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June
24, 2003
Elaine
Cassel
Supreme Indemnity
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Roya
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A Message from Tehran: Is It Worth
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June
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A. Cook
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US Prisons as Strategic Hamlets
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Harold
Gould
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June
19, 2003
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Cassel
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June
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June
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June
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Victory
at Little Big Horn Day
June 25, 2003
Why I'm Not Ashamed
to be an American
My
America vs. the Empire
By
BILL KAUFFMAN
In the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, John Fogerty
of the terrific (if weather-mad) band Creedence Clearwater Revival
recalled "feeling this shame just sweep over me...I was
terribly ashamed of our country."
He needn't have been, as he soon realized.
For Richard Nixon was "not my country. He's those guys--over
in Washington. First thing I thought about was the Grand Canyon
and my friends and neighbors--and the people all across the country.
The people in power aren't my country any more than a bunch of
gangsters are my country."
Nor is the Fortunate Son in his fortified
bunker on Pennsylvania Avenue my country--or your country, either,
unless you are as thin and insubstantial as one of those vapid
wraiths hissing of empire on CNN or MSNBC or any of the other
alphabetical collisions in our corporate-media soup.
There are two Americas: the televised
America, known and hated by the world, and the rest of us. The
former is a factitious creation whose strange gods include "Sex
and the City," accentless TV anchorpeople, Dick Cheney,
Rosie O'Donnell, "Friends," and the Department of Homeland
 Security.
It is real enough--cross it and you'll learn more than you want
to know about weapons of mass destruction--but it has no heart,
no soul, no connection to the thousand and one real Americas
that produced Zora Neale Hurston and Jack Kerouac and Saint Dorothy
Day and the Mighty Casey who has struck out.
I am of the other America, the unseen
America, the America undreamt of by the foreigners who hate my
country without knowing a single thing about it. Ours is a land
of volunteer fire departments, of baseball, of wizened spinsters
who instead of sitting around whining about their goddamned osteoporosis
write and self-publish books on the histories of their little
towns, of the farmwives and grain merchants and parsons and drunkards
who made their places live.
We are the America that suffers in wartime:
we do the dying, the paying of taxes, we supply the million unfortunate
sons (and now daughters) who are sent hither and yon in what
amounts to a vast government uprooting of the populace. Militarism
and empire are the enemies of small-town America, not only because
some native sons come home in bodybags but also for the desolating
fact that many never come home at all. They are scattered to
the winds, sent out--by force or enticement of state--in the
great American diaspora, never to return to the places that gave
them nurture.
War kills the provinces. It drains them
of cultural life as surely as it takes the lives of 18-year-old
boys. Almost every healthy, vigorous cultural current of the
1930s, from the flowering of Iowa poetry to North Dakota cornhusking
tournaments to the renaissance of Upstate New York fiction, was
terminated by U.S. entry into the Second World War. Vietnam,
like any drawn-out war or occupation, disrupted normal courtship
patterns on the homefront: the difference between republic and
empire might be restated as the difference between taking the
girl next door to the Sadie Hawkins Dance and paying a Saigon
whore in chocolate bars and the Yankee dollar.
Empire focuses our attention on matters
distant and remote, affairs to which we are mere spectators.
You can care about your backyard or Baghdad; you can't tend to
both. Under empire, Madonna replaces our mothers, imperial fantasies
straight out of Henry Luce's LIFE erase our lower-case lives,
and the wolf at the door is named Blitzer. Only he's not at our
door--our doors are too insignificant for such a ravening creature--but
on the idiot boxes that broadcast without cease the propaganda
of the regime. Facile contemners of President Bush deride him
as a "Texas cowboy." If only he were. Alas, President
of the World Bush is a deracinated preppie, an Andover yell leader
who blamed his first defeat for public office, in a 1978 congressional
race, on "provincialism." It seems that the real cowboys
were unimpressed by a naughty boarding-school cheerleader who
was unable to pronounce correctly the name of the largest city
in the district. Young Bush's helpmate, Vice President Cheney
of Haliburton, is a man so placeless that once he humbly determined
himself to be the most qualified running mate Mr. Bush might
have, he had to hop a plane to Wyoming and become an instant
citizen of the Equality State so as to avoid violating the pettifogging
constitutional clause that effectively prevents President and
Vice President from being residents of the same state. Bush and
Cheney have no similar constitutional scruples when it comes
to honoring Article 1, Section 8 of that forgotten document,
which reserves to Congress the right to declare war, but then
such hairsplitting is for epicene liberals, not big draft-dodging
he-men like George and Dick.
So no, I do not feel "ashamed"
of my country, for America, as John Fogerty understood, is not
Bush or Cheney or Lieberman or Kerry but my friends, my neighbors,
and yes, the Grand Canyon, too. Even better, it is the little
canyon and the rude stream and Tom Sawyer's cave and all those
places whose names we know, whose myths we have memorized, and
whose existence remains quite beyond the ken of the Department
of Homeland Security.
Will Rogers, an American of the old school,
once said, "America has a great habit of always talking
about protecting American Interests in some foreign country.
Protect 'em here at Home! There is more American Interests right
here than anywhere."
The Men in Grey who rule the televised
America won't protect American interests because they have no
interest in America. It's up to us provincials. What's it gonna
be, fellow hicks: serve the empire or preserve the street where
you live?
Bill Kauffman's
"Dispatches
from the Muckdog Gazette: A Mostly Affectionate Account of a
Small Town's Fight to Survive" has just been published
by Henry Holt. He can be reached at: kauffman@counterpunch.org
Weekend
Edition Features
Alexander
Cockburn
My Life as a Rabbi
William
A. Cook
The Scourge of Hopelessness
Standard
Schaefer
The Wages of Terror: an Interview with R.T. Naylor
Ron Jacobs
US Prisons as Strategic Hamlets
Harry
Browne
The Pitstop Ploughshares
Lawrence
Magnuson
WMD: The Most Dangerous Game
Harold
Gould
Saddam and the WMD Mystery
David Krieger
10 Reasons to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
Avia
Pasternak
The Unholy Alliance in the Occupied Territories
CounterPunch
Summer Reading:
Our Favorite Novels
Todd Chretien
Return to Sender: Todd Gitlin, the Duke of Condescension
Maria
Tomchick
Danny Goldberg's Imaginary Kids
Adam Engel
The Fat Man in Little Boy
Poets'
Basement
Guthrie, Albert & Hamod
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