Rogue Nation
by Noel Rooney
[ bookreviews ]
Oh, Doctor Coleman. May I call you Vernon? Vern, mate. You're right, of course, and most of us agree with you, broadly. And plenty of your book is no more than sensible observation; there are any number of disquieting facts lurking in the US locker, and you cite a good proportion of them. And that other stuff, the diatribes; most of us have thought some of those thoughts, of course we have.
But your book is the literary equivalent of pebbledash; for every solid fact or statistic, there's a slurry of ill-conceived and ill-expressed ire. And some of the, er, facts (like this one, for instance): "A survey found that a large number of textbooks used in the USA are riddled with errors." It's not just the articles which are kind of indefinite here.
And Vern, while it's certainly true that American English can sound, and look, decidedly funny to a British speaker (your readers' letters attest abundantly to that reaction) how did we get from there to "British right, American wrong"? the pilgrims, as you undoubtedly know, left rather in the period of the great vowel shift, before British spelling disengaged from its phonetic base, so is it just possible that the pilgrims took a relatively accurate vocabulary with them?
I was shocked when I read your description of obese people as disgusting (did you ever say that to one of your patients?), and the several passages which imply that the obese have only themselves to blame (for being American perhaps?). And as far as I know, not all American Jews are rich Zionists on the rabid right. Most American Jews do not agree with Israel's treatment of the Palestinians at all; and the majority of them are nervous of Israel's supporters on the Christian right because they are painfully aware (as you should perhaps be) of the deep and dangerous irony presented by fundamentally anti-Semitic Zionists.
Somewhere, Vern, in one or other (maybe a number) of your 90-odd books (impressive, that; but then if this book is anything to go by, you work at quite a pace), you'll almost certainly find a piece of advice along the lines of "when you feel yourself getting really angry, stop what you're doing and take a few deep breaths." There, doesn't that feel better?
