This is the "un-Chomsky" view. >From Newscan
NewsScan Daily, 4 April 2003 http://www.newsscan.com/newsscan/newscup.html WORTH THINKING ABOUT: AMERICA AND THE WORLD Jedediah Purdy toured the world to observe evidence of its generally acknowledged Americanization: "This is the first fact of global life. We Americans live in an American world, more than the citizens of imperial Rome inhabited a Roman world or nineteenth-century Englishmen a British one. The sun never sets on us. Where two or more are gathered, we are with them. Wherever one is trying to make sense of her life, we are there. "Beyond our power and wealth, America provides the global language of dreams and the imagery of ambition. We are what everyone, everywhere, might yet be. People everywhere want to spend their days not eking out survival, but enjoying the bounty of a rich country. The fantasy of a land of plenty is very old: it figures in Muslim views of paradise, Hindu descriptions of the Golden Age, and the legendary Cockaigne of medieval Christianity, an imagined place of perpetual feasting. Americans live in that place, the everyday tenants of one of the enduring human myths. "Apart from wealth, people are moved by the wish for freedom -- which today means American freedom. The ordinary liberty to go through a day or a week without harassment from the police; to choose your own friends and lovers; to speak your mind and come to your own opinions; to have ways of making the powerful answer to you: these are human aspirations, charged with new force in our age of democracy and human rights. For all its failings America stands for them. "The world's hunger is not exactly a compliment, and we should not take it complacently. We are loved, desired, and resented, often in one breath. Life is full of injury, confusion, and humiliation in a world upset by vast migrations, the rise of huge cities only fifty years old, and the collapse of social orders to which people belonged for centuries and millennia. Resentment and hurt, like aspiration, run to America: the country that offers to the mind and heart everything that real life denies the hand and mouth. "There is no guarantee of an American future. It is naive to believe that the migratory icons of American modernity -- constitutions, regular elections, free markets, shopping malls, MTV -- will turn every place to a version of what we already are." -- See Jedediah Purdy's "Being America: Liberty, Commerce, and Violence in an American World" at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0375413073/newsscancom/ref=nos im -- or look for it in your favorite library. (We donate all revenue from our book recommendations to literacy programs.) _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
