Role Reversal

During the struggle against South African apartheid, journalist Alistair Sparks used to visit the United States to "have my batteries recharged," inspired by "the idealism of the Kennedy years, the civil rights campaign and all that followed." Now, he writes, the roles have reversed: "My own country has emerged, albeit still with many faults, as a beacon of racial reconciliation and co-existence that gives me at least some sense of personal fulfillment in my evening years, while my old moral lodestar, the U.S., has slipped into an abyss of moral degeneracy, of political lies and casuistry, of torture and cruelty and of a contempt for human rights and human decency that violates your own supposedly sacred Constitution. For me emotionally, it is as though the United States has become the old South Africa." Sparks is particularly dismayed by "the craven obsequiousness of the U.S. media" with regard to the war in Iraq. "On my several visits to the U.S. in the course of this war I have been disgusted by all the cheerleading for your 'brave boys in Iraq,' the flagwaving and the craven desire to be seen as patriotic that wiped out the journalistic duty to ask the tough questions about why the war was being fought, who told the lies, or even to portray the carnage that was taking place inside Iraq."