tomdesigns said:
What could possibly be more distrubing than invading IRAQ based on lies resuling in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of by standers? resulting in tens of thousands of oraphns. Now that is a tragety made by decisions and not an accident.
Thank you. The righteous indignation of Americans and other expats seems a little misplaced.
The difference between Argentina and the US is that in the US, you get scammed, deceived and bullshitted at a large, national scale, while in Argentina, you might easily have something added to your restaurant bill that you didn't order.
I suppose it's fine to prefer the former, since it seemingly introduces less headaches into pedestrian, everyday existence, but let's not let go of reality completely. The US is no shining beacon of rectitude, and is most certainly, most emphatically no stranger to extensive government corruption, especially at a large scale. This is a factual issue that has little to do with extreme political ideology one way or another; the reality is, the US Congress is awash in regulatory capture, partly through the efforts of an unprecedented army of lobbyists, and partly through its long-standing revolving-door cronyism. State legislatures are, in many ways, even worse.
I'm not saying the two countries are functionally the same. I don't think anyone would seriously argue that day-to-day life in the US isn't easier, more convenient, more predictable and perhaps safer (depending on where you live) for a vast majority of its residents. The centers of global empires tend to be nice places to live. I just think there's a lot of presumptuousness in lecturing Argentines about how messed up their country is and how they are too spineless to do anything about it. The US has a laundry list of deep-seated issues in its polity that undermine its present and future stability and prosperity at a profound, existential level, and nobody's doing anything about them.
Are CFK's populist supporters really so much different from "git government hands off my Medicare!" Tea Party rabble on the one hand? Are the protectionist measures so out of sync with futile Democratic top-down "job creation" ventures? How do you weigh INDEC's antics against "quantitative easing" and unsustainable deficits and debt loads? Is the relationship between government and domestic industry in Argentina so much more indictable than US$2T in Wall Street "bailouts"? Does the massive mortgage securities bust and resulting contagion really compare so favourably to the Argentine house of cards? Is rampant jingoism and nationalism, especially over the Malvinas question, so unlike the enthusiastic flag-waving "united we stand" crowd that allowed Afghanistan and Iraq to play out of America's underbelly of militarism, albeit with magnitudinally more devastating consequences? Is "fútbol para todos!" so much different from the surreal "bread and circus" universe, inhabited by such a vast preponderance of the American working class, of giants chasing after a brown, oblong pig-skin ball amidst inane sportscaster blather and commercial brand bombardment?
Expats are sensitive to what's wrong in Argentina because it has a different flavour, because it's different from the kind of corruption and ridiculousness that they've accepted back home their whole life unquestioningly, or with minimal resistance, or an apathetic shrug and a certain jaded fatalism. Why should we deny Argentines the right to do the same about their particular strains of societal pathologies, bureaucratic sclerosis, governmental lunacy, etc?
