[UA] Greetings

[Timothy Ferguson]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ua-admin at lists.uchicago.edu [mailto:ua-admin at lists.uchicago.edu]On
> Behalf Of Epoch
>
> On Thu, 17 May 2001, James O'Rance wrote:
>
> > Epoch <msulliva at wso.williams.edu> said:
> >
> >  >>>Quantity doesn't really impress me much.  If there were 30
> clones of the
> > Crocodile Hunter on the air in the U.S., and I watched all of
> them, would I
> > have a good handle on Australian culture?<<<
> >
> > Of course not. But not every American TV show that we see is "Friends"
> > (although I'd rather have Friends than Survivor 2, which I've
> mercifully
> > missed). We get Buffy too.  ;)
>
> I'm kind of hard-pressed to think of a TV show that doesn't significantly
> skew the nature of the culture of the nation that it's set in.  That's
> more or less the point of TV shows -- they don't show everday life, we get
> plent of that every day.

See, here's the self-referentialism again.  Here it's perfectly normal to
get TV which shows the fascinating minutiae of how people other than us
live.  A vast chunk of our public broadcasting is taken up with this - do
Americans not do documentaries?

That's facetious, I watched a fascinating one on New York...the guy who did
it has a series...the others were on the Civil War and baseball, as I
recall.

> >  >>>Do you know who the governor of California is?  Our Senators?<<<
> >
> > There are certainly governors and Senators named on the news
> from time to
> > time, especially if you have a pay TV service. Anyway.
>
> Sure.  And doubtless the PM of Australia is mentioned on our TV from time
> to time (I don't have a television, so I'm even more cut off from
> everything than most people).  And if I did have a TV, I'd doubtless pay
> no more attention to it than you do to the governor of California.

Our PM visited Washington a couple of years ago and Bill refused to see him.
He also refused to return calls during the Timor crisis until slightly after
our Foreign Minister decided he was being stonewalled and began "megaphone
diplomacy" - that is giving embarrassing interviews to CNN to try to end-run
the President by speaking directly to the American people.

Our politicians don't get on your TV.  They are simply boring -and not even
your politicians think they are significant except in defence matters.

> I suggest that you're probably overestimating the amount of religious
> influence, and particularly conservative Christian religious influence,
> that there is in public life here.

I think perhaps your religious influence is invisible to you because it
appears normal.

Why, for example, is it that every interview I see with any of your
politicians ends "God Bless America"?  I cringe when I hear it.  American
friends tell me that in Australia beer has a similar omnipresence...


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