Margaret Drabble is a writer of some renown. She has a problem and she has admitted it.

She loathes America, and what it has done to the rest of the world.

She joins a long list of righteous writers like Ted Rall, Noam Chomsky and Norman Mailer, who have contracted a terrible, brain-shrinking disease. No, not SARS, but LARS: Loathe America Really Severely. (It was best I could come up with on short notice.)

LARS debilitates the thinking process. These writers try to write something clever or deep or profound, but all they can come up with is a million variations of "I hate you America, you SUCK!" Take, for instance, Ms. Drabble's most recent piece:

My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me, like a disease. It rises up in my throat like acid reflux, that fashionable American sickness. I now loathe the United States and what it has done to Iraq and the rest of the helpless world.
Ah yes, feeling vomit rise into your throat until it causes a burning sensation is quite fashionable these days. It sounds to me like Ms. Drabble could use an exorcist rather than an antacid, however. She has the demon soul of Maureen Down stuck in her esophagus.

Drabble's terrible sickness has caused a bit of amnesia as well, as she has completely forgotten anything good America has done for the rest of the world. In fact, in Drabble's fevered brain, America is the enemy of all, wreaking havoc wherever it goes, leaving victims lying in its wake like a killer tornado. She makes no mention of the enemies that America is actually fighting, like al Qaeda or Saddam or terrorism in any form, instead making the United States appear to be the enemy of all who look upon it.

There, I have said it. I have tried to control my anti-Americanism, remembering the many Americans that I know and respect, but I can't keep it down any longer. I detest Disneyfication, I detest Coca-Cola, I detest burgers, I detest sentimental and violent Hollywood movies that tell lies about history.
I can think of worse things a country could face than Mickey Mouse, soda and Ronald McDonald. Sure, the clown guy is scary and soda might make you burp, but I have a pretty good feeling that oh, the people of Iraq for instance, might prefer a few dwarves and a Happy Meal to being tortured, beaten, stripped of any dignity you once had and left to starve to death while their leader lives in luxury. (Ok, she does have a point about the movies. I hate Pearl Harbor, too.)

Of course, like any proud Brit, Dabble drags Shakespeare into the fray.

Just leave Shakespeare and Shakespeare's homeland out of this squalid bit of revisionism, I thought at the time. Little did I then think that now, three years on, Shakespeare's country would have been dragged by our leader into this illegal, unjustifiable, aggressive war. We are all contaminated by it. Not in my name, I want to keep repeating, though I don't suppose anybody will listen.
Unjustifiable. Tell that to the children who were freed from the prison. Tell that to the young girls who were raped by Uday Hussein, to the familes who lost husband, wives, sons and daughters to unjust torture and murder.

America is holding more than 600 people in detention in Guantánamo Bay, indefinitely, and it may well hold them there for ever. Guantánamo Bay has become the Bastille of America. They call this serving the cause of democracy and freedom.
So, America is an evil, putrid, sickness inducing country for holding suspected terrorists and enemy combatants in detention, but Iraq is ok for holding innoncent children in dank, airless prisons for not agreeing with his politics? I think the LARS has caused Drabble's loathing gene to mutate and go haywire.

Seriously. She has all but admitted to stalking Jack Straw.

I keep writing to Jack Straw about the so-called "illegal combatants", including minors, who are detained there without charge or trial or access to lawyers, and I shall go on writing to him and his successors until something happens. This one-way correspondence may last my lifetime.
I think Mr. Straw better have the Anthrax and Other Deadly Powders Department check out those letters before he opens them. Even if they are sealed with a kiss, he must make sure that the lipstick stain isn't tainted with cyanide. Those stalkers can be a passive-agressive bunch.

I hate feeling this hatred. I have to keep reminding myself that if Bush hadn't been (so narrowly) elected, we wouldn't be here, and none of this would have happened. There is another America. Long live the other America, and may this one pass away soon.
Ah, there it is! The tell-tale parenthetical reference to the last election. We now know where Ms. Dabble contracted her LARS disease from. She must have been hanging out with Ted Rall.

As for me, I would not want to see the America where Al Gore was president on September 11, 2001.

I do believe there are a lot of grateful Iraqis who would not want to revise history in that manner either.

Unfortunately, there is no cure for LARS, and it seems to be contagious. The most vulnerable people are those who use the word "selected" in place of "elected." If that is you, seek shelter immediately. Preferably in another country.

Posted by: DSmith at May 8, 2003 03:41 PM
My experience was very similar to Raoul's, though in the UK.

In 1978, when I graduated from Oxford University, my class was composed overwhelmingly of extreme lefties. The intellectual slogan of the time was "back to the villages!", the theory being that everything to do with modern industrial society was wrong and if we could just recapture the wisdom of pre-industrial societies everything would be wonderful (this is still playing in Peoria, or rather New York, as "It Takes A Village").

I wasn't caught up in this nonsense, but those around me were. It was therefore ironic that due basically to an administrative screw up I needed something to do before going to the Harvard Business School, and I went to Africa (Malawi) for two years as an economic adviser. Malawi was (and is still) one of the ten poorest countries in the world. Out of my whole class I was practically the only one who actually went "back to the villages" and got to see what life there was really like.

Meanwhile the lefties around me at Oxford went off for the most part to become lawyers and accountants. In so doing they traded overnight one flavor of conformism (which is all their politics really amounted to) for the next, just as easily as they traded T-shirts and jeans for business attire.

Of course when I arrived in the real "villages" in Africa, the first thing I found was that if the whole population of Malawi could have moved to the United States the next day they would have been very happy. Failing this, all the young people in the villages wanted to move to the capital city and live an urban existence. Every one who could do so quit the village like a shot. Duh.

Nobody back in the UK cared in the least about this gap between their ideology and reality, because their ideology was no more than a fashionable piece of clothing, directed at the audience in their immediate vicinity. Left wing politics performed the function of a sort of moral "hood ornament", I guess at a time of life when most young professionals could not yet afford either the automotive or the sexual versions, which came later.

Meanwhile the Africans who ran the government, who I worked for directly, were highly amused by endless procession of do-gooders we received from the developed world.

In this respect they were no different from the villagers I used to live with in the South of France. Some sociology program in the US had been sending graduate students over for years, and each one would stay for several months and then go back home and write up their thesis on peasant society.

There is no record of any of them ever having realised that the villagers had been running for years an ongoing competition to see who could spin the most outrageous falsehood about the way they lived and get this year's grad student swallow it.

So unfortunately even if Ms. Drabble did visit one of these countries she would likely just come back not only still deluded but also convinced that her prejudices had been "confirmed by first hand experience".