He knows ancient history and he knows what we are living through, how and why. This is from his Pajama’s Media column.
The Art of Appreciating America from Abroad
Sense Out of Nonsense — a ten-step plan
I’ve been following the news the last two weeks — Weinergate, the dismal “unexpected” economic news, the new wars in Libya and Yemen — from Europe while leading about 60 on a military history tour of Italy, Corsica, Sardinia, and Sicily. Even a brief hiatus abroad always gives one perspective and appreciation of the United States; reading various European papers accents the difference, and daily association, by chance and by design, with Europeans enriches the perspective. I offer some reflections this week on the American experience, and hope to be back on the farm in the U.S. by the time most read this. I note that the Mediterranean is a beautiful place, the study of which I have devoted much of my adult career; so my comments are not so much critiques of Sicilian or Roman life as much as thoughts on the U.S. through the benefit of both distance and connectivity with the 24/7 news.
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2. When listening to national network or cable news, please assume that during the half-hour show one of the talking heads — anchor, correspondent, interviewer — is either married to or dating another like talking head at another station or paper, or a D.C. politician, and that most of what we shall subsequently hear is predicated on that fact. The nexuses are usually sex, money, power, or a shared quest for celebrity, and they lead to a warped view of contemporary America — the deranged hatred for the upstart and independent Sarah Palin a prime example.
3. Likewise we should assume that most of our news, our popular entertainment, our movies and TV shows, and our supposed conventional wisdom that winds up in magazines reflect the anxieties, fears, and prejudices of about 1-2 million elites that live between either New York and Washington or San Francisco and Los Angeles — apprehensions that are largely irrelevant to 9 of 10 other Americans. Apparently living in an urban, coastal, and largely segregated upscale neighborhood and associating with such a thin slice of like-minded America create such insularity and serial foolishness.
Read the rest of the ten steps here.
