Comment by randcraw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by randcraw | Hacker News Reader

America is indeed an empire. Apparently the author was oblivious to this, and her epiphany that empire creates a reality distortion field for all those within it is really not that much of a revelation, except to her. Perpetuating unthinking patriotism is fundamental to empiric survival. Only as long as the populace believes in their inherent superiority (AKA exceptionalism) do their eyes remain blissfully closed to the consequences of their righteousness on others.

The rest of the article (book?) is about the author's slow growing awareness that non-Americans are warped by these distortions of reality too, in ways that are just as self-delusional and self-destructive. Yes, power does corrupt. Absolutely.

Frankly, I have a hard time seeing how anyone over 30 could find this piece compelling. It's founded in a childish self-centered view of the world, a self-indulgent bubble that finally popped for the author, but not until age 30?

Has this become typical? Even an Ivy League American student can be so insulated that they're not aware that people elsewhere in the world see the world so differently? That their disenfranchisement from power, both locally and globally leaves them bitter and mistrustful of all forms of authority? Who doesn't know this? Jeez. We just elected TRUMP, dammit. Who isn't aware that even the average American feels disempowered by the routine abuse of authority by self-perpetuating elites?

Likewise, I was equally taken aback at the general public's response to "Hillbilly Elegy" as epiphany. Back in the 1970's I lived on the edge of Appalachia, which left me well aware of the subsistence lifestyle in rural America that the book revealed as something new (to most?). Are such wide dynamic ranges of experience in and outside the USA really so invisible to most of us?

If so, that's freaking inexcusable. We live in an era where the ubiquity of the Net can make you aware of virtually every aspect of human experience on Earth in less than a heartbeat. Just open your eyes.

> Frankly, I have a hard time seeing how anyone over 30 could find this piece compelling. It's founded in a childish self-centered view of the world, a self-indulgent bubble that finally popped for the author, but not until age 30?

Ironically it sounds like you yourself are living in a bit of a bubble. I can assure you that many Americans over the age of 30 share what you describe as a self-centered view of the world.

Articles like this may seem obvious and redundant to you, me and other people that actively reach into the web for information. But there is a large...LARGE community of people that do not actively go looking for new information. They are fine or even scared to see what is beyond there bubble. So just like raising children. Constant reinforcement needs to happen to make things stick and let this information sink in. Eventually the light bulb flickers on for everyone.

>But there is a large...LARGE community of people that do not actively go looking for new information

I have to wonder what good an article like this is then. Which I think is the overall point of GP's post.

You hope some people that know nothing about the topic stumble upon it and this becomes there light bulb moment.

I've learned never to be surprised at what people haven't learned yet. Especially if it's not explicitly taught. After all, everyone starts out not knowing anything, and even with good students, there are always gaps.

Calling this "inexcusable" seems ungenerous. It's inevitable.

Obliviousness to the world at age 30 is inevitable? Hardly.

At age 31 the author just wrote a whole book based on her naivete, apparently without a mea culpa or inquiry into how that did or could happen, even after an Ivy League education.

I persist; inexcusable.

I do think she learned about world affairs rather late for someone who went to college, but it's inevitable that there are some people like that, just like it's inevitable that there are people who are below average in any skill you can think of. Good for her that she chose to write about this.

There are, after all, millions of Americans who never get a good understanding of what it's like in other countries. Changing this is a huge challenge. Going around saying things are "inexcusable" doesn't actually help fix them.

>Frankly, I have a hard time seeing how anyone over 30 could find this piece compelling. It's founded in a childish self-centered view of the world, a self-indulgent bubble that finally popped for the author, but not until age 30?

Meanwhile if you go to rural red state America, the 90% of the country that doesn't live in cities where people can remain proud of the ignorance while also not even being aware of it, will tell you, upon being informed the mixed world opinion of America? You will get variably surprise, denial, and anger. And that's for people over 30. They have no idea what the world thinks, some will deny it and others will scoff why they should care what someone else thinks, they're all stupid socialist countries anyway (and therefore their opinions don't matter, sort of logic).

I think you're in deep denial yourself about how deeply ignorant most Americans are by presuming only the young are this ignorant. I'm willing to bet the millennial generation is more well traveled than baby boom generation (I'm X) and most of the ignorant cluelessness about the rest of the world comes from the most clueless waste of space generation in America which is the baby boomers.

If anything, the internet has made us more insular, as every moment in every place can be substituted with the familiar dopamine drip from our friendly information dealers.

In other words, we used to see the Grand Canyon. Now we see it on a screen through a camera, and we spend the rest of our time at the Grand Canyon by posting about it on Facebook, Instagram, Reddit etc.

I see your point. For many it's been all too easy for the Net to foster a virtual vicarious view of other peoples' lives.

I'm old enough (60) for my early days to have been shaped more by a tangible Real World than an electronic one. I can see how those who grew up after the rise of Networked iLife might base their world view on less tangible experience, presuming they know more about hands-on cultural physics than the watching life through the World Wide Window allows.

I'm under the impression that far more people live in a bubble that you'd consider remarkably limited, than not.

i found it strange that she was sort of selling a story of the provincial country girl when she grew up in jersey.

New Jersey is a very, very diverse place. Things may not be as spaced out as they are in the Midwest, but culturally the New Jersey countryside is very very different from the sections on the Shore, on the Northeast Corridor, and in the affluent North.

> New Jersey

> ...

> affluent North.

Good one!

Meant the part of North Jersey that is affluent, not that all of North Jersey is affluent.

Alot of urban areas are very provincial.

I think you're being a little harsher than necessary toward the general public's failings in this regard, but yeah, the author does not appear to be contributing anything substantially different from what we learned from the unrest that the U.S. faced during the Vietnam war era.

> what we learned from the unrest that the U.S. faced during the Vietnam war era.

That the counterculture and the Communists were actively trying to make us lose a war? The author of this discusses real problems with the US -- situations like Guatemala, where we backed a feudal aristocracy, or Iran, where we set the country back considerably by helping overthrow Mossadeq -- and not just conspiracies carried out by our enemies.

Thinking about the meaning of "empire", I wonder if it would've been better for the US to have made various outright annexations after WWII. Not having to deal with an independent local government, or with self-interested local elites, makes things clearer and easier; the US's interventions in El Salvador or Guatemala would've been significantly less nasty if they had begun with annexation and the extension of domestic policies like EITC, Social Security, and property tax...

Far though I may be from supporting that counterculture, we lost almost 10X as many troops fighting in Vietnam - many conscripted - than in the middle east, and we hadn't suffered any attack from that part of the world on the scope of 9/11. I was not alive during the Vietnam War, but it's been my distinct impression that its critics saw our involvement there as straight military-industrial complex imperialism, fueled by the same kind of propagandistic nationalism / fear of the "other" the author discusses. I don't see what substantially new perspective the author is raising.

I can't speak to Latin America, but I recall that General Patton upon the 3rd Reich's surrender in Berlin wanted to quickly broker peace with a friendly German government so that he could press on eastward to Moscow and put an end to the Soviet Union while it was in a weakened state from the failed German invasion. Historic counterfactuals sure are interesting to think about.

There are people who live their entire lives without that bubble ever popping.

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