Bem-vind@! Este é um “livro” - Miguel Vale de Almeida

the more controlled media systems there is. It is not controlled by a state censorship board set
up by some dictator that can be overturned. It is controlled by a much more evasive octopus. We
may have similar problems here, but pluralism is much more rooted among us. Just take a look
at our newspapers and even at our state owned TVs (except where, like in Italy, the TV tycoons
came to power riding the neo-liberal wave…).
Two of the octopus’s tentacles have really messed the minds of “Most Americans”: the alliance
between political power, business and the military; and the strength that religious Puritanism
has in your society. Bush is just the epitome of all that. He is a monster created in the confusion
of democracy with the market, and of freedom in the wider humanistic sense with freedom in
the ideological sense of “the free market”. Furthermore, this “freedom” seems to be “God sent”.
American conservatives – but also you, dear “Most Americans” – think that America has
separated church from state when in fact it managed to keep the state away from interfering in
the churches, not the other way around (which, although far from achieved, is our main goal and
concern here – and that’s what separation of church and state is supposed to mean). The result is
that probably a larger percentage of Europeans than Americans either don’t believe in God (but
they believe in ethics) or think that it is a strictly private issue. Many churches – especially the
one with the Vatican headquarters – mess up people’s minds in Europe. But you guys have God
all over – even in the President’s mouth.
The military and economic power of conservative America – largely achieved by means of
waging wars abroad as sound business enterprise – can not survive without patriotism and God.
The sad thing is that even those who do not benefit from the system (most Blacks and all of the
American quasi-illiterate and health care-deprived poor) not only believe in the official script,
but they also make up for the majority of the armed forces’ personnel.
You see, Europeans are starting to look upon America with contempt. The US looks more and
more like a third world fundamentalist backwater place. In the last issue of the NY Review of
Books author Norman Mailer actually calls the US “a monumental banana republic” (!). The gap
between Europe and America is wider than ever. “Most Europeans” only feel at home in the US
in parts of NYC and in a few campuses, where reason, humanism, and cosmopolitanism try to
survive. The America that I owe a lot to (when I studied there – when, among other things,
smoking was still considered a human activity) is located in those tiny liberated areas.
Europe has gone farther in overcoming the religious thing after centuries of bloodshed around
that kind of irrationality. Just like it has gone farther in overcoming the naiveté with which
“Most Americans” believe in the “Market” (as if it were the other face of the Divinity).
Europeans keep killing each other in some countries and also have democracies in desperate
need of reform – but at least they do not believe any more. They’re becoming sceptic, some
would even say cynical. But I prefer that to mass belief. Call us weak. Call us wimps. Call us
effeminate: I don’t care. I actually quite like it.
But that isn’t all. Europe has also overcome the culture of war. Yes, Europeans are becoming
more and more pacifist. Yes, Europe has been constructing more than the US a culture of peace,
after ages of bloodshed around ridiculous and infantile issues such as patriotism – a proclivity
that “most Americans” still seem to have. And please do not say that Europe enjoys this
supposedly illusionary peaceful situation because the US have paid for our defence. It is partly
true, I admit, but that has been done largely in the interest of, and according to the American
military-industrial agenda. Furthermore, if you do the arithmetic right, you’ll find out that
Europe spends way more than the US in peacekeeping, in development aid and in reconstructing
countries destroyed by American (and other) interventions or policies. Besides its own capitalist
ventures (not ethically different from the American kind) Europe finances America, and
European tax payers finance American tax payers (who don’t pay that many taxes,
comparatively).
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