Justin Webb's America

The obsessive and the dotty

• Justin Webb
• 14 Nov 07, 03:40 AM GMT

What a wonderful array of commentary on the subject of anti-Americanism!

It is an important topic and anyone interested could do worse than read the four-volume collection of writings on it entitled "Anti-Americanism: History, Causes, Themes," edited by my friend Brendon O'Connor of Griffith University in Australia.

I took the books on a train to New York the other day and quite a crowd gathered to leaf through them! Special thanks to Mr Curley for the poem - with your permission I would like to use that elsewhere - and to Jack Hughes for making a trenchant point about the BBC.

For what it is worth I agree with you about execution in the US getting obsessive coverage from us foreigners while the same issue in China receives little attention. It is one of the pitfalls of reporting open versus closed societies.

But boy does the dotty stuff keep happening here: the latest being governor Sonny Perdue's prayers for rain on the steps of the Atlanta statehouse. Anti-Americans, the softer European variety, look at that kind of behaviour and wonder at America's capacity for self-delusion and religious literalism. Nothing much separated that gathering from a get-together of Stone Age men, let's face it.

Although of course 250 Georgians do not represent the nation; as someone in the Atlanta Constitution blog put it, in one pellucid phrase: "Good gracious, how embarrassing!"

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