ThruthLeft

Fear and Loathing in Brussels (2/21/05)

The Bush propaganda machinery and the commercial news media are quickly fusing into one horrendous worldwide mind control mechanism and Hunter Thompson felt he had to go. Damn.

Thompson in his prime was brilliant at cutting through pretense, back in the days before spinning the news spun out of control. He was among the first to expose the idiocy of the commercial news media, which didn't need much much coaxing from Nixon in 1972 to demolish "the most decent man in the Senate," as one of his Republican colleagues called George McGovern. When McGovern was calling the Nixon administration the most corrupt in American history Thompson was one of the few journalists still listening. The rest were already writing their stories from the perspective of the victor, more concerned about putting themselves on what they thought was the right side of history than examining and exposing Nixon, Agnew and their felonies. McGovern was right, of course, but too late to secure any benefit for his prescience. He will be remembered as the last candidate for the presidency who was open with the press, and he surely paid the price with the horrendous coverage he received.

Not unlike the intensely imaginative and creative monologuist Spalding Gray, Thompson lost track of his place in the world and decided to leave it.

We need him now. Almost all of Europe is screaming Ne Bush Pas! and can't be heard on this side of the Atlantic. Even with the carefully crafted images and utterly sanitized appearances just as the White House wants them, and the U.S. news media pimping Bush and his newfound sincerity in courting Europe, the truth just keeps oozing out. Bush is almost universally reviled in Europe and seen as the single greatest threat to world peace and without a few contrarians in the press corps you'll never hear about it.

This is starkly clear in a new survey from the German Marshall Fund comparing European and American perspectives on foreign policy, as long as you ignore the press release and go right to the data.

Fully 88% of the French and German public disapproves of Bush's handling of U.S. foreign policy, and that is two points worse than it was last June. Only 11% of French and Germans approve of Bush's foreign policy. And fully half of the people of both countries expect US/European relations to get worse rather than better. Bush's belligerent and bellicose stand is intended for domestic consumption and apparently "yee hah" is a good enough foreign policy for the majority of Americans. The poll shows that 80% of Americans believe that it is desirable that the U.S. exerts strong leadership in world affairs. The Germans are pretty sure that's wrong -- 57% find strong U.S. leadership not desirable versus only 40% who think that it is -- while the French are quite sure that it is wrong, with 65% of them in opposition to strong U.S. leadership with only 29% in favor.

And fully 1% of Americans surveyed spontaneously volunteered -- it was not among the choices -- that they had "never heard" of the United Nations. If we give a pass to the quarter of the population that is under 18 and just take adults that 1% figure means about 738,796 Americans have never heard of the UN, which is a larger number than the population of our five smallest states.

Fear and loathing are clearly winning these days. Ignorance doesn't just rule, it rules with pride. Bush will return to the U.S. and his trip will be -- surprise -- heralded as a great success by the ever-expanding coiterie of right wing zealots who get paid to tell us what to think. Ask yourself for a moment if you ever saw Hunter Thompson on television, then ask yourself why not. If we had a free marketplace of ideas those of us who would have paid to hear him talk would have had had the chance, and his trenchant and biting comments would be popular. If he could have made a living talking, there is every reason to conjecture that he'd still be alive.

-- David Lytel, Washington, DC

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