harold pinter bashes us in his nobel speech: guardian

dec 8th

pinter's acceptance speech is a rumination on the craft of the playwright, but also a polemic against the us. a rant in parts, but hard-hitting and sharp on occasion, especially the pablo neruda poetry. leftists have never progressed beyond the spanish civil war and guernica and all that: they refuse to see their own gulags and cambodian death-camps and maoist hell-holes.

this is on the one hand a typical example of a leftist european taunting the us -- so it can be laughed away as part of the terminally decadent old continent's last hurrah against the americans they love to hate. but on the other hand, it is a useful compendium of the us's sins that could come in handy in the odd argument should you feel inclined to do a spot of america-bashing yourself -- an age-old spectator sport in many parts of india, especially west bengal and delhi and kerala. or even if you feel like defending america, here, conveniently, is the list of things z magazine, and the nation and all those guys love to throw at the us.

i feel a certain even-handedness and objectivity in being able to appreciate pinter's points without necessarily agreeing with him. this, i think in an epiphany, is the way indians need to deal with the us in general -- coolly and objectively analyzing the good and the bad without getting emotionally involved in either hating them or loving them. this is hard for most of us excitable indians to do, but still...

http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1661516,00.html