And All That Stuff

Responding to Jeff Jarvis, who writes:

To dislike a country as diverse as America is misanthropic: America, more than any other state, contains the full range of humanity…

Sounds reasonable, but…

“I’m Joe Smith, I live in Brooklyn, and I’m invading Iraq?”

Nope. It doesn’t work. The fact is, there is an entity called the United States, it does often act as a single entity, and it does things - like invading Iraq - than can be disliked or even hated.

To be sure, stereotyping and prejudice based on nationality or culture would be narrow-minded. I’m sure I need tell no American that!

But this does not render impossible criticisms of the nation as a whole. And when someone posts explicitly defending the nation as a whole, it seems to me, it leaves one open to just such a response.