As America approaches her most momentous presidential election for decades, I am in the True (but not specially Wild) West, the top left-hand corner of the United States, a hard-core Republican state that most visitors only fly over.
They think it's dull. How wrong they are...
Hitchens treats the average Moscow resident with respect.
On the other hand he has these representative observations about the local liberals:
...Mr Reece, a courtly retired academic-with a Colonel Sanders moustache and Danish ancestry, has Moscow's biggest concentration of posters backing Obama sprouting on his front lawn. He usually displays a good crop of placards at election times but admits that he has never put up so many before....
....Mr Reece's language about Obama is almost religious. He uses words such as 'visionary' and 'inspiration'. He also says, rather frankly, that Obama is 'not too black'. But he knows little about him.He has never heard of Tony Rezko, the Chicago businessman recently convicted of fraud and corruption, who seems to have helped Obama buy his house, and whom Obama lobbied for.
He has also never heard of John Stroger, a dreary business-as-usual Chicago machine politician whom Obama backed against a reform candidate, rather undermining his claim to be the apostle of change, and to be much of a visionary....
...This knowledge puts him ahead of another deeply civilised Obama fan, Tom Lamar, a liberal member of the City Council and head of a not-for-profit environmental institute.
He hasn't heard of any of these unattractive and unvisionary figures in Obama's past and present. But despite being so weakly informed about his hero, he is an unshiftable supporter.
When I put it to him that Obama has been handled softly by the American media, Mr Lamar responded: 'I haven't really noticed any free pass. I don't feel that he is untested and unexamined.'....
...But he was stuck for an answer when I pointed out that an effigy of Sarah Palin, complete with glasses, red dress and beehive hair, had been suspended by the neck from a noose in a Hollywood street as part of a Hallowe'en display.
Police have described this as a legitimate expression of opinion. Perhaps. Yet it is quite clear that if anyone hanged Obama in effigy, especially in the Lynching Belt of the Deep South, it would ignite a huge explosion of rage, and not be treated as 'legitimate'....
It's the educated elite like Reece and Lamar that will lead the USA to its downfall. The elites in this country are uncritical in their thinking and resemble the emotionalism found in primitive charismatic churches. They speak in tongues, only they channel simple Marxist blather rather any supposed divine inspiration. The elites fail to understand the basis of this republic and the role of that unique American character of the individual. The hyper-aggressive nature of that American will now be diverted away from the market that produces goods for the masses based on a profit motive towards obtaining wealth from the government. Just use the public education system as prime example number one. We spend more per pupil and get less for it than any other country in the world. Thank the hyper-aggressive teacher's unions for that.
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