When a book bears the title "100 Ways America is Screwing Up the World" you don't expect a celebration of patriotism, but this new volume contains even less substance and less wit than a reader might reasonably expect. Moreover, when its author (John Tirman, director of MIT's prestigious Center for International Studies) appeared on my radio show, he embarrassed himself in dealing with even the most rudimentary questions.
After he rambled on for several minutes about "genocide" against Native Americans, for instance, I asked him whether he agreed with Kevin Costner's statement, in promoting "Dances with Wolves," that it would have been better for the world if Europeans had never come to the Americas. "I can't possibly answer that question," Tirman replied, and then refused to dismiss the insane proposition that humanity might have been better served if America, as we know it, never had existed.
His book also contains a number of howlers, beyond the expected leftist platitudes. Included in his listing of the "Ways America is Screwing Up the World" are such classic national virtues as the tendency to see our country as "Number One" ("Among the more obnoxious tendencies of redneck culture," Tirman sniffs) and the boost to the economy every year provided by the near-universal celebration of Christmas ("As a modern economic engine, Christmas is very much an American invention.") He also names Mel Gibson as one of his "100 Ways" -- not for his alcoholism or his anti-Semitic outburst (the book was written before that embarrassment) but for his direction of the film "The Passion of the Christ." Tirman loathed the movie and rejected the notion that "all this suffering somehow proves Jesus's uniqueness. But of course many thousands of political prisoners have endured years of torture, flagellation, and horrid (and anonymous) deaths. Many of these have been tortured and murdered by American Christians..." (italics added)
On the air, I read this passage back to him and asked him to tell me which political prisoners he had in mind who had been "tortured and murdered by American Christians." He refered once more to Native Americans, but then backed off when I pointed out that fierce warriors on the battlefield hardly counted as Christlike victims and "political prisoners." After I posed the question several times he acknowledged that he couldn't name a single prisoner "tortured and murdered by American Christians" without doing further research.
I didn't have the chance, however, to question him on another laughably inaccurate statement in his "Mel Gibson" chapter. He writes: "Hollywood has green-lighted new pseudoreligious projects to capitalize on Mel's pioneering trail." Does Tirman possess some inside information heretofore hidden from the public and all reporters? What "pseudoreligious projects" has Hollywood greenlighted after the spectacular success of "The Passion"? Is he thinking of "Superman Returns"? "Snakes on a Plane"? The striking thing about the entertainment industry, as I've commented many times, is that Gibson's success has inspired no notable imitators -- and no rush to cash in on religious projects.
The appalling aspect of this entire interchange involved Tirman's lack of preparation, his inability to defend his own work against my challenges. Of course, Mr. Tirman lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where his list of most admired Americans (at the end of the book) includes his neighbors and fellow academics Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn -- both of them also former guests on my radio show. These people function in an hermetically sealed, nearly all-leftist bubble in which few students or faculty will question the America-bashing assumptions they so smugly promote. If I were to begin my own list of "100 Things That Are Screwing Up America," sloppy and instinctively anti-nationalistic professors would rate a prominent ranking.