To Learn from the Americans

We disparaged them and called them superficial, but in the elections in the United States this week, they proved that we actually have a reason to check what’s happening on the other side of the ocean.

The elections held this week in the United States illustrate how wrong we were in the stereotypes we formed about the Americans. So much so that maybe the time has come to learn something from this very public which we, for long years, deemed to be superficial, idiotic and hedonistic. The last election campaign has demonstrated how much the United States is led by people having consolidated world views, who think in depth and are ready to go far in order to implement their ideas.

For long years, we were smug with the qualitative differences existing between us and the United States. We were glad, for example, to point at the idiotic and superficial American television, flooded with quiz shows and exaggerated reality shows. We were tut-tutting, from our vantage point of the “People of the Book,” and wondering where the ideology is, where the depth is, where the human is superior to the animal. So far, we have toed the television line with the stupidity and animalization, when our channels give a powerful fight against the religion of foolishness.

Overall, if we want to take the television as a property of depth, the current election campaign in the United States has summoned a staggering example of television that is an antithesis of superficiality. It’s enough to take a look every night at 11 P.M. Israeli time, at the Glenn Beck Program on the Fox News Network. Fox is a private network that daily dedicates a whole hour to a lecture delivered by charismatic host Glenn Beck. Even someone who objects to Beck’s ideas has to appreciate the phenomenon. It’s not only that throngs of Americans are devotedly fascinated by such an analytical and deep program; Beck has become a central political factor who has added the Democratic defeat to his personal record and threatens Barack Obama’s second term. Along with the activists of the tea party movement, Glenn Beck exposed the fact that many Americans have clear ideological red lines, while Obama’s downfall derives from collision with these lines.

Do we have something to be proud of?

The ideological awakening led by the tea party symbolizes an awakening from the principles President Obama tried to import from Scandinavia or from the third world. The Americans have rebelled against what is perceived as an expropriation of the individual liberties: increased taxes, significant expansion of government bodies and their interference in the economic system, federal financing of abortions, and also what’s regarded as flaccidity and defeatism of the administration in both foreign policy and in the domestic arena. The one who overcame the Party of Obama this week has proved once again that the United States is not Europe. Not for nothing the socialist thought and surely, the communist one, was reckoned as a condemned thing, almost illegitimate in the United States. The Americans have reestablished this recognition this week before the president, who himself is an ideologist and brainwasher.

Back to us. This week we were appraised that the “Lonely Planet” Travel Guide has crowned Tel Aviv as the third city most worth seeing in the world. The guide explained that the Israeli coastal city is cool, because the religion dominating there is bars, parties and hedonism. But it’s not sure if there is anything to take pride in. Are hedonism and social autism being our good news to the world?

One way or another, you don’t need “Lonely Planet” in order to reach a conclusion that something is faulty with us. To this day, Israel hasn’t settled the score with the masterminds of Oslo and the disengagement conceptions that had driven us to disaster. We haven’t kicked out the politicians who failed time after time. Not to mention our passivity in front of the systematic deception of the voters — in front of the unseemly notion according to which the Prime Minister is allowed to do the opposite of what he had pledged to his voters. Over here, we suck up everything, move on and refuse to take our destiny back to our hands. Therefore, the time has come to have a look at the other side of the ocean and learn something.