From TPM Reader DC …
Re ‘You’re going to look super in a burka’: I think this makes sense mainly if you consider that unilateralism is in many ways the flip side of isolationism. To an awful lot of people in places like, say, West Texas [I once lived there], the outside world is seen as a vague, threatening place, full of people who want what we’ve got. First it was the Nazis, then the Communists, and now the Islamists; they all blur into a single, malignant Other, who need to be stopped well short of our shores [Throw in the Trilateral Commission and the international bankers for good measure]. I recall teaching history in WTX and having to explain to a student that Nazis and Communists weren’t the same people; he actually thought they were, and he was a smart guy! And Bush, despite his gestures of tolerance toward the American Islamic community, plays to this sentiment, with his “They hate our freedom” line and the threat that if we leave Iraq “They’ll follow us home.” To a lot of people, that doesn’t mean acts of terror; that means *conquest.* It’s perfectly understandable, actually; people typically interpret new problems in terms of what they’ve long understood already, and in terms set by the larger understandings of their communities. And this is a huge, diverse country–a fact persistently obscured by the sameness with which we experience it from the air or on the interstate. But precisely because this sort of reflexive defensive posture makes sense in a certain epistemological universe, it’s extremely difficult to deal with if you’re from a different one.
