ptodd@tekchips.UUCP (Philip Todd) (03/11/86)
It would seem, to judge by many of the articles posted on this newsgroup, that criticism of the status quo in the United States is regarded by many to be an activity which brands the perpetrator as un-American. Tim Sevener, in particular, is continually plagued by responses which assume that his (admittedly colorful) critiques of our society must be prompted by the love of some other society (USSR) rather than a love of what our society could be. Another response with all the intellectual power of a knee-jerk is to condemn any article discussing the defects of a particular regime if equal weight is not given to the defects of regimes at the other end of the political spectrum. If we must, before writing, ensure that our negative comment about some Marxist state is balanced by a negative comment of equivalent weight about some military dictatorship, and this negative comment must be matched by some slander about vote fraud in a token democracy, then we will never write anything. But perhaps here this newsgroup only echoes the nation as a whole. Congressmen are to be considered un-American if they disagree with any aspect of RR's policies; any international dialogue between the US and USSR on human rights elicits two disjoint lists of perpetrators. With the spread of TV preachers in politics, however, we have not taken this trend to the limit - will criticism of the current regime soon be not only un-American, but also un-Godly?