Great 'Bating Bunyips! Australian journalist Tim Blair opens up the op-ed page of the Sydney Morning Herald and finds a few Yank-bashing shrimps to toss on the barbie. Good on you, mate!

Blair missed just a couple of points in his sassy commentary. First, one of his countrymen writes in a letter to the SMH editorial page:

[Bush] views the world through the prism of a Wild West comic book. There are good guys and outlaws, "injuns" and the seventh cavalry.

Okay, the closest I've ever been to Australia is getting stoned and putting the Xanadu DVD in a continuous playback loop, so help me out, people -- does the Coriolis effect slow down time in the Southern Hemisphere, or something, so that it's still 1957 from Perth to Canberra? Do Aussie kids still gallop into the living room astride their wooden hobby horses, pull on their Wonderful World of Disney®-branded coonskin caps and plop down in front of the 9-inch black-and-white RCA console to watch kinescoped Republic serial westerns with Randolph Scott and stock footage of Apaches going Woooo-wooo-woooo!? 'Cause, trust me, no one up here fantasizes about cowboys, rustlers, and <airquote> injuns </airquote> anymore, wombat shagger -- those one-liners about Bush as a Rootin'-Tootin' Bronco Buster are so stale you could slice 'em up and make croutons.

The other thing that Blair took insufficient issue with was the original portrayal of the U.S. as a schoolyard bully, by that fatuous Yale Law hack-writer:

The world faces a single man armed with weapons of mass destruction, manifesting an aggressive, bullying attitude

Genius, if the U.S. is playing any role, it's taking inspiration from Adam Baldwin's pecs-tacular performance in the 1980 nerd wish-fulfillment pic My Bodyguard -- the muscular galoot with the heart of gold who doesn't like to see his skinny, asthmatic, frequently-perceived-as-gay classmates (i.e., Western Europe) get shoved into a gym locker by a petty-thief chainsmoking dirtball (i.e., Jihadism). Got it? America isn't the bully; America is the cool jock friend you always wished would come along to kick the bullies' asses. Or, if you like, America is the cute teenage girl who roundhouse-kicks monsters into quivering submission and saves Sunnydale.

posted by Throbert | 9/23/2002 03:30:00 PM |

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