idea of itself that is significantly, and dangerously, divorced from reality. That idea, as Robert Kagan explains so adroitly, is that the world has moved beyond the necessity of war. It is a pretty fiction, but a fiction nonetheless. And keeping it alive requires that one ignore dangerous realities—such as the growing problem of militant Islam within Europe’s own borders

He also details some of the lies that the European elites and media establishment tell the public about incessantly. A surprising one is that America is a land of poverty with a few rich people controlling everything (hmm, sounds more like the situation in over there to me). The fact is then dropped that black Americans living at the poverty line actually have a higher standard of living than your average Scandanavian-take that welfare system. Why all this lying and distortion...cause the Euro elites know that if the Europeans knew how America really is, what with our independent thinking, our dynamism and all those good things that make America great, well they would all leave Europe to come to our shores. As is revealed in the article, no one who has actually been to America hates it, and those with the highest feelings of anti-americanism, aside from the French who are just nuts anyway, are the ones who have never stepped foot on our side of the pond. Its really good reading and I recommend that everyone check it out.

Eve

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