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CounterPunch
February
7, 2003
Bush and the Return of Manifest
Destiny
What
Latinos Saw at the State of the Union
by JORGE MARISCAL
Hovering over the final section of President Bush's
State of Union speech was a ghostly shade that perceptive Latinas
and Latinos recognized at once. The old cucui (bogeyman)
was none other than the spirit of Manifest Destiny, the ideology
of racial and cultural superiority that guided the United States
westward across the continent into Mexican territory, south into
Central America and the Caribbean, across the Pacific, and beyond.
Writing in support of the annexation
of Texas during the summer of 1845, politician John O'Sullivan
invented the phrase "Manifest Destiny" to describe
American expansionism. In an uncanny echo of recent statements
by President Bush, O'Sullivan complained that other nations had
raised questions about the emerging hegemony of the U.S. "for
the avowed object of thwarting our policy and hampering our power,
limiting our greatness and checking the fulfillment of our manifest
destiny."
O'Sullivan's phrase was picked up by
Republican congressman Robert Winthrop and others in their efforts
to agitate for war against Mexico and the takeover of Mexico's
northern territories. According to O'Sullivan's original concept,
God had entrusted the U.S. with "the development of the
great experiment of liberty and federated self-government."
Even the great poet Walt Whitman could not resist the imperial
fever of the White Man's burden: "We pant to see our country
and its rule far-reaching only inasmuch as it will take off the
shackles that prevent men the even chance of being happy and
good." Before the decade ended, the U.S. had conquered
the entire Southwest and forced Mexico to accede to the Treaty
of Guadalupe Hidalgo signed 155 years ago this week.
In its twenty-first century incarnation,
Manifest Destiny has disguised its racist rhetoric but still
wears proudly the garb of self-righteousness and arrogance.
In his State of the Union speech, President Bush declared: "Americans
are a free people, who know that freedom is the right of every
person and the future of every nation. The liberty we prize is
not America's gift to the world; it is God's gift to humanity."
The implication is clear enough. God gave liberty to humanity.
The United States is the interpreter and agent of God's will
on earth.
The president also had this to say:
"America is a strong nation and honorable in the use of
our strength. We exercise power without conquest, and we sacrifice
for the liberty of strangers." Tell this to the Native
Americans, the Puerto Ricans, the Filipinos, and the Central
Americans. Tell it to the Mexicans who had populated the Southwest
since the sixteenth century. Tell it to the vast majority of
their descendents whose legal and economic rights have been denied
systematically since 1848. Tell it to the families of hundreds
of Mexican immigrants who have died at the militarized border
simply because they sought a better life.
At the center of the president's speech
was one more telling phrase. Behind the hubris and the Christian
providentialism sat a concept that should give pause not only
to Latinos but to every person of good will around the world.
Buried in the heart of the speech was a phrase that escaped
the notice of the media talking heads. The president warned:
"the ideology of power and domination has appeared again."
Iraq's dictator, Bush suggested, was the incarnation of this
ideology just as "Hitlerism, militarism and communism"
had been in decades past. Millions around the world and in the
U.S. immediately agreed that indeed the "ideology of power
and domination" has raised its ugly head once again. But
they understood what was really happening. They understood that
the greatest purveyors of the "ideology of power and domination"
today are named Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfiwitz, and Perle.
And the president added: "This
nation fights reluctantly, because we know the cost, and we dread
the days of mourning that always come." But the ultraconservative
hawks of the Bush administration dread the days of mourning only
in the abstract because their family members will not be at risk.
The real mourning will be done by thousands of innocent Iraquis
and the families of American servicemen and women who will be
sacrificed on the altar of Bush's folly. If allowed to proceed
forward, the course of action this administration has chosen
means not only Permanent War but also Permanent Mourning. Permanent
Mourning for millions of people at home and around the world.
Last Saturday Americans in the United
States awoke to a new cause for mourning. Seven astronauts,
we learned, had lost their lives in the crystal blue sky high
above the Southwest. What a terrible irony that the space shuttle
Columbia disintegrated as it hurtled over Texas, the breeding-ground
for George W. Bush's political career and the causis belli
for one of the earliest episodes of Manifest Destiny.
Jorge Mariscal
is a veteran of the U.S. war in Viet Nam and Director of the
Chicano/a Latino/a Arts and Humanities Program at the University
of California, San Diego. He can be reached at: gmariscal@ucsd.edu
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