Sunday, October 26, 2008

Cursing and Loving the Internet (At The Same Time)

The perception of American culture in Argentina has always surprised me. Someone told me that they thought everyone in America drank whiskey. Someone else told me that Americans eat huge breakfasts. People want to know if cowboys walk the streets of the West or if jocks, cheerleaders, and nerds make up highly segregated high school cliques. Obviously a lot of this comes from the American movies that are shown on almost every film channel day and night.

On the other hand the perception of American politics and current affairs is almost dead on. My host dad watches the Argentine news and knows just about as much as I do about the election in the United States. Listening to Argentine reporters talk about the election also takes away a lot of the bias. All this aside I found the following incident pretty amusing...

I got up from a nap today and walked into the office where my host dad was watching a video of an American talking about the collapse of the U.S. financial system and the introduction of the Amero currency. The man went on to describe how the United States had minted the Amero (he even had gotten his hands on one of the coins) and how we would all be doomed if it were to be implimented. He urged all Americans to exchange their money to gold or silver or even French Francs (de facto as of 2002) immeadiately. My host dad was in disbelief and wanted to know what I thought of this. Of course I told him I thought it was some stupid conspiracy theory.

I decided to look up the host of the video, Hal Turner. Here's the first line from his wikipedia entry: Harold "Hal" Turner is an American white nationalist and white supremacist from North Bergen, New Jersey. We soon decided that there was probably little truth to the video.

However, I guess there is some truth to the saying "don't believe everything you see on the internet." I'm just glad that we took the time to do a little further research. And that I have an internet dictionary to translate supremacist.

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