Posted by
Daniel Crandall on Monday, June 23, 2008 1:00:44 PM
Doctorow's idea of the American Flag
Little did you know that the growth of a nation rests upon thievery, rape and pillage. That, in Cory Doctorow's rather twisted version of history, is how America became the great nation it is today (presuming he thinks America is a great nation).
In the
introduction to his audio story at Subterranean Press's online magazine Doctorow relates the emotional impact hearing his grandmother's stories about life during WWII in Leningrad (St. Petersburg before the long nightmare of Communism). She told him about having to throw bodies from apartment windows because she was too weak to carry them out, about how seeing frozen corpses on street corners, and other horrors during the siege of Leningrad.
And then we get this gem
"My grandmother’s stories found an easy marriage with the
contemporary narrative of developing nations being strong-armed into
taking on rich-country copyright and patent laws, even where this means
letting their citizens die by the millions for lack of AIDS drugs,
destroying their education system, or punishing local artists to
preserve imported, expensive culture.
"The USA was a pirate nation for the first 100 years of its
existence, ripping off the patents and trademarks of the imperial
European powers it had liberated itself from with blood. By keeping
their GDP at home, the US revolutionaries were able to bootstrap their
nation into an industrial powerhouse. Now, it seems, their descendants
are bent on ensuring that no other country can pull the same trick off."
In one fell swoop, Doctorow equates the American "contemporary narrative" with the Nazi Siege of Leningrad and turns America's founding Fathers into pirates.
Pathetic.
Doctorow's vision of America's Founding Fathers