The Take On America: How We Look From The Outside

It’s Monday, so we’ve all had plenty of time to figure out how we feel about President Obama’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly in New York and his appearance at the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh last week…all of us…and as usual, the rest of the world has been watching our reactions with interest.

Predictably, it’s the loudest voices that are getting heard…and the vile and venom from the right is coming fast and furious, just as it has ever since this President took office. No matter what he says or does, Republican politicians will tell all who want to listen that he’s wrong… then their media mouthpieces will set out to vilify him...and the people who listen to Rush Limbaugh and watch Faux News will once again work themselves into a rabid lather. It’s a repeating cycle that has our friends and neighbors from around the world shaking their heads in dismay at what we have become.

Following is a column from Saturday’s Globe and Mail, Canada’s National newspaper, about the ‘Joe Wilson’ phenomenon. It illustrates what people in other parts of the world are thinking about what we say and do…what their perceptions are…and it’s typical of what you’d find nowadays in any country in the Western world.

From the Globe and Mail, Saturday September 26, 2009 :

By Sonia Verma

West Columbia, S.C. — Roxanne Wilson answers the door in a white T-shirt, aqua-blue shorts and a pair of pearl earrings. This morning she meant to mow the lawn, take in the trash cans and wash down the aluminum siding on her sprawling, ranch-style home. Instead, her thoughts hover on her husband, whom she drove to catch his flight to Washington just a few hours ago.

To much of the country, including former president Jimmy Carter, Congressman Joe Wilson's heckling of Barack Obama during the U.S. President's address to a joint session of Congress betrayed the ugly, possibly even racist side of his Southern heritage.

To his wife, though, Mr. Wilson is just “a typical Southern gentleman.” And here in Lexington County, the heart of South Carolina's overwhelmingly white and Republican second district, he is nothing short of a hero. The Wilsons have received hundreds of letters of support and even a few personal cheques. At their church, the First Presbyterian, Mrs. Wilson was applauded.

Their home, nestled on a street of towering pines, is hushed, unfussy and full of cluttered charm. The sitting room is scattered with grandchildren's toys and Ali G DVDs. Family photos, including some posed with Republican presidents past, crowd the shelves.

“I know Joe's upset, but for good reason,” explains Mrs. Wilson, who revealed in a campaign video last week that she was shocked at first by her husband's outburst herself. “He thinks we're just going down a road that we are never going to be able to recover from. There's plenty of people who agree.”

Across this county of Baptist churches and barbecue joints, Mr. Wilson's supporters feel galvanized by their unlikely new voice in Washington and their shared opposition to big government. And almost all of them say what Mrs. Wilson does: “Race has nothing to do with this.” Yes, the Wilsons did fly a Confederate flag on their front lawn before Mr. Wilson was elected to Congress, but “that was about heritage not hate,” Mrs. Wilson says. (The rebel banner still flies in front of the South Carolina state assembly building in Columbia.)

Mr. Obama won a surprising victory against Hillary Rodham Clinton in the South Carolina Democratic primary, but the state is now emerging as a significant hurdle to his policies. Mr. Wilson's “You lie!” has become a rallying cry not only among a lunatic fringe but in Main Street America; indeed, at least in Lexington County, the line between the two is getting blurry.

Joe Wilson's heartland today is a place where everyone from Tea Party Patriots to state-governor hopefuls are uniting over fears of the deepening reach of the federal government.

“The changing of America is what we're talking about. We're fighting for our freedom,“ says Ron Parks, a 53-year-old construction worker who for most of his life stayed far away from politics. Today he is a local organizer in the anti-Obama, cross-country Tea Party movement; he objects to everything from the economic-stimulus package to seatbelt laws.

Meanwhile, Mr. Wilson, previously an undistinguished backbencher, has become someone people here talk about as a future contender for the Oval Office.

“Throughout the course of this nation's history there have been extraordinary events which have lead to extraordinary acts of defiance,” says Larry Grooms, a long-time Republican state senator. “People are beginning to understand that some of the basic rights that most Americans hold dear are quickly being eroded.” Without men such as Mr. Wilson, he adds, America is destined to become like North Korea.

High passions

In a rundown strip mall next to an indoor shooting range, Mr. Wilson's campaign office has been inundated. It raised $1.5-million in the week after the incident; cheques and letters are still pouring in from across the country. “Glad to know you're not apologizing again. Stay strong,” reads one letter from Arizona, taped to the office's bathroom door.

“It's just been overwhelming,” says Preston Grisham, Mr. Wilson's 26-year-old campaign manager. “The most common call I get is from people who say Joe said what they have always wanted to say.” Which is what, exactly? After all, he spoke only two words. “I hear a lot of different things,” Mr. Grisham says hesitantly. “Before this, they really didn't know Joe, so everyone's just taking their own interpretation of what he actually said.”

The passion of the support for Mr. Wilson often seems to run deeper than its logic. In Lexington, residents express suspicions of Mr. Obama and policies such as health-care reform, but they are equally angry at the cost of their insurance. They believe his economic stimulus package will bankrupt their country, but many of them have lost their jobs, with South Carolina posting double-digit unemployment last summer. They think Mr. Obama is a liar, but can't explain why.

Two miles down the road from Mr. Wilson's campaign office at the Southern Restaurant, former Vice-President Dick Cheney's picture hangs on the wall alongside the Sept. 12, 2001, front page of the local paper. Here emotions run raw.

“I don't trust [Mr. Obama]. I think a lot of his ideas are too far out in left field,” says Wyman Abstance, celebrating his 57th birthday with two friends from work, over $7.50 plates of steaming fried chicken, mashed potatoes and collard greens. Which ideas does he mean? “I can't name a specific one,” Mr. Abstance says. “But he loves to spend money too quick, and money isn't always the solution. I think he's going to get this country to a point where we could be taken over by another country.”

His friend Kenny, who also works at the local utilities company, is riled up about the health-care bill, which he says he doesn't understand. “All I know is it's going to cost a bunch of money … one way or the other,” he says before taking a sip of “unsweet” iced tea.

Richard Freedman, sitting across the table, couldn't bring himself to watch the President's speech. “I don't trust him. He lies every time he opens his mouth.” Mr. Freedman doesn't distrust all Democrats, though. “I guess I don't feel as uncomfortable with Bill or Hillary as I do with President Obama,” he says, though he can't say why.

John Gissendaner, a 67-year-old retired official with the department of interior works, is much clearer on his reasons: “Obama's ruining our country with all these social programs and giveaway programs. I hate him. And it's not 'cause he's black. It's 'cause he's a Muslim socialist.”

That's the kind of statement that outside observers use to dismiss these voters' sentiments as mere cover for cultural prejudice. But others say the resentment here arises from more nuanced, legitimate and lasting causes. “South Carolina has a long history of spitting in the face of federal authority,” says Walter Edgar, Director of Southern Studies at the University of South Carolina. “Now people are losing their homes and their jobs and can no longer afford to send their children to the right schools. For them, the federal government is a good whipping boy.”

Prof. Edgar says the rest of the country should heed the undertones in all the noise around Mr. Wilson's words: “This is not a fringe movement,” he says. “It speaks to a growing uncertainty, a growing unease, and Washington should take stock. This is not going to die out.”

Sonia Verma is a Globe and Mail reporter.

So there you have it. Apparently we’ve become a kind of third-world political joke that, to our friends and neighbors, is really much more sad than it is funny. We can blow it off by saying we don’t really care what the rest of the world thinks…but we should care. We’ve got to stop carrying on as if Americans are the only people in the world who can think, or who’s opinions matter.

We need to once more become that ‘shining city on the hill’ that every other country looked up to. But after eight years of the blustering, bullying Bush administration, and the hate-filled political grandstanding and rhetoric that has badly sullied our national image since Barack Obama became President, we’ve got some work to do before we can climb that hill again.

SC

The Joe Wilson Agenda: Racism by any other name is still…

South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson showed the country and the world what he really is during Barack Obama’s Health Care Reform speech to a joint session of Congress last Wednesday…and by that we don’t mean just an ignorant, unprincipled peckerwood with no respect for the office of President of the United States, or the institution to which he was, incredibly, elected to serve. Unfortunately, it’s much more distressing than that.

If it were that simple, President Obama’s subsequent, gracious acceptance of Wilson’s so-called apology would have led us to conclude that it’s time to move on…except that it’s not that simple. Oh, Joe Wilson is everything we said above, but he’s more than that. He’s also a racist who, because of enablers and apologists like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and Lou Dobbs and Sean Hannity and Sarah Palin, now feels it’s acceptable to bring his racism out of the closet and put it on display for the world to see.

So there was Wilson offering to keep the welcome mat out at his Washington office Saturday for somewhere between an estimated fifty and a hundred thousand like-minded people who gathered in our nation’s capitol for something called the 912 Project or the 912 March…a staged event conceived in the twisted, unbalanced, paranoid mind of the aforementioned Beck. And although they arrived both as individuals and groups who claimed kinship with or interest in any number of causes, what they were really there to do was show their true color…WHITE!

They can hide behind any banner they find and call themselves whatever they like, but the truth of the matter is that the vast majority of those who participated in this event are extreme, right-wing ideologues who became unhinged when a black man was duly and constitutionally elected President of these United States. And now, because the enablers are telling them it’s okay to hate the President and anyone who supports him, overt racism is the right-wing flavor of the moment.

If it wasn’t such a sad commentary on what public discourse and deportment in America has become, it would be laughable. Actually, no it wouldn’t. It’s just plain sad!

Two things before we wrap it up for this edition of our PWC blog. First, one of the funniest albeit saltiest journals we regularly follow is the Rude Pundit. For his take on Saturday’s display of lunacy at the 912 event in Washington, go to http://www.rudepundit.blogspot.com/ . Suffice it to say that ‘The Rude One’ has a way of putting things the way we’d often like to put them…if only we weren’t worried about what our mothers would think.

And finally, here’s an editorial that was sent to us by a friend which appeared in today’s Toronto Globe and Mail. It concerns the Health Care Reform debate currently raging in America. It’s short, concise, and, in our estimation, right on the money.


By Eugene Lang and Philip DeMont

From Monday's Globe and Mail Last updated on Monday, Sep. 14, 2009 03:21AM EDT

"It is rare for Canada to get noticed in the United States. In fact, it is almost unprecedented for anything Canadian to be the focal point of debate in Washington. Yet we have seen just that in recent months during the congressional wrangling over U.S. President Barack Obama's attempts to reform health insurance.

Canada's medicare system has suddenly been thrust into the spotlight south of the border. It has been pilloried by the Republicans in Congress, the subject of derisive and distorted television advertisements, described variously as a system of medicine by bureaucrat, a statist form of health care afflicted by gross inequities and inefficiencies, one that pales in comparison to the U.S. model. The hysterical tone of the anti-medicare rhetoric among Republicans would make one think Canada is North Korea.

But there is an inconvenient truth that the Republican ideology cannot dispute. Canada's approach to providing citizens with universal health insurance is superior to the U.S. model of private insurance. When we get beyond the anti-medicare ideology and histrionics on Capitol Hill, we can establish this by reference to four basic numbers that give a good sense of our system versus the system in the United States.

Life expectancy is a basic measure of the quality of health care. In the U.S., a citizen will live 77.8 years on average. In Canada, you can expect to live two and a half years longer (80.4 years). Infant mortality is also a vital indicator of health care. In the United States, 6.37 infants die out of every 1,000. In Canada the number is 5.4 out of a 1,000.

But what about the cost differences of the two approaches to health care? Surely our Leviathan-like system, which produces such enviable results, must cost a fortune relative to the U.S. model.

The best measure of health care costs is the percentage a country spends relative to the size of its economy, or its gross domestic product (GDP). Canadians spend about 10 per cent of GDP on health. Americans spend 16 per cent to achieve inferior results on life expectancy and infant mortality.

Finally, it is estimated that there are somewhere around 40 million Americans – about 12 per cent of their population, well in excess of the total population of Canada – who have no medical insurance whatsoever. These unfortunate people are literally on their own in paying for any and all medical treatments they require. That gap in coverage is staggering, making the United States an outlier among all advanced Western nations.

One might ask how many uninsured citizens exist in Canada? The answer is zero – all Canadians are insured. In this country, good-quality, universally accessible medical care is regarded as a basic element of citizenship, kind of like owning a gun is in the U.S.

So to sum up. We live longer than the Americans do. We are less likely to die at or soon after birth than the Americans are. All Canadians have medical insurance, whereas a huge number of Americans don't. And we pay less as a society for health care than they do in the United States. Four numbers paint a stark picture. And when you strip away the anti-medicare ideological rants and falsehoods on display in Washington, Canada's approach to health insurance would probably sound pretty good to many Americans.

To their credit, by putting public insurance on the table as a supplement to private plans, the Democrats in the U.S. Congress are trying to drag the United States into the club of civilized nations when it comes to health care. We've been in that club since the establishment of medicare more than 40 years ago.

Don't get us wrong here. We are not saying medicare is perfect; it is far from that, and it requires constant improvement, as most Canadians understand. But it is not a bad deal for citizens of this country.

The Republican-led anti-medicare lobby in Congress knows these numbers and facts. But they are regarded as inconvenient truths that must be ignored in the crusade to discredit the Canadian approach to health insurance, to ensure no public option creeps into the U.S. system. Anti-government ideology is running amok in Washington, trumping facts and rational debate, distorting one of the most important public policy issues the United States has grappled with in decades.

Ultimately, the U.S. public will pay the price for that."

So there you have it. As always, your comments and opinions are encouraged. We’ll talk to you again tomorrow.

SC