The Sound of One Hand Clapping
It tires me to hear the constant complaint of Americans that ‘they’ (whoever's life we're changing at the moment) just don’t get it and are not sufficiently desirous of democracy.
It tires me to hear the constant complaint of Americans that ‘they’ (whoever's life we're changing at the moment) just don’t get it and are not sufficiently desirous of democracy. They are almost always Yugoslavs newly turned loose against one another, Eastern Europeans struggling to understand an unfamiliar democracy, Russians contending to recognize what has happened to their culture, Chinese not up to our standard on the human-rights scale.
Why can’t they recognize their own best interests?
Probably because they suffer the same sense of dislocation we Americans try to deal with in uncertain times. International rules are new and we’re playing on an old board--there are precious few truly modern politicians today, East or West. As bilateral leftovers in what has become (at least militarily) a unilateral world…