|
March 23, 2002
T.W. Croft
Enron's
Attack on Our
Economic Security
March 22, 2002
Robert Jensen
Corporate Power is a
Threat to Democracy
Tommy
Ates
The
Future of Black Academia
Rep. Ron Paul
Why are We in Ukraine?
March 21, 2002
McQuinn,
Munson, & Wheeler
Stars
and Stripes:
Killing for the Flag?
John Chuckman
How Change is Wrought
David
Vest
Hail
to the Chaff
March 20, 2002
Kay Lee
Censorship at Angelfire
Robert
Jensen
The
Politics of Pain
and Pleasure
Sheperd Bliss
Notes from Hawai'i:
Trouble in Paradise
Rick Giambetti
Prozac
and Suicide:
an Interview with
Dr. David Healy
Philip Farruggio
Bullies
Lori Allen
Live
from Ramallah:
The Madness of Occupation
March
19, 2002
Tariq
Ali
Nuke
Iraq?
Phyllis
Pollack
Roger
Daltrey's LA Surprise
Amir Ahmadi
War-Mongering
Academics:
The New Tartuffe
Ben White
Bomber
Blair
Fran Shor
Child-Murderers
and Madmen
March
18, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Crazy
is Cool
Dave Marsh
DeskScan:
What's Playing At My House
Armen
Khanbabyan
The
Pentagon in the Caucasus:
Georgia Is Only the Beginning
Gabriel
Ash
Abdullah
v. Osama
Bernard
Weiner
Middle
East for Dummies
Alexander
Cockburn
Tipping
in America
March
17, 2002
David
Vest
The
Politics of Packaging
Tariq
Ali
The
Left's New Empire Loyalists
March
16, 2002
Chris
Floyd
Ashcroft's
Secret Snatches
March 15, 2002
Doron Rosenblum
Israel's Settler Warlords
Alex Lynch
Rhetorical
Attacks On Iraq
Norman Madarasz
Neo-Con Propaganda
and the National Review
Paul-Marie
de La Gorce
Making
Enemies
March
14, 2002
Dr. Susan
Block
RIP
Danny Pearl
Francis
Boyle
Bush
Nuke Plan Violates International Law, Again
Wayne
Saunders
Memo
to Paul McCartney:
There Are Two Kinds
of Freedom, Sir
H.P. Albarelli
Anthrax
Cover-up?
March
13, 2002
Amira
Hass
Are
the Occupied Protecting the Occupier?
CounterPunch
Wire
National
Review Editors Suggest Nuking Mecca
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Personal
Responsibility
for Corporate Elites?
Robert
Fisk
Arabs
Don't Want US
to Strike Iraq
Alexander
Cockburn
When
Billy Graham Wanted
to Kill One Million People
March
12, 2002
Kay Lee
Dangerous
Changes in
California's Prisons
John Patrick
Leary
The
Return of Otto Reich
Wole Akande
US
is Being Discredited
in the Eyes of Africa
March
11, 2002
Hani Shukrallah
This
is the Way the World Ends
Tommy
Ates
Bush's
New Nuke Policy:
Target Allies and Enemies
Lidia Andrusenko
The Great
Chicken War:
Bush v. Putin
Dave Marsh
10
CDs Playing On My Desk
John Chuckman
Footprints
in the Dust
Norman
Madarasz
Max
Steel in a Time of Chaos
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
INSIDE
EXCLUSIVE
TO
COUNTERPUNCH
SUBSCRIBERS
Published Oct. 15, 2001
8-Page Special Issue
War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
Nuke 'Em
Search
CounterPunch
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
Buy
This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
|
March 23, 2002
The American Soul and Empire
By Shepherd Bliss
For over half a year now I have been trying to
make meaning from the events surrounding the Sept. 11 Fall of
the Towers. Grief, fear, and anger prompted this search. I have
consumed hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles, columns,
analyses, and commentaries by journalists, pundits, political
scientists and others.
None has helped me discern meaning as
much as a book published early in 2002 that was written before
that fateful day and focuses on the past. The American Soul by Jacob Needleman, professor
of philosophy at San Francisco State University, has stimulated
me to see a larger picture. Subtitled "Rediscovering the
Wisdom of the Founders," this readable book has enabled
me to imagine a positive post-Sept. 11 future for a re-newed
America.
An admirer of America, its traditions,
and possibilities, Needleman ponders the greatness of Washington
and Jefferson and honors Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman,
Crazy Horse, and Martin Luther King, Jr. He adds, "Real
reflection throws dazzling light on the disappointments,  mistakes, failures and even
crimes of America." He laments "the disease of materialism"
and "the affliction visited upon us by our successes."
But he seeks to "neither revile nor to romanticize the
actions and actors of America's past." "Nations, as
such, come and go," Needleman observes. "Persia, Rome,
Byzantium all sunk into the ocean of time." Needleman calls
on Americans to recover "the inner meaning of democracy,"
or lose it. He affirms America's promises of freedom, equality,
and social opportunity. Specific American virtues and their
"shadows" are detailed--liberty, which can degenerate
into self-gratification; independence, which can decline into
individualism; practicality, which can regress into blind materialism;
the rule of law, which can become an usurper; hard work, which
can enslave; freedom of speech, which can deteriorate into empty
talk.
Needleman wants us to "think in
a new way about America." Or "it will be an outer
empire alone, an empire only of money or military power or empty
promises. And such an empire will soon die." Perhaps that
is what is happening now. The U.S. Empire, at least as we have
known it, may be declining. Or as the ancient saying goes, "The
king is dead. Long live the king!"
The vicious Sept. 11 attack caught most
Americans by surprise. Others were not as surprised. Many nations
had experienced such deadly attacks, sometimes even by the U.S.
The U.S. government chose a full spectrum military response
to the Sept. 11 crime, thus compounding the crisis. Its first
targets were the violent al Qaeda and the fundamentalist Taliban
in Afghanistan. After their apparent rout--in which mainly innocent
civilians were killed--the U.S. has threatened to widen its
attack on the "Evil Axis of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea."
Last year a predator began killing chickens
on my farm. After the initial taste of blood, this wolf-dog
returned night after night to attack. As the mighty U.S. military
threatens to expand its targets, much of the world sees it
as a blood-thirsty predator. Boston Globe columnist James Carroll's
March 12 column notes that America has quickly gone from being
a civilized and imaginative Athens to a bellicose Sparta which
"define(s) itself so profoundly around war...we have reinvented
ourselves as the most belligerent people on Earth."
As the great American pacifist A.J. Muste
observed after World War I, post-war problems can be greater
for the victor than for the defeated. Full of its power, the
U.S. has already expanded military activities in the Philippines
and Colombia. Other countries at risk include Yemen, the Sudan,
Georgia, and Somalia. How might the rest of the world feel
as it hears the U.S. talk of its plans for nuclear attacks?
The U.S. may be acting like a wounded
beast, still powerful, but perhaps mortally wounded--not so
much by the Sept. 11 attacks as by its military response, which
increasingly isolates it in the world. The current Administration
seems willing to go-it-alone against perceived enemies. As the
U.S. continues it vengeful attacks, it loses any moral claim
and strengthens its so-called "enemies." The Bush
Administration may achieve what no one else has been able to
do and unite the Arab world. As City Council member Larry Robinson
in the Northern California city of Sebastopol has written, "Democracy
is under attack in America. But the greatest threats are not
from foreign terrorists." They come from inside and from
our own behavior. Needleman warns that "America needs the
goodwill of the world for its survival." Such goodwill
is rapidly eroding as the U.S. military expands its deadly reach.
Walt Whitman is an American hero whom
Needleman explores, noting, "To Whitman, who was emerging
as America's greatest visionary poet, Lincoln incarnated the
essence of American democracy: the harmonious blending of the
mystical and the pragmatic within the individual soul."
Whitman wrote about the great ideas of America--independence,
freedom, equality, the people, and the individual. Needleman
describes his "Democratic Vistas" as "the most
powerful manifesto ever written about the inner meaning of American
democracy."
In his final chapter, "Toward a
Community of Conscience," Needleman turns to the future
and America's sustainability: "We need to discover how
to look impartially at both the inner greatness that calls to
us and the profound weaknesses that determine the life we actually
live--with all its self-deception, arrogance and betrayal."
Whereas some are quick to condemn America, others rush to excuse
it and tolerate no fault-finding. We need to find a balanced
posture from which to allow appropriate self-criticism and
comments from outside, or we will not make it through this darkness.
Some may find this book too abstract,
too critical, or even too hopeful. The author, after all, is
a philosopher, not an historian or political scientist. The
conservative perspective in the U.S. often appeals to the spiritual
and psychological longings and aspirations of people. Perhaps
it is time that others gave more attention to deeper issues,
as addressed in "The American Soul."
America needs the soul-searching for
which Needleman calls. Fortunately, some are engaged in such
deep reflection. Columnist Carroll describes America's "dark
side." He notes that by dealing directly with "grief,
anger, and fear" we can get beyond revenge to "wisdom,"
the word Needleman also uses to describe where soul-searching
can arrive.
In "The American Soul's" final
words Needleman calls us to "both raise our heads in the
vision of authentic human dignity and lower our heads in the
vision of authentic remorse." With such a posture we can
step "into the future of the new America."
Or as the soulful poet Deena Metzger
writes,
They are trying to set fire to the world.
We are endangered.
There is time only to work slowly.
There is no time not to love.
Shepherd Bliss
is a member of the North Bay Progressive Media Collective and
can be reached at sb3@pon.net.
|