'Reasonable' anti-Americanism (updated)

I'm catching up with things a bit here after being away from home for three days. One of the things I've caught up with so far is a piece in Saturday's Guardian Weekend by Decca Aitkenhead, which shows that two days after the London bombing it was the usual fare in that newspaper. Aitkenhead begins by parading one of the contemporary illnesses of the airhead 'progressive' classes:

During the 1990s I went on holiday to America several times, and nobody objected, or noticed. President Bush and Iraq have changed everything. A fortnight in Florida shouldn't incur the disgrace of apartheid Sun City, exactly - but to many of my friends it would definitely take some explaining. This doesn't feel unreasonable. Anti-Americanism seems a legitimate response to the current political climate, and you don't sponsor a country you are claiming to censure, either with your spare time or your money.

So much the worse for many of Aitkenhead's friends. Anyway, the clever-clever burden of the piece is that New York, contrary to its own opinion of itself, is not better than anywhere else in the US (for which Idaho is made to stand in). No, it's just as bad. One might have thought that the Guardian would have delayed carrying something containing this passage:

[S]ince 9/11 [New York] has commodified boastfulness into an entire industry, tirelessly dedicated to I Love [the paper version has the heart symbol] New York merchandise. The only alternative on sale in many parts of Manhattan is merchandise branded with I Love NYPD instead.

I Love New York was a clever response to 9/11, capturing both the city's need to win back fearful tourists, and the affection inspired by its trauma. All the same, had London been al-Qaida's target that day, I doubt they'd now be selling I Love The Met T-shirts on Oxford Street - and I wouldn't want them to be, either. New York's 2012 Olympic bid died long ago, but blindly optimistic flags were still flying across the city as late as last week. London, meanwhile, still in with a chance as I write this, was plastered with posters urging: Fuck The Bid. I didn't care much either way about the bid - but I was enchanted by the posters, their reckless wit combined with the diligence of distribution.

Well, I don't know about the T-shirts, but 'I Love London' seems to be precisely the spirit of much of the response to the atrocities of last Thursday. And the day before that I didn't notice too much of the anti-Olympic bid sentiment Aitkenhead celebrates. It's plainly an accident that her article appeared when it did, just two days after the bombings. But it illustrates the sort of miserable, America-hating stuff one can happen upon in the Guardian on any average day. Except it wasn't an average day. Aitkenhead's piece closes so:

New York is just better than anywhere else [in the US] at converting America's ambition for consumption into urban reality. If you like that kind of thing, get yourself over there before the exchange rate turns. If, on the other hand, your anti-Americanism finds these values objectionable, stop kidding yourself. You do not Love New York.

Everything else aside here, there is also the sheer philistinism of a sensibility that can reduce one of world's great cities to this.

Update on July 12: Several readers have written in to correct Decca Aitkenhead on a point of fact. One of them: 'I just want to note that "I Love New York" appeared years before 9/11. Think what you will about such a slogan, but it had nothing to do with post-9/11 boosterism. Do these Guardian writers ever bother to do their homework?' See also here.