11/01/2004|||109930288568606919||||||

PERCEPTION PROBLEMS

The Times is right to worry about foreign coverage of the election campaign and US politics in general:

"The chiaroscuro caricatures of America drawn during a close and compelling election campaign suggest that the most pressing problem after the votes are cast will not be the litigious lawyers (are there any other kind?) but the lingering external preconceptions about the US that have hardly been given more colour and depth over the past few months. For the apparent sake of clarity, and to reinforce one’s own smug sense of moral superiority, Americans are, in general, portrayed as religious rednecks who somehow balance crass consumerism with a fundamentalist spirituality that is only or a tree or two better than rock worship. For all the wealth of a country supposedly in thrall to mass materialism, dialectical materialism is yet to be sold on hypermarket shelves and God still mans the checkout.

"That the world outside is destined to be disappointed by John Kerry, if he were to win, is far more certain than the outcome of the election itself. Not because Mr Kerry is incompetent, but because he is not what Europeans want him to be. And for all the mocking of George W. Bush, a second term would at least be informed by a recognition that some mistakes were made and economic principles violated. The serious external problem for both candidates is the single-axis sensibility that leads countries to define themselves as being 'not America'.

"... Unless there is more effort to comprehend the US, and presidential campaigns bring coverage but not necessarily enlightenment, the frustration outside will grow exponentially. And to presume that America is 'polarised', as much coverage suggests, and that one of those poles is firmly planted in the values of neo-socialist liberal rationalism, or however else the dominant ideology of Europe is defined, is to believe that the most telling difference between Athens, Greece, and Athens, Georgia, is topographical.

|||Clive|||http://clivedavis.blogspot.com/2004/11/perception-problems-times-is-right-to.html|||11/01/2004 09:43:00 am|||||||||

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