If you want a glimpse of the surreal, read what foreigners think about America in Watching America, a website that presents unique foreign perspectives. Prepare yourself to be perplexed by the views presented. If you click on their heading “Foreign News Sources”, they do offer a nifty listing on many foreign news sources and whether the site is in English, so that’s one small positive thing I can say about this site, which claims:
“It is not our purpose to find favorable or unfavorable content, but to reflect as accurately as possible how others perceive the richest and most powerful country in the world. We have no political agenda.”
You can laugh at that huge detour from the truth, I did 🙂
Fascinating! I’m going back to read some more. With some of those articles I encountered the ages-old question: When you enter Never-Never Land, do you laugh or cry?
That list of foreign sources is extremely useful! I bookmarked it.
Great link, Libertybelle!
do you laugh or cry?
Definitely laugh, there’s really plenty of actual stuff worth tears going on in America, but this propaganda isn’t of a level to even be concerned about. I am curious as to the background of all these “translators” though – indoctrinated American university students perhaps?
You raise a great point! The translator is an integral part of these articles. With books that have versions available right now, I always have to remember that I have have read two “Cyrano de Bergerac” (Rostand) paperbacks, one excellent and the other pedestrian, and also two “The Captive Mind” (Czeslaw Milosz) that are quite different, and two “Le Rouge et Le Noir” (Stendhal), one fancy and eloquent and the other plodding, and and I have to be careful to recommend the right ones when I think of them. A really good translator can make or break a book or essay.
I seriously wonder about current translations of important books of the past, and the possible predations of Progressive translators. I know that I have learned that libraries are getting rid of the very books you’d think they would most keep on hand. And a lot of wonderful children’s books are disappearing from even the used book marketplace.
As for your point about laughing at the stories at that site, I agree about “I laugh”—in the manner of Figaro in the “Barber of Seville” “I must force myself to laugh at everything lest I be obliged to weep”, or, as I’ve seen it in another translation, “I laugh that I do not cry.”
I have to admit, though, I had tears in my eyes this morning at what’s going on in Ukraine and Venezuela, and especially at the photo of Leopoldo Lopez saying goodbye to his wife just before he turned himself over to the monstrous government of Venezuela. May God be with him and his wife and followers.