[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: W.'s Big Fat Greek Pride

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W.'s Big Fat Greek Pride

August 19, 2004
 By MAUREEN DOWD 



 

The White House has become the palace of paradox. 

The war that was supposed to let us swagger and strut in
the world is impeding our swagger and strut in the world. 

As Selena Roberts wrote in her "Sports of the Times" column
on Tuesday, American athletes in Athens are trying so hard
to curb their usual chesty, preening, flag-waving behavior,
in accordance with the U.S. Olympic Committee's fears about
security in an anti-American climate, that it may be
dulling the American team's edge. 

"It does not reflect well on American culture, but some
United States athletes need to pound their chests to get
their hearts racing," Ms. Roberts writes. "Some need to
scowl, stare and pump music into their heads to accompany
their defiant strut before the start gun. Somehow,
intimidating others is motivating to them." 

Of the street-tough, hip-hop bad boy Allen Iverson's
becoming a model of lackluster conformity in Athens, she
wondered, "Who body-snatched this man?" 

Even our warlike national anthem has been transformed, from
blaring horns to peaceful, soothing strings. 

The basketball thing is a disaster. If there's one sport we
were always dominant in, it was basketball. Basketball was
invented in this country. And now we're losing to Puerto
Rico and struggling against Greece, while thousands of
gratified Europeans in the stands jeer U.S. stumbles. 

Puerto Rico beat us? It's as if the Jamaican bobsled team
beat the Austrians. 

It was impossible to believe before this week that if you
had Allen Iverson, Tim Duncan and Carmelo Anthony, with
LeBron James coming in from the bench, that we couldn't
beat any five guys in the world. Yet we were trounced by
one of our own, a U.S. commonwealth. And the Greek national
basketball team, which didn't even qualify for the Olympics
and got in only because Greece is the host country, nearly
beat us, as the rancorous crowd booed whenever the
Americans got the ball. 

The world cannot get enough of our big, cocky sports
millionaires on the losing side. 

Just as President Clinton entwined himself with the
Olympics in Atlanta during his re-election campaign,
President Bush has attempted to latch onto the Greek
Olympics, running an ad in which the flags of Afghanistan
and Iraq are shown as a narrator boasts that at "this
Olympics, there will be two more free nations, and two
fewer terrorist regimes." (Not to mention more terrorist
acts in the world.) 

But if the Olympics aren't working as a P.R. tool for the
country, how can they work as a P.R. tool for the
president? 

"The Americans are groping for an identity," Ms. Roberts
muses. "Who are they without their trademark 'tude?" 

Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld thought they could change
the American identity by invading Iraq, that they could
toughen up our 'tude and remove the lingering post-Vietnam
skittishness about force and the "blame America first"
psychology. 

They thought our shock-and-awe war would change America's
image, adding some muscularity that would make Arab foes
cower and the world bow down to the U.S. as an unassailable
hyperpower. 

The vice president and the defense chief have changed our
identity and image in the world - but not in the way they
envisioned. 

Our athletes are swaggering less and trying to be more
sensitive to other athletes. 

Iraq is making us wring our hands over whether to blast our
way into Najaf and Falluja, quavering with uncharacteristic
sensitivity even as the White House fires verbal mortars at
the domestic enemy, John Kerry, for suggesting that we be
more sensitive. 

The presidential race seems frozen in some weird way, with
no one breaking through, and the polls showing the
candidates locked in a virtual tie. 

George W. Bush can't defend the mess he's made in Iraq, and
John Kerry can't effectively attack Mr. Bush on Iraq. He
has fallen into the president's trap and foolishly agreed
that he would have given Mr. Bush the authority for the war
even if he had known there were no W.M.D. and no security
threats to the U.S. 

Barack Obama was wrong that "there's not a liberal America
and a conservative America." There is a liberal and a
conservative America, and Mr. Bush is happy to govern only
one of them. 

The new Pew Research Center poll finds the country ever
more divided. "The public takes a paradoxical view of
America's place in the world," the poll reports, with 45
percent of Americans saying the U.S. plays a more important
and powerful role as world leader than it did 10 years ago,
and 67 percent saying the U.S. is less respected. 

The president who promised a humble foreign policy ended up
with a foreign policy inflated by hubris - which is, after
all, a Greek idea. 

E-mail: liberties at nytimes.com 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/19/opinion/19dowd.html?ex=1093938906&ei=1&en=ea694c1e267e369e


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