Saturday, July 10, 2004
ANTI-BUSH BOOKS
Anyways the other day I had a little time on my hands so I wondered into a big bookshop in Berlin. Lacking any other serious interests I lounged over to the politics shelves. It was a scene truly worthy of a parody. Three full shelves of George Bush's not always attractive visage glancing back at me. The titles? Every conceivable variation of "Bush lies", "America is evil", "Bush is corrupt", "USA: rogue state", "George Bush eats babies", well you get my drift. I honestly started wondering, whether there really is a market for so much of this Moore-Chomskyite-stuff. I mean a handful of anti-Bush and anti-America books, I can get that, I've even read some of them, even though they haven't made much of an impression on me, have they. But such an endless avalanche of such works? It boggles the mind. There was a single pro-American book to be found, Robert Kagan's updated "Power and Weakness". You really had to be there to get the whole image and atmosphere; I just stood there suppressing a giggle. Anti-Bush/anti-Americanism today occupies a place in the German book buyers' mind that religion used to in medieval times. This is how I imagine the displays of party-line books looked in the former Communist East. Of course, don't forget, it is America under Bush and post-9/11 that is a country of "hidden censorship" in which only one opinion is permitted. Good to see that's not the case in Germany, errm, as David the Medienkritiker reminds us.
Anyways the other day I had a little time on my hands so I wondered into a big bookshop in Berlin. Lacking any other serious interests I lounged over to the politics shelves. It was a scene truly worthy of a parody. Three full shelves of George Bush's not always attractive visage glancing back at me. The titles? Every conceivable variation of "Bush lies", "America is evil", "Bush is corrupt", "USA: rogue state", "George Bush eats babies", well you get my drift. I honestly started wondering, whether there really is a market for so much of this Moore-Chomskyite-stuff. I mean a handful of anti-Bush and anti-America books, I can get that, I've even read some of them, even though they haven't made much of an impression on me, have they. But such an endless avalanche of such works? It boggles the mind. There was a single pro-American book to be found, Robert Kagan's updated "Power and Weakness". You really had to be there to get the whole image and atmosphere; I just stood there suppressing a giggle. Anti-Bush/anti-Americanism today occupies a place in the German book buyers' mind that religion used to in medieval times. This is how I imagine the displays of party-line books looked in the former Communist East. Of course, don't forget, it is America under Bush and post-9/11 that is a country of "hidden censorship" in which only one opinion is permitted. Good to see that's not the case in Germany, errm, as David the Medienkritiker reminds us.
