This is a response to an email comment that was sent to the Amazoness Quartet. Here is the email in question...

"You guys are idiots. Anime is for the Asians. I mean REAL asians. You Americans stick with your own series. You think you know everything but have you lived in Asia? Uh...no. I know everything about Sailor Moon and the people in Asia does too. Americans don't know shit. They get on the stupid computer and learn everything from there. What's with you people? YOu got your hands on a few original comics and boom, you know everything. You begin to brag about your few comics and make it sound like a lot. Americans are nothing but pieces of trash when it comes to Anime. Anime are for Asians. That is where it was made and Asians (oriental) are the people they made it for. They only dubbed it here for the money. You don't speak Japanese perfectly so you should have no idea what they are saying. How can you tell it's better? Just becuase you read the english translations on the interneet? Do you think that's accurate? Dumbasses. Please reply. I want to hear the idiots try to say something smart.�

- Lily

First off, we have the basic premise of the email, that "anime is for the asians". Really? Where does it say that? The first thing that popped into my mind as I read this is "Anime originated from Disney...". However that might not be enough. I guess that means that Microsoft Internet Explorer is for Americans. All you damned foreigners are gonna have to make do with browsers made in your own country.

Let's take this to the absurd extreme. Anything made in a country is for that country, and no one else. Before you jump up and yell in support, say goodbye to most of civilization because in today's world, civilization does not exist without the import and export of products.

The biggest thing we lose is oil from the arabic countries, which means either we open up every oil reserve we have, much to the dismay of the environmentalists, but if we're lucky, gas prices and home heating prices shouldn't rise too far above $5 a gallon, or we find another fuel source�which could explain the millions spent on the study of cow-produced methane emissions.

This kind of attitude would mean that countries would not be able to export parts to third-world countries for manufacture into the completed product, which is then sent back for sale in places like the US, which would cause all sorts of fun results, like massive illegal immigration into this country for all of the low-level jobs we'd have here.

The results from such a policy are too many to go into here. How about food? Want a taco? Go to Mexico. Want pizza? Hop a ship and go to Italy. Have a hankering for some kelbasa (sp)? Stop in Poland after that pizza dinner.

What the person writing this email forgets is that the spread of products around the world is based in the spread of different cultures and the workings of the capitalist system. People come to this country from other parts of the world, and they don't simply leave their culture behind them. And people figured out a long time ago that things from other parts of the world have a ready market here because they simply are not the norm. They�re unique, and therefore, there�s a market for them.

Anime is played on TV, and TV is a forum for ideas. If you applied Lily�s rantings to ideas, Germany would have developed the atomic bomb, because at the time, most of the really good scientific work in the related fields was happening in Germany, and only the rise of the Third Reich caused most of those people to flee to a place where they would not be persecuted.

So, ideas, and products are not, and should never be tied to one country. We never know where the next big idea may come from, and the world as a whole benefits from the free exchange of ideas. The same goes for goods, services, and products. Things such as anime are brought to the US because people here want to see them and will pay good money to do so. If Lily truly wants to complain, he or she should go talk to those greedy Japanese who are busy taking American money. While that is happening, I�ll curl up and put on one of my anime videos.

Good luck, Lily.

Artemis

(comments welcome - please email me at [email protected] and I will post your comments here as well.)