UK novelist Margaret Drabble writes: I loathe America, and what it has done to the rest of the world

Daily Telegraph ^ | 08/05/2003 | Margaret Drabble

[risk]

I loathe America, and what it has done to the rest of the world By Margaret Drabble (Filed: 08/05/2003)

I knew that the wave of anti-Americanism that would swell up after the Iraq war would make me feel ill. And it has. It has made me much, much more ill than I had expected.

My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me, like a disease. It rises up in my throat like acid reflux, that fashionable American sickness. I now loathe the United States and what it has done to Iraq and the rest of the helpless world.

I can hardly bear to see the faces of Bush and Rumsfeld, or to watch their posturing body language, or to hear their self-satisfied and incoherent platitudes. The liberal press here has done its best to make them appear ridiculous, but these two men are not funny.

I was tipped into uncontainable rage by a report on Channel 4 News about "friendly fire", which included footage of what must have been one of the most horrific bombardments ever filmed. But what struck home hardest was the subsequent image, of a row of American warplanes, with grinning cartoon faces painted on their noses. Cartoon faces, with big sharp teeth.

It is grotesque. It is hideous. This great and powerful nation bombs foreign cities and the people in those cities from Disneyland cartoon planes out of comic strips. This is simply not possible. And yet, there they were.

Others have written eloquently about the euphemistic and affectionate names that the Americans give to their weapons of mass destruction: Big Boy, Little Boy, Daisy Cutter, and so forth.

We are accustomed to these sobriquets; to phrases such as "collateral damage" and "friendly fire" and "pre-emptive strikes". We have almost ceased to notice when suicide bombers are described as "cowards". The abuse of language is part of warfare. Long ago, Voltaire told us that we invent words to conceal truths. More recently, Orwell pointed out to us the dangers of Newspeak.

But there was something about those playfully grinning warplane faces that went beyond deception and distortion into the land of madness. A nation that can allow those faces to be painted as an image on its national aeroplanes has regressed into unimaginable irresponsibility. A nation that can paint those faces on death machines must be insane.

There, I have said it. I have tried to control my anti-Americanism, remembering the many Americans that I know and respect, but I can't keep it down any longer. I detest Disneyfication, I detest Coca-Cola, I detest burgers, I detest sentimental and violent Hollywood movies that tell lies about history.

I detest American imperialism, American infantilism, and American triumphalism about victories it didn't even win.

On April 29, 2000, I switched on CNN in my hotel room and, by chance, saw an item designed to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam war. The camera showed us a street scene in which a shabby elderly Vietnamese man was seen speaking English and bartering in dollars in a city that I took to be Ho Chi Minh City, still familiarly known in America by its old French colonial name of Saigon.

"The language of Shakespeare," the commentator intoned, "has conquered Vietnam." I did not note down the dialogue, though I can vouch for that sentence about the language of Shakespeare. But the word "dollar" was certainly repeated several times, and the implications of what the camera showed were clear enough.

The elderly Vietnamese man was impoverished, and he wanted hard currency. The Vietnamese had won the war, but had lost the peace.

Just leave Shakespeare and Shakespeare's homeland out of this squalid bit of revisionism, I thought at the time. Little did I then think that now, three years on, Shakespeare's country would have been dragged by our leader into this illegal, unjustifiable, aggressive war. We are all contaminated by it. Not in my name, I want to keep repeating, though I don't suppose anybody will listen.

America uses the word "democracy" as its battle cry, and its nervous soldiers gun down Iraqi civilians when they try to hold street demonstrations to protest against the invasion of their country. So much for democracy. (At least the British Army is better trained.)

America is one of the few countries in the world that executes minors. Well, it doesn't really execute them - it just keeps them in jail for years and years until they are old enough to execute, and then it executes them. It administers drugs to mentally disturbed prisoners on Death Row until they are back in their right mind, and then it executes them, too.

They call this justice and the rule of law. America is holding more than 600 people in detention in Guantánamo Bay, indefinitely, and it may well hold them there for ever. Guantánamo Bay has become the Bastille of America. They call this serving the cause of democracy and freedom.

I keep writing to Jack Straw about the so-called "illegal combatants", including minors, who are detained there without charge or trial or access to lawyers, and I shall go on writing to him and his successors until something happens. This one-way correspondence may last my lifetime. I suppose the minors won't be minors for long, although the youngest of them is only 13, so in time I shall have to drop that part of my objection, but I shall continue to protest.

A great democratic nation cannot behave in this manner. But it does. I keep remembering those words from Nineteen Eighty-Four, on the dynamics of history at the end of history, when O'Brien tells Winston: "Always there will be the intoxication of power… Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever."

We have seen enough boots in the past few months to last us a lifetime. Iraqi boots, American boots, British boots. Enough of boots.

I hate feeling this hatred. I have to keep reminding myself that if Bush hadn't been (so narrowly) elected, we wouldn't be here, and none of this would have happened. There is another America. Long live the other America, and may this one pass away soon.

[risk]

Intolerance shows up in the oddest places these days, such as in the bewildered writing of a feminist author who stops to tell us just how much she hates us. Is there a prediction of doom for the west in her attacks? Margaret Drabble stops short of telling us how she'll act on her wrath, but one can imagine U.N. shock troops bursting in our living rooms and hauling us off to international tribunals backed by gas chambers and concentration camps. She's that angry!

I was first without words when I read this article, which set me to worrying about the future of our civilization. The anti-war protesters here in California over the past months have also caused me to ask the question what next? If we defend ourselves after 9/11, we're the attackers. If we withdraw from the world, we're negligent. If we abandon Israel or even the imprisoned and tortured Iraqis, we'd have blood on our hands anyway.

My coworkers have expressed similar reactions to Drabble's. I can only come to the conclusion that we are divided, we're being attacked from within, and our resolve is sure to be tested further in the future. This problem is not going away!

Before I consider just a few of the specifics of this article, let me introduce the author, whom I've just taken a few moments to research using Google.

Art and Culture Network biography says of Margaret Drabble, "Fans devour her hyper-accurate descriptions of the furniture, values..." Author of For Queen and Country, former actress with the Royal Shakespeare Company, Drabble is a dreary feminist writer who has "focussed on female protagonists," according to her Barnes & Noble biography. The BN bio quotes The Nation on Drabble's The Gates of Ivory novel in which she attempts to carry Conrad's criticisms of western man beyond Apocalypse Now and into the present.

What I love about this novel is what I love about the best of Drabble's works -- it's rich and complex and allusive and textured and intertextual and takes on the big questions: life and art, representation and responsibility, the possibility of political action, the question of human nature.

Setting aside the issue of how big Drabble's questions are, we can take a hint at her willingness to equivocate in BN's suggestion that she is a post-structuralist. According to Roger Bowen,

Margaret Drabble's The Gates of Ivory embraces the globe and confronts the realities and deceptions of global culture, filtering the textures of contemporary life in England from the mid- to the late 1980s, as well as the stories that knitted England and the West to the politics of Southeast Asia.

So it's pretty easy to see why Drabble could come to the conclusion that America was evil, if she's unclear as to what had first involved the Allies in southeast asia. Her comments about globalism imply her alignment with the anarchists who used violence in their protests in Seattle and Genoa against the World Trade Organization.

What about the opinions Drabble has thrust at us? "My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable." Good so far, as she gets right to the point. But besides not liking traditional American men like GW and Rumsfeld, why is she angry? She's upset about the friendly fire incidents, for one. But after skipping past them (even though they were among the "most horrific bombardments ever filmed"), she starts sounding just like bin Laden's letters when she attacks Americans for using atomic weapons in WWII. Nuclear weapons do not hold her attention for long, though. But she continues to echo bin Laden's complaints about America. "A nation that can paint those faces on death machines must be insane." (Then Britain was insane when it defended her family during WWII with garishly painted Spitfires, but that's another story.)

She moves back to southeast asia and invokes the capitalist trends in Cambodia with trepidation, saying "the Vietnamese had won the war, but had lost the peace." Who won the war again? Whose peace is it? Ask the thousands of boat people who escaped the collapse after America left.

Drabble flits back to Iraq. "America uses the word 'democracy' as its battle cry, and its nervous soldiers gun down Iraqi civilians when they try to hold street demonstrations to protest against the invasion of their country," she complains. The realities of military conflict are obviously not within her realm of experience, making us wonder if her parents failed to inform her about the horrors of the second world war.

Bringing us back to America, Drabble complains about the Guantamamo detentions and complains that neither America nor Britain are following international law. She is willing to decry our treatment of terrorists, but not the mayhem and destruction they have, and would have continued to cause were it not for our internment of them.

Despite the revelations of Nazi links to Ba'athism and Stalinist tactics in Saddam's prisons, Drabble invokes Orwell against the Allies saying, "A great democratic nation cannot behave in this manner." She goes on to say:

We have seen enough boots in the past few months to last us a lifetime. Iraqi boots, American boots, British boots. Enough of boots.

I hate feeling this hatred. I have to keep reminding myself that if Bush hadn't been (so narrowly) elected, we wouldn't be here, and none of this would have happened. There is another America. Long live the other America, and may this one pass away soon.

If this America, the one that is standing against international terrorism, rogue states with weapons of mass destruction, and communist and formerly communist states with ambitions far beyond their own borders, these Allies which inlcude Japan, Spain, a handfull of eastern European nations, and Drabble's Britain could well pass away soon. Since the Allies do not plan to withdraw their agreement to defend western civilization, then what would bring us down? Would it be a simultaneous VX nerve gas attack in 20 cities? Would it be the destruction of four west coast metropolises by North Korean nuclear weapons in a matter of an hour? Would it be the infiltration of Islamic jihad in all of the countries named above?

No, our destruction could come from good citizens failing to recognize the Allied role in history, failing to recognize the genius of the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence. A failure to recognize the universality of the American Revolution. Our destruction could well come from people like Drabble inciting us to self hatred. We can stand against everything but those from among ourselves who wish to rewrite history and identify us as the initiators of the second world war, of the killing fields in Cambodia, and of spawning a second Holocaust against the third world in our war on terrorism.

[daddypatriot]

Enough of Drabble's dribble. Why doesn't someone take her to Iraq to see the torture chambers, the foodstuffs hidden away from Iraqi children and the graves of Hussein's victims? Drabble's complaints are part envy and part stupidity.

[Miss Marple]

You have written an excellent essay in answer, and I think you are quite correct. We have for too long allowed the media and the universities to control the discussion and claim the moral high ground.

I am encouraged that we have in this administration people who do not apologize for the United States, but proudly hold our nation's ideals high. We also must do the same. We cannot let those within our own borders who wish us harm continue to poison the national culture and political climate.

[Gorzaloon]

I knew that the wave of anti-Americanism that would swell up after the Iraq war would make me feel ill. And it has. It has made me much, much more ill than I had expected.

Ill enough to cut your throat?

C'Mon..You can do it.

It won't hurt.

[tkathy]

Now the entire world is a victim? Isn't the U.S. the new kid on the block, so to speak? The politics of victimhood won't stop until the entire universe can somehow be made a victim of either Jews, white people, or the U.S.

[ckilmer]

risk

drabble is not a bad looking woman. but its clear from the turn of her jaw and the clarity of her sentences that no man who was not a world beater would feel much like a man in her presence. her feelings of hatred are the closest she'll ever come to the feeling of love.

[Cvengr]

Little did I then think that now, three years on, Shakespeare's country would have been dragged by our leader into this illegal, unjustifiable, aggressive war.

"unjustifiable!? ...Perhaps, but then again considering the Middle East rate of terrorist incidents has dropped to a record low since 1966, with the beginning of this "illegal, unjustifiable, aggressive war, ....maybe, just maybe there is something a bit more fundamental which the war promotes. Go figure.

Good post, interesting read.

I also noted the hypocrisy of her comments regarding Vietnam. The communists and socialists got what they wanted, they've had it for 30 years, and they still refuse to publicly own up to the consequences of their beliefs in action.

[Cvengr]

I wonder if Drabble's parents refused to get her a 'Minnie Mouse' backpack when she was a toddler and the resentment brewed far too long.

Now she is simply envious and jealous of another American icon:

[aristeides]

This was published in the Telegraph?

If she hates Americans for still calling it "Saigon," and not "Ho Chi Minh City," she's going to hate us no matter what we do.

[dennisw]

F her. I value the warriors and defenders of America and UK. Novelists/authors are not anything special. Anyone can get published these days and they are no more well versed on politics and life than are you and I. Writers used to be valued as philosophers when getting published was difficult due to the economics. No longer

[chainsaw]

Does she also hate the British people? There were also British troops in Iraq.
Would she rather see children ages 10-14 and younger in prison because they would not participate in a children's army?
Would she rather see humans having their tongues cut out in the town square and left there to bleed to death?
Would she be able to say anything against Saddam regime, if she lived there under Saddam hussein, and be able to write her nifty novels with impunity? I think not. She is a stupid dribble brain.

[Sam Cree]

An essentially silly person, I think.

I suppose she wishes we could all be like the socialist states. After all, the several hundred millions of humanity executed by them last century were executed for the finest of causes, for social justice. How inspiring and how beautiful she must think that is.

I take it back, she is not silly, she is a horror.

[angkor]

Ho Chi Minh City, still familiarly known in America by its old French colonial name of Saigon.

Wrong, wrong again, and even more wrong.

The Vietnamese themselves still call downtown Ho Chi Minh City "Saigon," though on the whole its more correct to call the entire city "Saigon," since that has been its name since at least 1650 to 1975.

The colonialism Drabble refers to is actually more amply illustrated by the name "Ho Chi Minh City" as it shows the colonialization of the South by Hanoi (and indeed Hanoi runs Southern Vietnam exactly as it would a colonialized country).

Furthermore, "Saigon" is not a "French colonial" name, it is the original Khmer (Cambodian) name for the area, which was "Woods of Kapok Trees", or Sai Con (one of several various spellings).

That Drabble can be thrice wrong in merely a single sentence fragment shows that her head is screwed-on backwards.

[G.Mason]

"We cannot let those within our own borders who wish us harm continue to poison the national culture and political climate."

We can and we will.

You see....there simply aren't enough "boots".

But wait....we can protect ourselves by employing a little known secret.

It's called reason.

Post-structuralism?

Not today, thank you.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

At last Clinton has a spokeswoman for his views.

[exnavy]

Margaret should end her own misery by suicide.

[nypokerface]

Her disease isn't anti-Americanism, it's liberalism which I guess is the same thing.

[libertylover]

Very good analysis, risk.

[Dick Bachert]

Suggest the Brits send this moron off to Iraq to live if the mullahs get their way and put a radical islamic system in place. Tell her to be sure to take her burka!

[Alouette]

A face like hers is just crying out for a burqa.

[VadeRetro]

I have to keep reminding myself that if Bush hadn't been (so narrowly) elected, we wouldn't be here, and none of this would have happened.

I try not to forget that, too. I can't imagine a vigorous post-McGovern Democratic administration.

[Bombard]

WHO REALLY CARES, A LOT OF HOT AIR IS GENERATED EVERY DAY AND NO ONE CARES. THIS IS JUST MORE OR THE SAME.

[Former Proud Canadian]

The torture chambers don't matter to these folks. Don't confuse them with reality.

[Bismark]

drabble is not a bad looking woman

Don't judge her by this picture, this makes her look like she's in her 30's and not in her 60's as her 1939 birthdate would imply.

[Dudoight]

Risk, brilliant response to Ms. Drabble's skewed whine. If you are not a professional writer, you should be.

[Lockbox]

Nice to hear from the naive that lives under the umbrella of American protection. Maybe Margaret Drabble
should live on the other side for a while, oh that’s right you can never come back from the dark side.

[Stentor]

An essentially silly person, I think.

Her neurosis has found a way of expressing its existence. In another time she would have been considered a common scold.

[lilmsdangrus]

Exactly!!! Great comment, dennis. and I can only add, Drabble=dribble, drivel=YUK

[veronica]

What a pathetic, pathetic woman. Seething with hatred, spewing bile. I must say it amuses me when the loony America haters bare their claws like this, it's fun to know that we get under their skin to this degree. :))

[quebecois]

A couple of points about this woman and her article:

1) She is lying in claiming that her hatred of america is something recent. Its obvious to me that she has always hated america. What is different now is that america really doesn't care what people like her think. Thats what is really stuck in her craw.

2) As for her disgust for the teeth painted on the planes...she obviously knows little of history and warfare. Various forms of face painting/war paint are as old as mankind. The Scots did it...the Sioux did it....the Flying Tigers did it (to their planes). This isn't some sort of hideous american invention.

3) What is it about Coca Cola that so inflames the passion of euroweenies? (it seems that Coke, Disneyworld, and burgers really really offend them)

[risk]

Furthermore, "Saigon" is not a "French colonial" name, it is the original Khmer (Cambodian) name for the area, which was "Woods of Kapok Trees", or Sai Con (one of several various spellings).

Interesting! This brings to mind the symbolism of the flag of Free Vietnam: the stripes stand for North, Central, and South Vietnam as united in a national community. Soon may it wave over the three regions for which it stands.

[IronJack]

Another disgruntled Lefty feigning high dudgeon at America's success, but hiding her pettiness behind expansive words and noble sentiments. If, as Voltaire said, we invent words to hide ideas, then this polemic is a prime example. Never have so many words been summoned to expand such a petulant thesis.

[CathyRyan]

The results of removing estrogen replacement therapy from the market?

[quebecois]

And one more thing that I almost forgot:

"America is one of the few countries in the world that executes minors"

Sorry, honey...there are many nations in the world that execute minors...its just that the US gives them a fair trial first.

[risk]

Risk, brilliant response to Ms. Drabble's skewed whine. If you are not a professional writer, you should be.

Thank you, though I have much to improve. I work with software in the high tech world, but I definitely would like to write as well. I think the dynamic environment FR provides us for rapid feedback is good for teaching me how to communicate better.

[Malesherbes]

Per Amazon, Drabble's great opus, "Gates of Ivory," is not now in stock, but can be bought used for $ 1.24. Maybe her acid reflux has caused writer's block.

[ZULU]

That;s Dribble, not Drabble. Like most feminazis, she hates western civilization because it is the product of western man. Maybe she should look at Islam.

[mollynme]

Don't judge her by this picture, this makes her look like she's in her 30's and not in her 60's as her 1939 birthdate would imply.
You are right. Here is a more recent picture.

[risk]

I try not to forget that, too. I can't imagine a vigorous post-McGovern Democratic administration.

A couple of things come to mind at reading Drabble's wish for a Gore election in 2000.

First, she intentionally failed to mention the connection between 9/11 and our attack on the most insidious pan-Arab nationalist country, Iraq. Wahabi fanatics attacked us because we stand in their way of uniting the whole Arab world in crushing Israel. Iraq's NBC (nuclear/chemical/biological) warfare ambitions made it more than just an ideological threat, as Saudi Arabia is. Therefore, unelecting President Bush is not going to put the genie of terrorism back in the bottle, nor would it assuage our righteous passion for avenging and crushing those who would incinerate our citizens on a much larger scale than was the case in 2001.

Second, most of us agree that we couldn't ask for a more effective Commandier-in-Chief than President Bush during this troubling time for the Allies. President Clinton and then candidate Gore were aware of the threat, as much as President Bush was on 9/10/2001. But how they acted on it would have been dramatically different. When Drabble is an old woman, living off the fruits of long and satisfying writing career, she'll have the opportunity to realize that her safety was bought by Australian, Polish, Czech, American, and British troops in 2003 when we took the war on the Axis of Evil up a notch.

Even former leftists like Christopher Hitchens are saying things like "The important thing is this: Is a candidate completely serious about prosecuting the war on theocratic terrorism to the fullest extent? Only Bush is."

Drabble ignores the challenge of 9/11 so it shouldn't be a surprise that she wants a 9/10 president. She's an appeaser with amnesia. But there are those of us Americans and Brits who'll never forget.

[VaBthang4]

Lemme guess....Bitter, Ugly, Pasty-white, under-sexed, over-inflated western women.

Did anybody honestly think she was gonna be a looker?

[Paleo Conservative]

MEGA BARF ALERT!

This thread has already been posted, and her photo is really nauseating.

[catpuppy]

Margaret needs to put down the crayon and have mommy wash out that hate filled mouth with soap.

[the_doc]

My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me, like a disease. It rises up in my throat like acid reflux, that fashionable American sickness. I now loathe the United States and what it has done to Iraq and the rest of the helpless world.

As I physician, I am quite sure she is correct in her self-diagnosis.

[cousair]

Do we all really care what Ms. Drabble thinks?? Her liberal sickness has gone too far to treat....and maybe from the sounds of her article, a nice way out would be a simple slit to the throat from where comes her words!! Too bad Drabble, you are at the end of a long line of whiners. Bush has boxed all of you in at both ends and continues to win every battle. YOU HATE HIM BECAUSE MOST OF America trusts him. He is a leader that history will write about for decades.

[Prodigal Son]

Already posted a couple of times.

Not complaining. This lefty's rant needs counter rant. Just tying all the comments together:

I loathe America, and what it has done to the rest of the world.

I loathe America, and what it has done to the rest of the world [triple bagger barf]

[Alissa]

My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me, like a disease. It rises up in my throat like acid reflux, that fashionable American sickness.....

I can hardly bear to see the faces of Bush and Rumsfeld, or to watch their posturing body language, or to hear their self-satisfied and incoherent platitudes.

This is just about the same reaction I have to the Clintons and rest of their gang.

[freedumb2003]

Excellent response to an enlightening post.

I suspect you will be giving our good buddy MadIvan a run for his money for items from across the pond.

[angkor]

the symbolism of the flag of Free Vietnam

Thanks for the link.

My wife and just returned from Eden Center, the "Little Saigon" of Northern Virginia.

Flying in the parking lot were at least 20 Free Vietnam flags, side-by-side with an equal number of American flags.

It is one of the most patriotic places in America.

[Publius6961]

UK novelist Margaret Drabble writes: I loathe America, and what it has done to the rest of the world

Huh??
Far as I can tell, absolutely nothing.

What's a Margaret Drabble?

Or is this another example of "stealth" publicity?
A "progressive's" method of publicizing an otherwise useless piece of crap in FR under the guise of criticizing it?

[philetus]

drabble is not a bad looking woman? Shirley, you jest.