The Yankees Effect

As usual, Vaughan puts into perspective topics that Americans don't hear anything about. A girl who jumped into a latrine to save three adorable kittens? She's booked solid on all the talk shows and plastered all over the papers. She'll probably get a book deal out of it.

The EU, or any European news for that matter? Two articles, back of page 17, underneath the department store ads. Unless it's about EU nations not supporting our Crusade in the Middle East, it's no news in today's press.

Since America is such a huge landmass, and since we are hardly ever found wanting of anything, we can effectively think as if we're self-contained. As a nation, we're near-sighted in global matters because we've been a superpower since the end of WWII, and it's made us cocky. Every now and again, we have a humbling moment like the Bay of Pigs or Vietnam to remind us that we're not omnipotent. Make no mistake, Vietnam was a tragedy on an unprecedented scale, but America needed to learn a lesson in humility. The larger tragedy is that many have dismissed the failure (or "a draw" as Kevin Kline's character insists,) as a one-off, and refused to learn from it at all.

Though I'm not a sports fan in the least, I'll attempt a baseball analogy here. America's war efforts are like the New York Yankees.

The Yankees win because they can afford to pump insane amounts of money into the franchise and buy the greatest players. The individual players may despise each other and refuse to work together, but they're individually at the top of their game. The team has won so much that it hardly seems like an effort anymore. There's so many games throughout the season, only the die-hard fans watch all of them. The only time a game is news is when it's the World Series, or when a team actually beats them. And when any team has the audacity to beat them, the fans unite against a common enemy with a level of hatred usually reserved for murderers.

Take it down a level, and look at the people. The Yankee Fans are vaguely aware of other teams, Los Angeles, Minnesota, Chicago, Atlanta and such, since they occasionally play against the Yankees. But they don't give a second thought to the fact that these teams are whole different CITIES. Places with different fans, different industries, whole different cultures and personalities than their own. Places made up of people working, raising families, struggling to make ends meet, dealing with problems just like their own. Most Yankee fans have never been to these other cities, so the places aren't real in their minds. Just places you see pictures of or read about, not REAL places like here.

America is by no means alone in putting their own interests before other nations. All countries do that, it's self-preservation. But America takes the blue ribbon for disinterest in the world community. It's an amazing disconnect between the American military and the people: The Military has their hands in almost every conflict above the skirmish level across the globe, while the people rarely care about anything outside their own city.

So it's the total opposite of the famous activist slogan "Think Globally, Act Locally": America, in fact, Thinks Locally and Acts Globally.