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Today's
Stories
September 11
/ 12, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Swatting
at Flies
September 10,
2004
Patrick Cockburn
Disappointment
at Samarrah?
Michael Donnelly
Democrats v. Democracy
Alan Farago
Mosquitoes in a Hurricane
Doug Giebel
Karl Rove's Terror Playbook
Mike Whitney
Bob Graham's Political Tsunami
David Domke
God's
Will, According to the Bush Administration
September 9,
2004
Joe Bageant
Karaoke
Night in Bush's America
Ed Kinane
Abducted in Baghdad
Peter Bohmer
The Cuban Revolution: Present and Future
Todd May
The Emerging Case for a Single-State Solution
Jeremy Scahill
The New York Model: Indymedia and the Text Message Jihad
Joshua Frank
Green House Party Gasses
Fran Shor
The Crisis in Public Dissent: When Protest is Considered a Terrorist
Act
Patrick Cockburn
Welcome
to the Dirtiest City in the World: Despair in Baghdad
Website of
the Day
Liberty Street Protest: No to War at Ground Zero
September 8,
2004
Patrick Cockburn
This
Doesn't Smell Like Victory: A War on Two Fronts in Iraq
Dave Lindorff
Bush Confuses; Kerry Mute: Spinning 1000 Dead
Bulent Gokay
Russian and Chechnia After Beslan
Lisa Viscidi
Land Reform and Conflict in Guatemala
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Byrd's Eye View
Mike Whitney
Afghanistan: American's Drug Colony
Stan Goff
Body
Count: 1001
Website of
the Day
Bush and the Love Doctors
Sex,
Drugs & the Blues!
Serpents in the Garden
CounterPunch's
Sizzling New Book on Culture and Sex is Now Available
Click here to purchase
September 7,
2004
Diane Christian
Hostage Tactics: a Game of Mortal Poker
Joshua Frank
Greens
Unravel from Within
Patrick Cockburn
Fallujah
Erupts Again: US Death Toll in Iraq Nears 1000
Ron Jacobs
Bush and Putin: "We're Not Girlie Men"
Chris Floyd
Cry Havoc: Bush's Own Personal Janjaweed
Dr. Carol Wolman
No Blood for Oil at Paul Bunyan Day Parade
John Ross
The
Politics of Darkness North / South
September 6,
2004
Alexander Cockburn
An
Anti-Labor Day That Lives in Infamy: How Many Democrats Voted
For Taft-Hartley?
Ralph Nader
The
Cruel Legacy of Taft-Hartley: a Labor Day Call for Rights for
Working People
Lee Sustar
What's Driving the Attack on Pensions?
Kathleen and
Bill Christison
Dual
Loyalties: the Bush Necons and Israel
September 4-5,
2004
Alexander Cockburn
Elephants
and Gramsci
Ted Honderich
The
Way Things Are
Sasan Fayazmanesh
The
Holy Empire: Who We Are and What We Do
Douglas Valentine
What the World Should Know About Guantanamo
Patrick Cockburn
New Iraqi Police State Flexes Its Muscles
Gary Leupp
Neo Cons Under Fire
Fred Gardner
Pot Shots: the Hempstead T-Shirt
William A.
Cook
The
Day of the Lemming
Dave Zirin
Kobe Bryant and the Price of Freedom
John Chuckman
The Day the World Ended
Karyn Strickler
God Save the Endangered Species Act
Vanessa Jones
Bad Day with an Ikea Cup
Mike Whitney
Kerry: the "Better" War Candidate
Mark Donham
Dear John (Kerry): Start Explaining and Fast
Mickey Z.
McBypass Nation: Feeling Clinton's Pain
Alan Farago
Can the Everglades be Fixed?
Poets' Basement
Landau and Albert
September 3,
2004
Jeffrey St.
Clair
High
Plains Grifter: Jesus Told Him Where to Bomb
Rahul Mahajan
Bush's RNC Speech: an Annotated Response
Carl Estabrook
The
Book of Slaughter and Forgetting
Joshua Frank
The Florida of the Northwest: Oregon Dems Sabotage Nader Again
Gary Leupp
Music to My Ears: Sunday's March
James Hollander
Deja Vu in Manhattan: Assisted Political Suicide?
Mark Engler
Republicans
Among Us: a Week at the RNC, Inside and Out
Jesse Sharkey
Making Students and Teachers Pay for the Crisis in Education
Jane Stillwater
Calling the Cops on Your Own Kid
Stephen Green
Serving
Two Flags: the Bush Neo-Cons and Israel
September 2,
2004
Jeffrey St.
Clair
High
Plains Grifter: Part 3: More Pricks Than Kicks
Max Gimble
Et Tu, Menchu? Extrajudicial Killings and Clandestine Graves
in Guatemala
James Petras
President Chavez and the Referendum: Myths and Realities
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush and the Afghan Electoral Model: "If They Want to Vote
Twice, Let Them"
Todd Chretien & Jessie
Muldoon
Will the Democrats Expel Zell Miller?
Jack Random
Spite and Venom Day: the Turncoat and the Profiteer
Alan Maass
The Real Vietnam
Christa Allen
Contre Bush
Website of
the Day
[Redacted]
September 1,
2004
Alexander Cockburn
The
Stench of Doom
Kathleen and Bill Christison
Poor Larry Franklin
Dave Lindorff
Kerry's Litmus Test
Josh Frank
Protest in White: Not All of New York Rises Up
John L. Hess
Moles, Scoops and Flip Flops
Mike Whitney
Deconstructing Arnold
Jack Random
Kindergarten Night at the RNC
Andrew Wilson
War on the Pachyderms: Why Do Elephants Hate Us?
Jeffrey St.
Clair
High
Plains Grifter: Part Two: Mark His Words
August 31,
2004
Joseph Nevins
Escapism
and Global Apartheid: The Dominican Republic & the NYTs
Matt Vidal
Beyond
Bush's Rhetoric on the Economy
Neve Gordon
Kerry and the Middle East
Dave Lindorff
Bush
the Peace Candidate?
Mike Whitney
NPR Leads the Charge for War Against Iran
Jack Random
Opening Night: Playing the War Card
Jeffrey St.
Clair
High
Plains Grifter: the Life and Crimes of George W. Bush (Part One)
CounterPunch Photo of the Day
Pete Seeger in NYC
August 30,
2004
Justin Podhur
The
Disappeared Mayor
Shaun Joseph
The
Hypocrites at TheNaderbasher.com
Mike Whitney
Israeli Moles in the Pentagon: What More Could They Possibly
Want?
Ron Jacobs
Live, From New York: the Majority of Protesters Claimed No Candidate
David Lindorff
Sunday in Manhattan: the Sound of Marchin', Chargin' Feet, Boy
Dave Zirin
USA Basketball: The Team White America Loved to Hate
Sam Husseini
Israeli Spying on the US: a Long History
August 28 /
29, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Zombies
for Kerry
Patrick Cockburn
Najaf Ceasefire Good for Iraq, But Weakens Allawi and US
Ray McGovern
Blowing Smoke on Intelligence
Dr. Juan Romagoza
From El Salvador to Abu Ghraib: Reflections of Torture Survivor
Ray Hanania
An Israeli Spy in the Pentagon? Ridiculous!
Fred Gardner
Eddie Lepp Busted by DEA: Facing Life for Growing Medical Pot
Diane Christian
Big Men: the Better Leader Lets You Live
William S. Lind
The Desert Fox
Paul D'Amato
The Left Takes a Dive for Kerry
Joshua Frank
Greens at the Crossroads
Mickey Z.
Media Declares War on Anti-War Protests
Winslow T. Wheeler
Sen. McCain's Pork Chops: an Exchange
Justin E.H.
Smith
The New Age Racket and the Left
Thomas St. John
Burning Slaves at the Stake: On "Sinners in the Hands of
an Angry God"
Ali Tonak
Help the NYPD?
Mark Engler
New York Says "No"
Justin Felux
Haiti: the Attica of the Americas
Poets' Basement
Gelman, Albert, Ford and Hamod
August 27,
2004
Gary Leupp
Neocon
Musings
Robin Cook
The
Ghosts of Abu Ghraib
Diane Christian
Disarming
Michael Donnelly
Situational Democracy: the Show Me the Green Party?
Jack Random
4F and Other Heroes: an Army of War Resisters
Mike Ferner
"To the Swift Boats!"
Mazin Qumsiyeh
7000 Palestinian Political Prisoners
Veronza Bowers, Jr.
"You Won't Be Leaving Tomorrow"
August 26,
2004
M. Shahid Alam
The
Clash Thesis: a Failing Ideology?
Diane Christian
War
Rules: Bush is No Sun Tzu
Derek Seidman
"They're As Bad As Wal-Mart:" Starbucks Workers Get
Organized
David Lindorff
Court to RNC Protesters: Drop the Rally
Christopher
Brauchli
Signs of Dissent: the Bush in the Bubble
Stew Albert
Reporting Suspicious Activity
Mark Donham
Judgement in Athens: Give the Koreans Their Day in Court
Saul Landau
Pinochet:
the Al Capone of the Southern Cone
Website of
the Day
The Kerry 527 Ad You'll Never See
August 25,
2004
Amelia Peltz
Can
I Have 9.8 Seconds of Your Time?
Noah Leavitt
Defining and Redefining Torture
Ron Jacobs
Takin' It to the Streets: It's Not About the Election, It's About
Democracy
James Brooks
Coronado Crosses the Jordan
Akiva Eldar
How to Win the Jewish Vote: Turn Gaza into a "Mini-Afghanistan"
Gemma Araneta
Chavez's New Brand of Populism
Philip Cryan
Uribe's Boys: the Death Squads of Colombia
CounterPunch Wire
Cheney Opens the Closet Door
August 24,
2004
Jeremy Scahill
John
Kerry: the Warchurian Candidate
Gary Leupp
"We
Want Them to Go Away"
David Domke
God
Willing: an Echoing Press and Political Fundamentalism
William Loren Katz
The Meaning of Hugo Chávez: Black and Indian Power in
Venezuela
Jonah Gindin
With Chavez? Reading the International Private Media
Fran Schor
Denying Atrocities: From Vietnam to Fallujah
Joe Bageant
Driving
on the Bones of God
Website of the Day
The Great America Lockdown: a Primer for the RNC
August 23,
2004
Winslow Wheeler
Don't
Mind If I Do: Porkbarrel and the War on Terror
John Pilger
Bush
May Be the Lesser Evil
Stan Goff
Swift
Boat Dogfight
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
Notes
from the West Bank: Build, Demolish, Rebuild
Mike Whitney
The Unraveling of Afghanistan
William Blum
Brave
New World of Iraqi Sovereignty
Ralph Nader
A Letter to the Washington Post: a Shameful and Unsavory Editorial
August 21 /
22, 2004
Cockburn /
St. Clair
"They
Want Blood:" The Bi-Partisan Origins of the Total War on
Drugs
Landau / Hassen
Failing
the Mission? Form a Commission
Brian Cloughley
The
Bush Team in Iraq: Moral Cowardice, as Practiced by Experts
Josh Frank
Nader as David Duke? The ADL Wants You to Think So
Mike Whitney
Reincarnating Mengele: the Torture Doctors of Abu Ghraib
Ron Jacobs
Day Labor Blues
Mickey Z.
Shooting at Whales: 40 Years After Tonkin
Fred Gardner
Dr. Wolman Comes Out: The Cannabis Consultants
Dave Zirin
Uprising in Athens: Iraqi Soccer Team Gives Bush the Boot
Josh Saxe
Witnessing Police Brutality in LA
Yanar Mohammed
Letter from Baghdad: a Democracy of Killings and Bombings
Helen Williams
Ali's Story: a Taste of Reality from Baghdad
Michael Donnelly
Elemental and NaturalForests, Fire and Recovery
Elizabeth Schulte
The Crisis in Affordable Housing
Poets' Basement
Adler, Albert, Virgil, Ford and Krieger
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
Here for More Stories.
|
Weekend Edition
September 11 / 12, 2004
A Clinical
Study
Anti-Americanism
By
BERNARD CHAZELLE
Last summer, with France on his mind,
the British historian Paul Johnson graced the pages of Forbes
Magazine with this trenchant observation: "Anti-Americanism
is racist envy" [1]. Lest anyone miss the point, the best-selling
author quickly rephrased it in more accessible language: "France
is not a democracy." His novel insight could hardly be dismissed
as mere "anti-Frenchism" for the simple reason that
the word does not exist. In fact, neither does anti-Polishism,
anti-Spanishism, or even anti-Vaticanism. (Each one googles in
the single digits--the modern definition of nonexistence.) With
over 115,000 Google hits, anti-Americanism stands alone: a living
testament to US exceptionalism.
But what is it, anyway? As
so often, ingenuousness is of no help. Indeed, if the word were
to connote simple, unadorned hostility toward Americans, wouldn't
the enslavement of half the population of the Deep South in the
mid-19th century constitute its most perfect embodiment [2]?
Slavery, lynchings, miscegenation laws... Truly, can anything
be more anti-American?
Apparently yes. Google the
words "anti-Americanism, Jim Crow" and you get a paltry
390 hits. Substitute "Jacques Chirac" for "Jim
Crow" and you rake in a much healthier 5,210 hits. Trade
the French president for "intellectuals" and up you
soar to 14,000. Paul Johnson understands: "Anti-Americanism
is the prevailing disease of intellectuals today," avers
the historian, who, leaving Osama off the hook, proceeds to aim
his fire at effete gaggles of Gauloises-puffing cafes intellectuals.
What gives?
In a mildly deranged way, Johnson
has a point. Anti-Americanism barks more than it bites. September
11 is the grim exception to the rule that terrorism kills few
Americans: rarely more than 20 a year, which is less than lightning
[3,4]. Israel has a rate of terrorist fatalities hundreds of
times higher [5]. Sri Lanka, home of the Tamil Tigers, has suffered,
on a per-capita basis, the equivalent of one 9/11 every 3 weeks.
And this for 20 consecutive years [6].
Granted, numbers alone obscure
the central lesson of 9/11, which is its ominous portent for
the future: the mythical nuclear suitcase at Penn Station. But
to instill fear is no defining feature of anti-Americanism; for,
as recent events prove, the residents of Mombasa, Bali, Riyadh,
Casablanca, Istanbul, and Madrid are every bit as entitled to
their anxieties as New Yorkers are to theirs.
Tempting as it is to dismiss
Johnson's focus on diseased intellectuals as merely proof that
it takes one to spot one, the reader would be well advised to
resist.
WE'LL ALWAYS
HAVE PARIS
Being ground zero for sophisticated,
unifying, and reflexive anti-Americanism, France provides a glimpse
of the disease at its most distinctive. In two recent books,
Jean-Francois Revel and Philippe Roger have intelligently researched
this phenomenon [7,8]. France does not come off well. Anti-Americanism
is diagnosed as a pathological condition of old lineage which
feeds on a witch's brew of hypocrisy, resentment, illiberalism,
and a deep-rooted aversion to change.
Trudging through its affliction,
however, France has remained rather fond of America. A May 2000
SOFRES poll revealed that only 10 percent of its citizens dislike
the United States [8]. French anti-Americanism is mostly an elite
sport. Quite the opposite of French-bashing stateside, which
is the last PC-free zone for hate speech in America and a market-tested
crowd pleaser for late-night TV comedy. What the two ethnophobias
have in common is a refreshing lack of inhibition. Thus, one
could only admire France's Minister of Culture, Jack Lang, for
keeping a straight face while calling Spielberg's "Jurassic
Park" a "threat to French identity." (OK, French
politics does have its share of dinosaurs.) In perfect counterpoint,
the run-up to the war saw Lang's partners-in-neurosis at Fox
News vituperate obsessively, hysterically, maniacally, and deliriously
about France's "pathetic irrelevance," seemingly oblivious
to the contradiction.
The French may be fond of Americans,
but over 80 percent of them viscerally reject US lifestyle and
customs [9]. Little "racist envy" there. Ominously,
signs of a post-Cold War continental drift abound. While a 1988
survey rated "power, dynamism, wealth," and "liberty"
as the words most frequently associated with American society,
by 1996 the top choices had become "violence, power, inequalities,"
and "racism" [9]. Granted, the French are not the type
to let ignorance of a subject get in the way of an opinion. But
French obduracy is not the point. A striking dichotomy between
liking Americans and spurning their values is now deeply entrenched
in much of Western Europe. Large majorities of Germans, Italians,
and British characterize America as "domineering, racist,"
and "violent" [10]. In March 2003, the percentage of
people holding a favorable view of the US was only 48% in Britain,
31% in France, and 14% in Spain [11]. On societal issues such
as poverty, gun control, and the death penalty, the continental
divide appears beyond bridging. The phenomenon is worldwide.
In 34 of 43 countries polled in 2002, a majority of people said
they disliked America's influence in their country [12]. In that
quarter of humanity called the Muslim world, anti-US hostility
is at a fever pitch.
Neocon scholar Robert Kagan's
catchy aphorism [13], "Americans are from Mars and Europeans
are from Venus," strikes a chord with Europeans, who remember
their own Martian phase only too well and feel so relieved to
have outgrown it. The poetry of Rumsfeldian power lust tends
to get lost in translation. To war-weary Europeans, who've been
there and done the imperial power thing before, Kagan's martial
fantasies sound perilously premodern, boyishly immature, brazenly
anti-feminist, and--as my teenage daughter would say--so last
millenium.
Ah, the great cleansing, avenging
power of war! Its seductive lure was irresistible in the summer
of 1914. On the eve of the war to end all wars, Thomas Mann called
the imminent slaughter a moral necessity... "both a purging
and a liberation" [14]. A mere three weeks into the war,
a quarter-million French soldiers had died. Some purging, indeed.
In the spring of 2003, Bush's America, too, felt the cleansing
urge and heeded the avenging call. Echoing Mann while kindly
sparing us the intestinal metaphor, Andrew Sullivan called the
Iraq war "a moral necessity" [15]: 13,000 civilians
killed, a Saddam-lite puppet regime, and a fresh resupply of
hatred against the United States. Isn't moral clarity beautiful
when actions are divorced from their consequences?
MANIFEST DESTINY
GONE GLOBAL
When President Bush is not
busy hailing freedom, he is usually occupied extolling liberty.
On the lofty matters of democracy, freedom, and human rights,
his administration proudly talks the talk. The walking--as ever
the weak link--has gotten alarmingly wobbly. It was once proud
and steady: In the wake of World War II, the United States bestrode
the globe like a colossus with twice the relative economic clout
it enjoys today. Fresh from liberating the world from tyranny,
America was universally revered. Where Europe stood for ruin,
fascism, and colonization, the US spelled wealth, freedom, and
self-determination.
Then came Korea, a nervous
draw, followed by Vietnam, a bitter defeat. TIME Magazine captured
the navel-gazing torpor with its characterization of the My Lai
massacre as an "American" tragedy [16]. (Does that
make the Holocaust a "German" tragedy?) America had
invaded Vietnam, killed well over two million of its citizens,
and then fled. While staring into an abyss of disillusion, many
in the Third World began to wonder: Was the colossus the new
apostle of freedom or merely the heir to the throne of Western
imperialism? That it could be a bit of both was a subtlety lost
on the many to whom the sight of white men killing the natives
never had more than one meaning. Fighting the scourge of communism
was a worthy cause. But at what price? To make up for all of
its dictator-propping interventions in Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia,
Greece, Chile, etc, how many democracies did the US help spawn
during the Cold War? Sadly, not a single one. Today, for all
his talk of freedom, Bush is busy emulating Saddam by filling
graves with dead Shiites. Meanwhile, with 725 bases overseas
and troops in 70 percent of the world's countries [17], the US
military footprint is large enough to ensure that, for millions
around the world, Americans are people in uniform. Rambo's paternity
rights are hardly Hollywood's alone.
Which is rather unfortunate,
for if there is one nation on earth that has always represented
(if not always delivered) liberty and hope for the oppressed
of the world, it is America. Brilliance rarely is the first attribute
one associates with George W. Bush, but even his detractors must
concede that his contribution to the cause of anti-Americanism
is a feat of staggering genius [18]. Never has the United States
been so alienated from the rest of the world. Why? It's the policy,
stupid! Pro-war columnists are wont to attribute the hostility
to dark, evil, irrational forces, thus bringing to their diagnosis
the full power and sophistication of voodoo medicine. More level-headed
observers see the hand of a US leadership trapped in its own
delusions, and marrying, against all odds, equal measures of
cynicism and naivete.
Notch this one up in the cynical
column. The US has made two new friends: Uzbekistan's Islam Karimov,
whose pastime is to boil his opponents to death [19], and Turkmenistan's
Saparmurat Niyazov, whose proudest accomplishment is to have
renamed the months of the year after himself [20]. Both of these
unsavory crackpots are now the beneficiaries of US largesse:
the Saddams of tomorrow. Meanwhile, in line with the White House's
dismissal of the Geneva Conventions as "quaint," the
task of spreading American values in the Arab world landed in
the lap of Abu Ghraib Porn & Snuff Film Studios: a temporary
commission of lasting consequence. America used to be both hated
and feared in the Muslim world. With its aura of invincibility
shattered in the plains of Mesopotamia, now it is only hated.
Let no one ever say that Bush did not bring a smile to an Arab's
face: Osama, today, is crying with joy.
CULTURE SOUP
FOR SALE
Beethoven and good plumbing
are both German, but few have trouble distinguishing between
the two. Germany floods the planet with finely engineered machine
tools, but it is the rare auto worker in Detroit who switches
on his Siemens auto-feed drilling machine and exclaims: "My,
what a fine culture those Germans have!" The world buys
German engineering because it's good, not because it's German.
Not so with Air Jordans. Watch Nike and Coca-Cola go around the
world peddling footwear and sugary water with bubbles as proud
emblems of American culture. This conflation of culture, lifestyle,
and branding gives Americanization its distinctive flavor. The
word could just as well refer to the vibrant hip-hop scene in
France, the film-making influence of Martin Scorsese, the architectural
impact of Frank Gehry, or the proliferation of MBA programs.
But it does not. Not in the popular imagination, anyway.
Thomas L. Friedman explains:
"Globalization is so much Americanization. It wears Mickey
Mouse ears, and it drinks Coke, and it eats Big Macs..."
[21]. Somewhat lost in the stirring eloquence and exalted imagery
is a sobering truth: Americanization is not about the Bill of
Rights or the influence of bebop. According to Friedman, it's
about how to get fat and look silly. It presents the world with
a narrative in which the US is seen to efface its opulent cultural
complexity in order to hawk infantile, reassuring sameness. The
downside is that few have the skill required to wake up to Kenny
G in the morning, down a bowl of Cocoa Puffs over breakfast,
lunch on a Whopper over Jerry Springer, read up on Atkins in
the afternoon, watch "Rambo III" in the evening, and
then go to bed with full confidence that American civilization
is the answer to Ancient Greece.
But wait! Isn't America home
to much of the world's finest music, film, fiction, science,
and medicine? Aren't the vitality of its civic institutions and
the strength of its local democracy unparalleled? Isn't US culture
a treasure trove of magnificent riches? Yes, yes, and yes; but
Americanization pitches a different set of superlatives, ie,
the world's finest crappy food, funnest crash-and-burn blockbusters,
and shrillest consumerism. Paul Hollander's recent claim [22]
that "Americanization is the major, perhaps the only, widespread
form of modernization" suggests someone who's never used
a cell phone in Europe, ridden the subway in Hong Kong, watched
TV in Japan, or come to grips with the fact that for every Intel,
Boeing, Lucent, and GM, there is a Samsung, Airbus, Alcatel,
and Toyota.
Many fret about the dangers
of crass, US-style materialism But the evil of Americanization
is greatly overblown: The planet will not only survive it; it
will likely enjoy it. What it will do to America's image, however,
is an entirely different matter. If Americanization means typecasting
the US as the land of Coke, Big Macs, and Britney Spears rather
than the land of Martin Luther King Jr., Thelonious Monk, and
Philip Roth, the biggest loser will be America. Does anyone care?
Judging from the pitiful state of American public diplomacy--budgeted
at one quarter of 1 percent of defense spending [23]-- the answer
seems to be no.
Just as English is the world's
most slaughtered language, American culture is the most trivialized.
To compound the sin, it is also often used as a Rorschach test
in support of one's prejudices. Some will point out that the
US is the world's oldest democracy. Others will retort that it
was an apartheid society for 80 percent of its history. Both
true. Some will call jazz America's greatest artistic gift to
the world. Others will read in it a tragic tale of racism. For
them, not even a triumphant Ella Fitzgerald dazzling the crowds
at a White House gala could ever silence the haunting, anguished
voice of Billie Holiday singing
Southern trees bear strange
fruit Blood on the leaves and blood at the root.
Or consider the international
craving for the music of Jay-Z, Nas, and Outkast. Hip-hop is
a cauldron of creative literary experimentation unmatched anywhere
in the English-speaking world. Censorious, two-bit pulp hack
Lynne Cheney might not get it, but Seamus Heaney does. (As obviously
would anyone who writes of Lil' Kim with such grace: "Like
a calf freshly born on the pale fields of Mossbawn, she shimmers
with the newness of life, staggers wetly, and speaks to the sky.")
The rap-loving Nobelist is not alone. Hip-hop has caught the
ears of millions of youths worldwide and taught them that America
produces powerful art that speaks to them. The rub is that hip-hop,
the idiom of the ghetto, can--and will--be invoked with equal
ease as an ode to America or as Exhibit A for all that's wrong
with it.
EIN VOLK, EIN
REICH, EIN LIMBAUGH
The Brits lap up foreign barbs,
the Germans practice contrition, and the Russians make a fine
art of self-deprecation. Meanwhile, to the keen eye trained in
the art of national stereotyping, Americans can appear unjustifiably
thin-skinned and allergic to self-criticism.
First, the allergy. This country's
moral certainty and unflappable optimism are part of its extraordinary
charm. But moral certainty is one short step away from moral
blindness. The civil rights movement, for example, highlighted
America's admirable capacity to right its wrongs. It is cause
for celebration in history textbooks. But absent a collective
reflection on the moral failure that necessitated such righting
in the first place (and which, judging from the portrayal of
Arabs in the media, is still alive and kicking), one ends up
with the weird spectacle of jubilant self-congratulation drowning
out humility and atonement--as though our moral failings were
just God's way of giving us opportunities to demonstrate our
moral superiority. The lesson from Abu Ghraib? Rumsfeld put it
best: "The system worked!" [24]
With Walter Lippmann's "manufacture
of consent" hard at work in the mainstream media, criticism
of the consensual--say, foreign policy--is routinely dismissed
by the right and a segment of the liberal spectrum as hostile
(rather than wrong) and unpatriotic (rather than misguided):
reactions more conducive to paranoia than self-inquiry. Last
year's fury at France for daring to get in the way of Bush's
perfect little war engendered reactions ranging from the goofy
(freedom fries), to the self-flagellating (spilling French wine
in the street), to the unhinged (congressional bill for repatriating
dead GIs buried in France): all in all, more Prozac Nation than
Home of the Brave.
To blame the hypersensitivity
on 9/11 alone would be missing the forest for the trees. Anti-Americanism
has long had on these shores a self-referential quality of the
sort it enjoys in Europe--though for entirely different reasons.
Anti-Americanism blends the conceit of an "ism" with
the paranoid style dear to Hofstadter. In particular, it reminds
one of an Abbie Hoffman quip turned on its head: "Just because
they're out to get you does not mean you're not paranoid."
Anti-Masonry, anti-Catholicism, and anti-Communism have a shared
history of sky-high readings on the Richter scale of American
paranoia.
For a glimpse of the paranoid
style in full regalia, welcome to the loopy world of right-wing
talk radio. Brimming with "talent on loan from God,"
the shows are spoken blogs without the links--sonorous tableaux
of undiluted narcissism. The mechanics are well oiled: A cult
leader, known in the trade as "the host," blabbers
on endlessly about the ghastly horrors that liberals and foreigners
have in store for true-blue, patriotic, God-fearing Americans.
The host usually speaks from a position of moral strength, being
himself a recovering alcoholic (Glenn Beck), a drug addict (Rush
Limbaugh), or a convicted felon (Gordon Liddy, Oliver North).
But, hey, what would repentance be without sin?
First in the firing line of
the master blabberer are the Blame-America-Firsters, those vile,
guilt-ridden fifth-columnists who reflexively see in their own
breed the root of all evil. Their tormenting is not done Grand
Inquisition style. Far from it. The genius of the genre is to
serve a vulnerable audience (mostly, insecure white males stuck
in traffic) a perfect cocktail of humor, common sense, and paranoia.
That such an unlikely melange actually works is a thing of beauty:
The paranoia, predictably, feeds on a vision of lazy, amoral
purveyors of negativity who, having abdicated all sense of personal
responsibility, maunder on with stultifying seriousness about
the joy of the entitlement society. As the cult leader sees it,
theirs is a Bizarro world where a cup of hot coffee at McDonald's
is worth 50 cents if spilled into your throat and 3 million dollars
if spilled into your lap. Infusing the blather with humor is
a clever ploy meant both to entertain and to draw a contrast
with the dreary world inhabited by the Political Correctness
brigades: those insufferable bores who, in their relentless pursuit
of sainthood, long ago discarded like so much excess baggage
old-time frivolities such as smiling, laughing, and calling a
spade a spade.
Don't be fooled by the laughs.
For all their fixation on freedom, right-wing talk shows are
microcosms of totalitarian life. Limbaugh's rule is sunny fascism:
the triumph of jovial either/or thinking (if thinking is the
word). All truths are deemed self-evident; therefore, dissenting
views are not errors of judgment but of character. Reality is
screened and twisted to fit the dogma, and assertions are validated
by mere force of repetition. Add on top of that generous servings
of hate, paranoia, scapegoating, and buffoonery, and you get
a winning combo close to Mussolini's heart.
Fair enough. But the right-wing
paranoia, the existential fears? What's that about? Why the obsessive
talk about freedom in a land that has never known tyranny? Why
the insatiable appetite for defense spending when the enemy rides
donkeys and sleeps in caves? Could it be the collective memory
of immigrants fleeing persecution? Or the propensity of a God-fearing
frontier people to live in, well, fear?
MULTICULTURAL
INSULARITY
First, the facts. America lives
in a friendly neighborhood. No invasions by hordes of barbarians
(besides the Mexican fruit fly). The nation most successful at
killing Americans on the battlefield has been, by far, the United
States. All of its foreign wars combined have yet to match the
number of military deaths in the Civil War alone [25].
Which is not for lack of trying.
Between 1945 and 2001, the US initiated nearly 200 aggressive
military incursions, none of them having anything to do with
defense [26]. (In a nice Orwellian twist, the Department of War
renamed itself the Department of Defense in 1949 [27].) The low
casualty count on the American side speaks of technological superiority
and geographical good fortune. Not all have been so lucky: 60
percent of all French males between the ages of 18 and 28 were
killed or maimed in the First World War [28]. (Presumably, the
moniker "cheese-eating surrender monkey" refers to
the other 40 percent.) In no foreign war has the equivalent American
statistic ever exceeded 5 percent.
Notwithstanding 9/11, the US
gets little of the world's wrath. It does not get much of its
culture either. At least not in native form: Foreign movies generate
a negligible box office take; fewer than 3 percent of books published
in the US are translations (no better than in the Arab world);
and the music market is, after Pakistan, the world's most insular
[29]. America can be maddeningly provincial. And yet, buffeted
by cross-cultural winds, it is more cosmopolitan than any nation
on earth. Not much of a paradox actually. Americans welcome foreign
cultures, so long as they are local: Gloria Estefan rather than
Los Van Van; "The Joy Luck Club" rather than "Raise
the Red Lantern"; Hollywood remakes of foreign box office
hits rather than the real thing.
America doesn't go to foreign
cultures. Foreign cultures come to America, uprooted, transplanted,
and denativized. Just as keeping a lion as a house pet will spice
up your life without teaching you much about the jungle, immigrants
have enriched this nation without improving its capacity to look
outward. In Governor Ma Ferguson's eternal words, "If English
was good enough for Jesus Christ, it ought to be good enough
for the children of Texas [30]." Ma's insular legacy lives
on: Only 5 Americans in the entire State Department are fluent
enough in Arabic to be interviewed on TV [31]. The provincialism
of a superpower is not without consequences: America's quagmire
in Iraq has provincial cockiness written all over it.
FINAL STOP,
AMERICA
In popular US anthropology,
humans come in two varieties: the lucky folks who are American
and the unfortunate ones who wish they were. Sticklers for logic
will point to a third category: foreigners with no aspiration
to join in the American dream. These wretched souls bear the
cardinal sin of anti-Americanism, which is to deny the Homo Americanus
his self-perception as the unique final destination of human
civilization. (Francophobia is the opprobrium leveled at the
chief sinner.) This nation's tortuous relationship with the "Other"
(ie, the 6 billion people trapped in foreign lands) goes back
to the roots of the American experience. To the immigrant newly
arrived on Ellis Island, who, looking back upon the ocean, thought
of the ones left behind, the Isle of Hope was just as often the
Isle of Tears. Touched by residual survivor's guilt, Americans
easily see in the "Other" reminders of their own good
luck--that most fragile of blessings. The same fragility is evident
in the phrase "American dream." For, from a dream,
must one not eventually awake?
Hawk-eyed right-wingers who
see anti-Americanism everywhere trumpet their patriotism with
the insecure zeal of the convert. Why? Perhaps because immigrants,
like converts, bear an original sin of disloyalty. Being original,
of course, the sin is purely imaginary and therefore cannot be
expiated. This is why American-ness, like manhood, must be proven--again
and again. To be American is not an attribute but a commitment
and a badge of honor. As such it is under the constant threat
of loyalty-laden modifiers: -un, -non, -anti. Taking Kagan's
logic to a place we probably don't want to go, Venus knows she'll
never lose her womanhood in battle. Mars, on the other hand...
The pledge of allegiance, the flying of the flag, the cult of
the 2nd Amendment: These are the American worry beads that Mars
needs to finger daily.
SO WHAT?
Paul Johnson got it partly
right; a quarter right to be precise. Anti-Americanism is, indeed,
a disease that targets neurotic intellectuals and Europeans wary
of US lifestyle. But it is also an immune reaction--if sometimes
overblown--to a US foreign policy that too often confuses self-interest
with benevolence; subservience with democracy; meaning well with
doing good. It is, too, a growing skepticism toward the image--burnished
in the Bush years--of a shallow, violent society projecting its
insecurities onto the world. The fourth part of the anti-American
edifice is its imaginary wing. Henry James once observed that
Americans are "the most addicted to the belief that the
other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to under-value
them." Once the last anti-American has departed this earth
(don't hold your breath), rest assured that anti-Americanism
of the imaginary sort will still thrive; for it is, courtesy
of the paranoid style, a self-sustaining life form.
The life form acts as a multiplier:
paranoia that influences policy that fuels anti-Americanism.
It has been rumored that Evangelical Christians--many of them
devout followers of the commandment "Thou shalt be paranoid
with Jesus"--have guided President Bush in our hour of darkness.
On the face of it, a flashlight might have worked better. The
insufferable self-righteousness oozing out of every pore of the
Bush White House has had a way of translating into disastrous
policy. It will be the main challenge for future presidents to
reverse this course. As Raymond Aron once remarked to a German
friend, "The 20th century could have been your century."
Collective paranoia helping, it was not to be. A hundred years
from now, will we Americans hear from our friends, "This
could have been your century"? If we do, at least we'll
know why.
Bernard Chazelle is a professor of computer science
at Princeton University and author of The
Discrepancy Method: Randomness and Complexity. He can be
reached at: chazelle@CS.Princeton.EDU
This article and others are
available on Professor
Chazelle's website.
REFERENCES
[1] Is
Racist Envy, by Paul Johnson, Forbes.com, July 21, 2003.
[2] http://www.civilwarhome.com/population1860.htm
[3]
http://www.fas.org/irp/threat/terror.htm
[4] Key
to Lightning Deaths: Location, Location, Location, by John
Roach, National Geographic News, May 22, 2003.
[5] http://www.ict.org.il/articles/articledet.cfm?articleid=439
[6] http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/srilanka.html
[7] L'Ennemi Americain: Genealogie
de l'antiamericanisme francais, Philippe Roger, Paris, Seuil,
2002.
[8] Anti-Americanism, by Jean-Francois
Revel, Encounter Books, 2003.
[9] French Opinion and the
Deteriorating Image of the United States, by Richard Kuisel,
Georgetown University, Manuscript 2003.
[10] US Department of State,
Europeans and Anti-Americanism, September 2002.
[11] http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=185
Views of a Changing World 2003, The Pew Global Attitudes Project,
June 2003.
[12] Soft Power, by Joseph
S. Nye, Jr., PublicAffairs, 2004, page 35.
[13] Power
and Weakness, by Robert Kagan, Policy Review, June 2002.
[14] The
Big One, by Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, August 23, 2004.
[15] The Daily Dish, by Andrew
Sullivan, May 5, 2004.
[16] http://www.time.com/
[17] The Sorrows of Empire,
by Chalmers Johnson, Henry Holt and Co., page 4, 2004, and The U.S.
Global Empire, by Laurence M. Vance, LewRockwell.com, March
2004.
[18]
A Year After Iraq War, The Pew Research Center, March 2004.
[19] US
Looks Away as New Ally Tortures Islamists, by Nick Paton
Walsh, The Guardian, May 26, 2003.
[20] Turkmen Leader Redefines
Ages of Man, CNN, August 17, 2002.
[21] The
Life and Times of Thomas L. Friedman, by Noah Stoffman, Varsity
Publications, Inc., December 9, 1997.
[22] The Politics of Envy,
by Paul Hollander, The New Criterion, Nov. 2002.
[23] Soft Power, by Joseph
S. Nye, Jr., PublicAffairs, 2004, page 124.
[24] McNamara Moment, by David
S. Broder, The Washington Post, May 9, 2004.
[25] http://www.civilwarhome.com/casualties.htm
[26] http://www.nationbooks.org/book.mhtml?t=vidal
[27] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_War
[28] The Collapse of the Third
Republic, by William L. Shirer, Simon and Schuster, 1969, page
142.
[29] http://www.deccanherald.com/deccanherald/mar142004/fp7.asp
America is a Cultural Fortress, by Scott Timberg, Deccan Herald,
March 14, 2004.
[30] http://www.mythome.org/quotes.html
[31] U.S. Image Abroad Will
Take Years to Repair, Official Testifies, by Christopher Marquis,
The New York Times, February 5, 2004.
Weekend
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What the World Should Know About Guantanamo
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New Iraqi Police State Flexes Its Muscles
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Dave Zirin
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Mike Whitney
Kerry: the "Better" War Candidate
Mark Donham
Dear John (Kerry): Start Explaining and Fast
Mickey Z.
McBypass Nation: Feeling Clinton's Pain
Alan Farago
Can the Everglades be Fixed?
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