HOW "ELITES" VIEW AMERICA

The web site for Pajamas Media, an alternative to mainstream media, contained an article by Bridget Johnson, "Why the World Hates America" (6-14-08). A reader identifying herself as "Sandra M" made some thought provoking comments in response to Johnson's article.

Having come to America as a refugee from Nazi Germany at the age of 10, one of M's passages is especially signigicant and describes my feelings exactly: "Immigrants who remember or have been told by their parents or grandparents how bad things were in the old country are those who frequently love and appreciate America most."

Here is everything Sandra M had to say:

86 percent of "Latin American elites" rating U.S. relations negatively.

Probably true. Do you know why? Because Latin American elites have always sent their sons and daughters to be educated in the United States. And what do they learn in American universities? Marxism, anti-americanism, a glorification of the loathesome Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. How many Europeans, Arabs, Iranians, Asians et al have come here , absorbed this poison and taken it home and for how many generations?

My grandmothers both sent their sons to be educated here. That was in the 1910’s. I know because 3 sons fought for the American Army in World War I.

In my convent boarding school in 1950 my dorm mates were Cuban (sugar) Venezuelan (oil) Colombian( land) Puerto Rican (law) Ecuadorian, etc. Their mothers had attended our high school a generation before.

We EXPORT ANTI-AMERICANISM. And still everyone in the world wants to move here and live the good life.

Guilt-ridden American elites were taken in by communists. Immigrants who remember or have been told by their parents or grandparents how bad things were in the old country are those who frequently love and appreciate America most.

Thank God for the Irish. Tim Russert is being eulogized today and he quotes his father’s line: "what a country!" Indeed.

Ayn Rand was once talking to a group of union men during the Wilkie for President campaign. One heckler, noting her thick Russian accent, shouted down: "Who are you to tell us who to vote for? You weren’t even born here." Rand shouted back: "I CHOSE to be an American, what did you ever do?" and the crowd roared in approval.

John Kerry was going to solve the problem of anti-Americanism so obvious among the Europeans. Oops. Europeans voted out the anti-American Chirac and Schroeder and replaced them with pro-American leaders. So did Italy, and England just voted out London’s Red Mayor.

I once read that the Soviets allowed only one American TV series to be shown in Russia: Brett Butler’s GRACE UNDER about a single mother, oil refinery worker. This poor American working woman had a car (a clunker but still, only the elites in Russia had any kind of car). She lived in a house with her 3 children (in a nation where large families share small apartments) She had an old refrigerator, but a refrigerator nonetheless. Not exactly a propaganda coup for the left, but the best they could do.

Maria Shriver and two other journalists went looking for poverty in Appalachia. They found a black man living in a trailer without running water, but there in the background I could see a color TV.

When communist sympathizers Simone Signoret and Yves Montand came here, they wanted to see the downtrodden Black poor in Los Angeles. What they saw were television antennas everywhere, not their idea of poverty.

We have poverty in America, but we don’t have the kind of starvation there is in Africa, Asia, et al. And may I give the guilt-ridden, elite environmentalists something to really feel guilty about?

We are creating real hunger and starvation in Africa, Asia and Central and South America and sky high food prices for Americans (our livestock are fed corn) with our soybean and corn subsidies for ethanol. Feel guilty about that, you damned watermelons (Russian word for environmentalists: green on the outside, red on the inside).