Why Do People Hate America

Ziauddin Sardar

The old rule about The Spectator leaning to the right and The New Statesman leaning to the left has been, if not replaced, then superseded. Now it's The Spectator if you want your fix of Brussels baiting and The New Statesman if you want to unload your bile all over Washington. Britain's opposing magnets: Europe versus America.

So it was the New Statesman that ran a rave review of this book a while back.

Much of the book is organised around American TV. Each of the chapters kicks off with a critique of a current American show and an analysis of what this teaches us about what's wrong with America. It's a strange approach and it doesn't really work. One show which gets a lot of column inches is The West Wing and the main problem with this is straightforward. The line between criticising American administrations and criticising the American administration as depicted in The West Wing is utterly blurred. Several times I was lost in the fog that this kind of technique generates. The second problem is I've never seen even one of the shows cited by Sardar and Wyn Davies. I guess I don't watch enough American telly. But, hey, Ziauddin, that's a good thing, right?

The rest of the book scores some easy hits (surely, even the most simple-minded American can get beyond the bogus and self-satisfied "they hate us for our freedoms" and perceive that it's more complicated than that) but most of the book is the kind of nonsense you used to find in the Socialist Worker back in college. Actually, thinking back, the Socialist Worker probably contained fewer proofing errors than Why Do People Hate America?