Michael Savage's Ban in U.K.: The Unraveling of Obama's International Unity?

An unusually interesting development is happening in the U.K. and perhaps soon to spread around Europe. No, it's not the British conversely stealing from America for a new reality show or sitcom. It's actually one of those situations that could break the back of a camel or, stripped of its metaphor, the weighted back of our current President. While it's obvious that President Obama's outlying goal outside myriad others is to reignite relations with countries that used to Freedom Fry us during the reign of W., the prospect of Europe creating a blacklist against certain controversial Americans from entering their borders is one that puts renewed relations on a bit of precipice that has to be tread much more carefully. This development also gives America a slight sense of direction of where U.K. and possibly other freedom-loving countries are going as they evolve their place in the world.

Call it coming close to a profound and adamant philosophic view of creating utopia where polarizing figures no longer exist in media or as household names.

The first sign of this is with Great Britain banning brutally honest radio talk show host Michael Savage. While we know Savage has a penchant for inserting his foot into his mouth more often than a contortionist can, the nature behind his banning gives either a widespread or isolated view of U.K.'s model view of their future. Since the ban of Savage came from British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith and presumably top brass above her head, it's probably safe to lean toward it being a more diffuse British view rather than just an internal governmental coterie.

In the view of Savage, it's free speech being eliminated in Western Europe, plus misinterpretation by the British. However, when you see the list of other Americans (and, let's be fair, others from around the globe) who are much more controversial than Savage is, it gives a strong indication that a strong conservative stance has developed in the U.K. that could very well spread out from there. Trying to figure out how this mindset and developed path toward more of a utopian existence started will involve delving into our prior relations and their general discounting of some American culture.

It isn't any secret that there's been a wide dichotomy of American pop culture between the U.K. and America going back decades. They never lost sight of how American network TV (and radio before that) borrowed heavily from British programming to make the ignorant American masses believe producers and writers here were creative wunderkinds. Add also the two country's sense of language that's always had a wide chasm in its sense of expression, despite our sharing of the basic structure of grammar. Even those in the fields of entertainment are sometimes worlds apart in comparing British performers to American ones.

In the vein of the radio talk (or chat) show host, Great Britain hasn't necessarily been into the shock jock idea America has made a cottage industry. You can safely place Michael Savage into the shock jock category, no matter how much he tries to spin it otherwise. But British radio is still relatively conservative in comparison to the mess we've made of things in radio here. As we all know, though, British TV is far from stiff upper lip. TV there was already ribald years ago with nudity and language freely used on the mainstream networks. Beyond that in the world of extremism, you don't typically it in U.K. entertainment, other than previously being allowed through other avenues to remind the populace the country upholds democracy.

So is this stance really the U.K.'s despising of America's allowance of extremist views in our media? Or is it overall that possible shift of Europe in tiring of a troubled world and creating a new philosophy for the sake of avoiding trouble down the road?
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The blackball list created by The Home Office in the U.K. is one filled with mostly Americans who've been allowed to express their far right or far left views in the States for years. You'll see the infamous and long-standing Rev. Fred Phelps and heads of various extremist groups, including one from the despicable Neo-Nazi National Alliance as just a start. Tolerance of these groups have been more than reasonable in America, with valid arguments here and there that say we shouldn't let them have a voice for our own good.

Yet America was founded on allowing these voices to be heard as well as conversely ignored. It's that distinction between what constituted America from being ruled by England where some basis of this banning of extremists in U.K. could come from. And yet we've heard arguments in recent years that America and U.K. should rejoin in a union as part of a larger and more powerful entity, especially in times of war.

Chances of that ever happening are remote anyway, regardless of what appears to be widening differences in philosophies once again between the British and true blue Americans. All that festering of isolationism between America and the rest of the world during the Presidency of George W. Bush appears to have allowed too many philosophical changes to take place before a new President could have a chance to make repairs. It doesn't take long for changes in philosophy to form into an adamancy that's impossible to reverse, no matter the adamancy of a persuasive U.S. President.

For President Obama, U.K.'s blacklist of American extremists and an apparent move away from allowing freedom for all voices could pose problems in his attempts to rebuild ties. Not that such a thing necessarily gets in the way of joining forces for certain higher causes. Yet if there's a desire by U.K. and soon other European countries to go after a more utopian existence at the expense of freedom, things could technically clash in a higher cause.

We should allow U.K. to pursue their cause, though, as a chance to see if eliminating extremism eventually leads to a more utopian existence. U.K. certainly deserves that after experiencing as much terror as America has in recent years. Since we'll never pursue that direction without infinite litigation from the ACLU, we'll just have to watch with interest. If there's eventual clear evidence that it does lead to a better society, it wouldn't be out of the question to see America steal from the British for the umpteenth time...

Source:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/05/07/us.savage.banned/