[MD] Flying Spagetti Monsters

[david buchanan]

gav said:
i have actually had a great time here....largely because of the people i 
have met and chatted with and got drunk with. it is the culture - the giant 
- that frustrates me so much (my country is in the thrall of the same giant; 
it is just bigger and meaner and nearer here).

dmb says:
American culture bothers you? I really don't see how that could be possible 
since America has no culture. She only has places to shop. Okay, I 
exaggerate the case but I'm guessing that what bothers you about the USA is 
her lack of culture. Sometimes I think she's a little too much like Lila and 
not enough like lady liberty, if you know what I mean.

I know a woman who grew up in Spain and is old enough to have lived under 
Franco's fascism. Her American husband, a friend of mine, reported a 
conversation he had with her and her Spainish friends. They all laughed at 
the idea that the USA was a free country. They said something like, hey we 
know what fascism looks like and you guys are way more fascist than us. That 
report stuck.

I think people freak out when the "f" word is used because they think it 
means genocide and totalitarian dictatorships. But Franco and Mussolini 
never built gas chambers and all these fascist leaders were very, very 
popular within their nations. See, if fascism is what you get when the 
giant's immune system gets over-heated, then fascism will always be some 
kind of muscular assertion of the values and beliefs most people already 
hold. This explains all the flag waving, anthem singing bullshit we see in 
fascism. The country will glorify its own history and ways of live in 
various ways and over-react to any criticisms of the same. It like the giant 
re-asserting itself and the level of aggression, I suppose, will roughly be 
in proportion to the level of the percieved threat.

If we look at what's going on in the USA through this lens, I'd say that the 
anti-intellectual style of American religiosity is behind quite a lot of it 
but this has been compounded by the whole 9/11 thing. Now we have 
fear-mongering bible thumpers running US foriegn policy. This is like the 
giant going on the attack at home and abroad at the same time, with the 
threat being percieved both within and without. The average fundamentalist 
Christian, for example, with view secular humanism and radical Islam as 
threats. To the giant, the intellectual level might looks just as dangerous 
as a rival culture. And our thinks it is fighting both at the same time.

My fear is that this is turning into a giant war of our fanatics against 
their fanatics. If that's the case, intellectual values lose either way.

Or something like that.

dmb

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