Ned's more erudite readers will be aware that David Brooks, Ned's favorite conservative Catholic columnist, writing in the NYT posited that America ought to export its "middle class values" to the developing world. Ned's first response was to recoil in horror. However, he should have known that others would take up the cudgel and pound Brooks's well-meaning thesis into the mud where it so richly deserves to forever reside.
For one Sridhar Subramanian of Ned's old bailiwick, Goleta California, home of UCSB, has written a modest tirade that appeared in today's NYT. In it, he derides the idea that this country should export such nonsense, saying, in effect, if the typical middle-class and plutocrat values of overconsumption and waste were to become the norm in India, his home country, then the planet would suffer an ecological disaster.
It goes without saying that Ned energetically concurs, and would add further that if other American "values" like titanic hypocrisy, interfering in other country's internal affairs, carrying out undeclared merciless wars of aggression against anybody we don't like and creating enraged 'terrorists' by the thousands in the process, despoiling the planet by deforestation as was carried out in Vietnam, and so forth ad nauseam, are similar exports then the world can readily do without them.
But Ned predicts that sanctimonious hypocrites by the thousand will crawl out from under their dark, dank hiding places and decry this 'un-American' traitor, and demand that he 'go back to India.' Sridhar only expressed what many Americans believe but have been too cowed to express: that the values inherent in this decadent "capitalist paradise" are toxic to life, mental health and soul, and God forbid that any other country is so misguided and benighted to consider taking them on.
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