Stars and gripes
: The London bureau chief of Newsweek, Stryker McGuire (a name that sounds like a character that should be played by Robert Urich), disses his country — our country — in (where else?) the Guardian. In the most back-handed of back-handed compliments he says that anti-Americanism is on the wane in London, but only after turning 9/11 into a back-handed insult:
At the time [September 11th] I remember the American playwright (and London resident) Bonnie Greer saying – hoping – that if any good were to come out of 9/11 it would be that the terror attacks might ‘literally bomb’ America into recognising that there is a world beyond US shores.
No such luck….
But there’s good news. It is nicely summed up by, of all people, a Frenchman, the philosopher-champion of counter-conventional wisdom Bernard-Henri Levy. Anti-Americanism, he says, is a boring clich