‘Why do people hate America?’

That’s a good question. It’s also the title of a book I found in a Paris bookshop, the Galignani, last September. It wasn’t the Americans I hated really when I bought the volume. I hated the price: Would you believe, for a small paperback published in the UK by Icon Books, just across the Channel, my credit card got dented by the sum of 15.82 euros. (At the time it was one dollar to one euro, so multiply that amount by the then going rate of P53 to one euro. The peso has lost much ground since then.)

The authors of that very interesting opus were Ziauddin Sardar, a Muslim writer, broadcaster and cultural critic, based in London; and Merryl Wyn Davies, a writer and anthropologist and a former television producer who used to work for the British Broadcasting Corp.’s religious programs. She’s Welsh.

I think the introduction to that critical tome fittingly set the tone of the undertaking on which the two had embarked. It said that as the dust cloud settled over Lower Manhattan on 11 September 2001, an unnamed shell-shocked woman emerged from the swirling gloom around the Twin Towers. Her words to a waiting television reporter were not "Why?", a "simple question of incomprehension, but a focused and pained question: "Why do they hate us?"

"Her words," the writers underscored, "were instantly taken up by everyone. They were addressed by President Bush, by politicians and commentators, they appeared in newspapers and magazines, were heard again and again on television and radio, and have been on the lips of people on the street and in their homes across America. And the same question has been asked far beyond the USA."

I won’t attempt, despite my deplorable tendency to verbosity, to capsulize or dissect this fascinating study. The only thread I will try to pull out of it, unfairly it must be added since one has to read the entire book to understand its whole argument, is that Americans are biased in their views and approach to the rest of the world. At the same time, it seems, the outside world is, in turn, biased in its reaction to and over-all view of America.

The way I look at it, there’s no "fix" to that situation. That’s the way it is.

Obviously, when Rome was a Big Power, instead of just a power in spaghetti, pizza and other pasta (and one of the scintillating world capitals of amoré), everybody hated Rome. Everybody, by the same token, scrambled to acquire Roman citizenship if possible, so they could join the Romans in bullying the rest of the known world (including all the lands adjoining Mare Nostrum, their Mediterranean "lake") and strut around proclaiming: civis Romanus sum!), (I am a Roman citizen!). It was this citizenship that often got our revered Epistle-writer, the great St. Paul – formerly the anti-Christian Saul – out of trouble.

Let’s face it. America is not as harmless as the Jolly Green Giant on food tins. America is too big-shouldered, ham-fisted, loud-mouthed to be loveable and therefore "loved". Yet it’s passing those who bad-mouth America seem to want to go there, acquire "green cards", and seek their fortune in the elusive paradise of milk and money.

Everyone detests America, if you listen to the frenzied rhetoric, yet so many seem to want to go there, including Muslims whose brethren accuse the USA of being a Jewish or Zionist-dominated country. Of course, the suicide-bombers wish to go there, too, for different – or, shucks, similar – reasons.

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The fierce but well-written book of Sardar and Davies has a fascinating Chapter Four appropriately entitled "American Hamburgers and Other Viruses".

The authors point out: "There is hardly a place in the world where one cannot get a hamburger. Even in the remote jungles of Sarawak, the rainforests of Brazil, the deserts of North Africa, one cannot escape the ‘golden arches’ of McDonald’s, the "flaming grills" of Burger King, the cute little girl of Wendy’s and other signs and symbols of American food chains. But hamburgers are more than ubiquitous. While the mass-produced hamburger is promoted as food, it is essentially junk, food compounded by a whole series of additives that make the final product of little nutritive value. Moreover, while a hamburger is certainly fast food, it is not, as is commonly claimed, the only or indeed the first fast food the world has ever seen. Every culture has its fast food. The shawarma (a form of rolled-up sandwich) in the Middle East, aloo-puri chaat in India, and nasi lamak (rice with dry fish) in South-East Asia, good old British fish and chips and the French baguette with cheese and ham are good examples. So, both as food and a cultural product, the hamburger pretends to be something it is clearly not."

"The hamburger is a particular source of hatred of America. It is the single most concentrated, or should that be congealed, symbol of the entire complex that is America. Like the hamburger, the idea of America has a number of separate ingredients: There is the government, the most powerful government on earth, or the sole hyperpower as we have termed it; there is the history of policy operated by successive American administrations and the consequences of these policies for countries and people beyond America; there is the enormous power of US corporations that can influence the policy of American government to favour their vested interests while remaining beyond the reach of any government to control or make them accountable; then there are the concepts, philosophy and ethos characteristic of the American world-view – such things as individualism and belief in personal freedom – that are like the relishes that flavour the hamburger; and there are the Americans themselves, with their particular blend of self-belief, seeming lack of interest in the rest of the world, and certainly that their way of life is the biggest, boldest and best for everyone. Like the hamburger, this multi-dimensional America is reduced and experienced as a standardised, mass-produced, packaged brand. Each aspect of America may have its own distinctive character, and many, taken in isolation, have more good attributes than questionable or negative connotations. But, like the burger, the essence of America is that the individual aspects of its influence seldom occur in isolation. A true hamburger is a superabundant, multi-layered compound entity. It is the degree to which America proclaims and glories in itself as a compound whole that makes the hamburger such a powerful metaphor for the nation, and such a potent symbol and focus for criticism of America in the rest of the world. The hamburger is more than its ingredients – it is, indeed, a way of life."

Whew! In their Ode to the Hamburger, I guess, the writers reveal themselves, not just the America they dislike. It was a profound essay they produced – and it’s true as they pointed out in a subsequent paragraph, that "the consumerism it (the hamburger) embodies is a clear cultural threat."

Their analysis is that the burger "personifies the way in which America is taking over the lives of ordinary people in the rest of the world and shrinking their culture space – their space to be themselves, to be different, to be other than America."

Oh, well. I know that in some countries, like those in the Middle East, as well as in Pakistan and India (the latter, the homeland of the Sacred Cow), as well as in Indonesia, there are angry mobs which attack Big Mac emporia, or bombers who bomb them. But I never, for my part, felt threatened by the hamburger "invasion" or regarded hamburgers with such vehemence, or imbued in them such significance.

I guess, it’s different folks, different strokes.

It takes as I’ve said, a profound thinker to see menace – except the terrible fact that it turns its victims into tubs of lard and layers on the fat – in the American hamburger.

Alas, burgers and the "couch potato" habit have transformed America into the World Capital of Obesity. It may thus be good for us grunts to go charging around in the desert. Nothing like sun, sand, and blazing sun to "burn out" those fat levels. (No "couch potatoes" out there in the Gulf, in those temperatures, believe me: Only baked potatoes.)

In our family, where pinakbet, dineng-deng, and Mama’s fabulous higado and arroz caldo, were "treats", we boys grew up with canned corned beef (carne norte), canned sardines, canned salmon, and condensed-milk sandwiches. Admittedly, the latter-mentioned sandwiches were unhealthily (drowned in mayonnaise, but we went in for soccer, basketball (sometimes basketbrawl), jogging, and walked to and from school, thus burning up most of the fat.

When I was a working student in New York – I part-timed as a waiter – of course I liked hamburgers, but couldn’t afford the pricier ones at Greasy John’s under the Third Avenue El. So I became a "White Castle" hamburger fan (never heard of it, did you?) Those were little burgers you could buy for ten cents a sandwich. Now, you can still get them "by the sack" anywhere in New Jersey. Yes, "White Castle" died out in New York, but they moved over to Joisey. Unhealthy? Of course, they are. When you exit a smokey "White Castle" outlet, you come out smelling obnoxiously like…well, hamburger. But I still love ’em.

And, down here in our archipelago, neither do we feel threatened. Our local hamburger "Jollibee" has defeated all "colonially-imposed" burgers hands down and even penetrated San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam), among other invasion beaches.

But, I suppose, that old hate-object, the American hamburger, will continue to provoke those fearful of their own cultures being smothered. Just as terms like Coca-Colonialism are still well-calculated to outrage nationalists here and there in the developing or Third World (Pepsi Cola, indeed predominates in the Arab world, incidentally, because many Arabs were led to believe Coke is owned by Jews.)

In fact, Agence France-Presse reported last Tuesday (Feb. 4) that a cola drink "aimed primarily at Muslims was being launched across Britain…The drink, Qibla Cola, is being offered as an alternative for Muslims and others who do not want to support Coca-Cola Co. Ten percent of the profit will go to the Muslim charity Islamic Aid."

"Muslims are increasingly questioning the role some major multinationals play in our societies," the news agency quotes Zahida Parween, founder of the company making the cola. "They ask," Zahida asserts, "should the money of the oppressed go to the oppressors?"

Perhaps the new Qibla Cola is truly halal. Will it become a hit among Muslims? I’ll go to Virra Mall next week in hopes that the first shipment will arrive there by air freight, so I can sample it. Hope the profits won’t go to the same Islamic charity organizations, though, which funded al-Qaeda.

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Executive Secretary Alberto Romulo is scheduled to met transport agency heads in Malacañang today. The conference was convened by Romulo and his Palace staff to discuss ways and means of mobilizing the government agency chiefs into getting their act together.

Although the Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC) is the "primary policy planning, programming, coordinating, implementing, regulating and administrative entity" (as defined) of the Executive Branch, there are still too many cooks in the administration meddling in that kitchen and messing up the broth. It’s time the DOTC asserted itself, based on its clear mandate under the law. This is a reminder to our friend, DOTC Secretary Larry Mendoza, not to be either "too nice" or accommodating.

The sad fact is that our traffic and our transportation systems are in dire straits owing to too many agencies formulating their own policies and implementing their own projects without coordinating at all with the DOTC. The result has been confusion and instability.

With the prospect of war in the Middle East inevitably shooting up the price of oil, triggering higher fares that must, also inevitably, lead to a clamor for wage adjustments, it’s urgent for President Macapagal-Arroyo to knock a few heads together in her government – and order her subordinates to work together, not egotistically (and avariciously?) battle each other for turf.

As for the grandstanders and prima donnas claiming closeness to the Palace and fondly thinking they have a monopoly on expertise and "brains", these knuckle-heads should have no place in a government confronted with a crisis.

GMA and Bert Romulo must tell them the score today. Indulging them and putting up with their antics would be ruinous.