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CounterPunch
March 21,
2003
The
Nation is Not United
The Other America
By EDWARD SAID
A small item in the press a few days ago reported
that Prince Ibn Al-Walid of Saudi Arabia had donated 10 million
dollars to the American University in Cairo to establish a department
or centre of American Studies there. It should be recalled that
the young billionaire had contributed an unsolicited 10 million
dollars to New York City shortly after the 11 September bombings,
with an accompanying letter that, aside from describing the handsome
sum as a tribute to New York, also suggested that the United
States might reconsider its policy towards the Middle East. Obviously
he had total and unquestioning American support for Israel in
mind, but his politely stated proposition seemed also to cover
the general American policy of denigrating, or at least showing
disrespect, for Islam.
In a fit of petulant rage, the then Mayor
of New York (which also has the largest Jewish population of
any city in the world), Rudolph Guiliani, returned the check
to Al-Walid, rather unceremoniously and with an extreme and I
would say racist contempt that was meant to be insulting as well
as gloating. On behalf of a certain image of New York, he personally
was upholding the city's demonstrated bravery and its principled
resistance to outside interference. And of course pleasing, rather
than trying to educate, a purportedly unified Jewish constituency.
Guiliani's churlish behaviour was of
a piece with his refusal several years before (in 1995, well
after the Oslo signings) to admit Yasser Arafat to the Philharmonic
Hall for a concert to which everyone at the UN had been invited.
Typical of the cheap theatrics of the below average American
big city politician, what New York's mayor did in response to
the young Saudi  Arabian's gift was completely
predictable. Even though the money was intended, and greatly
needed, for humanitarian use in a city wounded by a terrible
atrocity, the American political system and its main actors put
Israel ahead of everything, whether or not Israel's amply endowed
and highly mobilised lobbyists would have done the same thing.
In any case, no one knows what would have occurred if Guiliani
didn't return the money; but as things turned out he had nicely
preempted even the well- oiled pro-Israeli lobbying apparatus.
As the celebrated novelist and essayist Joan Didion wrote in
a recent New York Review of Books article, it has become a staple
of US policy first articulated by FD Roosevelt that America has
tried against all logic to maintain a hopelessly contradictory
support for the Saudi monarchy on the one hand and, on the other,
with the state of Israel, so much so, she adds, that "we
have become unable to discuss anything that might be seen as
touching on our relationship with the current government of Israel"
(p56, Jan 16, 03).
The two stories about Prince Al-Walid
dovetail nicely with each other, and show a continuity that has
been quite rare so far as Arab views of America have been concerned.
For at least three generations, Arab leaders, politicians, and
their more often than not American-trained advisers have been
formulating policies for their countries whose basis is an almost
completely fictitious and quite fanciful idea of what America
is. Far from coherent, this idea is at bottom all about how 'the
Americans' really run everything, even though in its details
the notion encompasses a wide, not to say jumbled, range of opinions,
from on the one hand seeing America as a conspiracy of Jews,
to theories on the other stipulating that America is either a
bottomless well of benign good feeling and help for the downtrodden,
or that it is ruled from A to Z by an unchallenged white man
sitting like an Olympian figure in the White House.
I recall many times during the 20 years
that I knew Yasser Arafat well, trying to explain to him that
this was a complex society with all sorts of currents, interests,
pressures, and histories in conflict within it and that far from
being ruled the way Syria was, for instance, a different model
of power and authority ought to be studied. I enlisted my late
friend, the scholar and political activist, Eqbal Ahmed, who
had an expert knowledge of American society but was also perhaps
the finest theorist and historian of anti-colonial national liberation
movements in the world, to talk to Arafat and bring along other
experts so that a sharper, more nuanced model might develop for
use by the Palestinians during their preliminary contacts with
the US government in the late 1980s -- but all to no avail. Ahmed
had carefully studied the Algerian FLN's relationship with France
during the war of 1954-62 as well as the North Vietnamese while
they were negotiating with Kissinger during the 1970s.
The contrast between a scrupulous, detailed
knowledge of the metropolitan society with which these insurgents
had been in conflict and the Palestinians' almost caricatural
knowledge of America (based mainly on hearsay and cursory readings
in Time magazine) was stark. Arafat's single-minded obsession
was to make his way personally into the White House and talk
to that whitest of white men Bill Clinton: in his view that would
be the equivalent perhaps of getting things done with Mubarak
of Egypt or Hafez Al-Assad of Syria. If in the meantime Clinton
revealed himself to be the master- creature of American politics,
completely overwhelming and confusing the Palestinians with his
charm and his manipulation of the system, so much the worse for
Arafat and his men. Their simplified view of America was monumentally
unchanged, as it still is today. As for resistance or knowing
how to play the game of politics in a world with only one, all-
conquering super-power in it, matters remain as they have for
over half a century. Most people throw up their hands in despair
like disappointed lovers: America is hopeless, and I don't ever
want to go back there, they often say, though one also notices
that green, permanent residence cards are much in demand, as
are university admissions for the children.
The other, more hopeful side of the story
concerns what seems to have been Prince Al-Walid's later change
of direction, about which I can only surmise. But I do know that
apart from a few courses and seminars on American literature
and politics scattered throughout the universities of the Arab
world, there has never been anything like an academic centre
for the systematic and scientific analysis of America, its people,
society, and history, at all. Not even in American institutions
like the American Universities of Cairo and Beirut. This lack
may also be true throughout the Third World, and maybe even in
some European countries. The point I am making is that to live
in a world that is held in the grip of an extraordinarily unbound
great power there is a vital need for knowing as much about its
swirling dynamics as is humanly possible. And that, I believe,
also includes commanding an excellent working command of the
language, something few Arab leaders (as a case in point) possess.
Yes, America is the country of McDonald's, Hollywood, blue jeans,
Coca-Cola and CNN, all of them products exported and available
everywhere by virtue of globalisation, multinational corporations,
and what seems to be the world's appetite for articles of easy,
convenient consumption. But we must also be conscious of from
what source these come and in what ways the cultural and social
processes from which they ultimately derive can be interpreted,
especially since the danger of thinking about America too simply
or reductively and statically is so obvious.
Even as I write these lines much of the
world is being bludgeoned into a restive submission by (or, as
are the cases of Italy and Spain, an utterly opportunistic alliance
with) America as it readies itself for a deeply unpopular war
against Iraq. But for the ongoing global demonstrations and protests
that have erupted entirely at the popular level, the war would
simply be a brazen act of unopposed cynical domination. Yet contested
as it is by so many Americans as well as Europeans, Asians, Africans
and Latin Americans who have taken to the streets and to their
local newspapers at least suggests that at last there is an awakening
to the fact that the United States, or rather the small handful
of Judeo-Christian white men who currently rule its government,
is bent on world hegemony. What to do then?
In what follows I shall offer a rapid
sketch of the extraordinary panorama presented by today's America,
as seen by someone who is American and has lived comfortably
in it for years and years, but who by virtue of his Palestinian
origins, still retains his perspective as a comparative outsider,
but a kind of insider also. My interest is simply to suggest
ways of understanding, intervening in, and if the word isn't
too inappropriate, resisting a country that is far from the monolith
it is usually taken to be, specially in the Arab and Muslim worlds.
What is there to be seen?
The difference between America and the
classic empires of the past is that, even though each empire
asserted its utter originality and its determination not to repeat
the overreaching ambitions of imperial predecessors, this one
does so with an astonishing affirmation of its nearly sancrosanct
altruism and well-meaning innocence. For this alarming delusion
there is, even more alarmingly, a new squadron of formerly Left
or liberal intellectuals alike who had historically opposed American
wars abroad but who are now prepared to make the case for virtuous
empire (the figure of the lonely sentry has been used) using
a variety of styles, from tub-thumping patriotism to sly cynicism.
The events of 11 September play a role in this volte face, but
what is surprising is that the Twin Towers-Pentagon bombings,
horrible though they were, retreated as if they came from nowhere,
rather than in fact from a world across the seas driven crazy
by American intervention and ubiquitous American presence. This
is of course not to condone Islamic terrorism, which is a hateful
thing in every way. But it is to remark that in all the pious
analyses of America's responses to Afghanistan and now Iraq,
history and proportionality have simply dropped out of the picture
entirely.
What the liberal hawks specially don't
refer to, however, is the Christian Right (so similar to Islamic
extremism in fervor and righteousness) and its massive, indeed
decisive presence in America today. The qualities of that vision
derive from mostly Old Testament sources, very much of a piece
with those of Israel, its close partner and analogue. A peculiar
alliance between Israel's influential neoconservative American
supporters and the Christian extremists is that the latter support
Zionism as a way of bringing all the Jews to the Hold y Land
to prepare the way for the Messiah's Second Coming; at which
point Jews will either have to convert to Christianity or be
annihilated. The bloody and rabidly anti-Semitic teleologies
are rarely referred to, certainly not by the pro-Israeli Jewish
phalanx.
America is the world's most avowedly
religious country. References to God permeate the national life,
from coins to buildings to common forms of speech: in God we
trust, God's country, God bless America, and on and on. George
Bush's power base is made up of the 60-70 million fundamentalist
Christians who, like him, believe they have seen Jesus and are
here to do God's work in God's country. Some sociologists and
journalists (including Francis Fukuyuma and David Brooks) have
argued that contemporary American religion is the result of a
desire for community and a long-gone sense of stability, given
the fact that approximately 20 per cent of the population is
moving from home to home all the time. But the evidence for that
desire is true only up to a point: what matters more is religion
by prophetic illumination, unshakeable conviction in a sometimes
apocalyptic sense of mission, and a heedless disregard of small-scale
facts and complications. The enormous geographical distance of
the country from the turbulent world is another factor, as is
the fact that Canada and Mexico are continental neighbours with
little capability of tempering American enthusiasm.
All of those things converge around an
idea of American rightness, goodness, freedom, economic promise,
social advancement that is so ideologically woven into the fabric
of daily life that it doesn't even appear to be ideological,
but rather a fact of nature. America=good=total loyalty and love.
Similarly there is an unconditional reverence for the Founding
Fathers, and for the Constitution, an amazing document, it is
true, but a human one nevertheless. Early America is the anchor
of American authenticity. In no country that I know does a waving
flag play so central an iconographical role. You see it everywhere,
on taxicabs, on men's jacket lapels, on the front windows and
roofs of houses everywhere. It is the main embodiment of the
national image, signifying heroic endurance and a beleaguered
sense of fighting of unworthy enemies. Patriotism is still the
prime American virtue, tied up as it is with religion, belonging,
and doing the right thing not just at home but all over the world.
Patriotism is also represented in retail consumer spending, as
when Americans were enjoined after the events of 9/11 to do a
lot of shopping in defiance of evil terrorists. Bush and employees
of his like Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice and Ashcroft have tapped into
all of that to mobilise the military for war 7000 miles away
in order 'to get' Saddam, as he is referred to universally. Underlying
all this is the machinery of capitalism, now undergoing radical
and, I think, destabilising change. The economist Julie Schor
has shown that Americans now work far more hours than they did
three decades ago, and are making relatively less money for their
efforts. But still there is no serious, systematic political
challenge to the dogmas of what are referred to as the opportunities
of a free market. It's as if no one cares whether the corporate
structure in alliance with the federal government, which still
hasn't been able to provide most Americans with decent universal
health coverage and a sound education, has to be changed. News
of the stock market is more important than re-examining the system.
This is a crude summary of the American
consensus, which in fact politicians exploit and try endlessly
to simplify into slogans and sound bites. But what one discovers
about this amazingly complex society is how many counter- currents
and alternatives run across and around this consensus all the
time. The growing resistance to war that the president has been
essentially minimising and pretending to ignore, derives from
the other less formal America that the mainstream media (newspapers
of record such as The New York Times, the main networks, the
publishing and magazine industries in large measure) always tries
to paper over and keep down. Never has there been so unashamed,
if not scandalous, complicity between TV news and the government's
rush to war: even the average newsreader that turns up on CNN
or one of the major networks talks excitedly about Saddam's evils
and how 'we' have to stop him before it's too late. And if that
is not bad enough, the airwaves are filled with ex-military men,
terrorism experts, and Middle East policy analysts who know none
of the relevant languages, may never have seen any part of the
Middle East, and are too poorly educated to be expert at anything,
all of them arguing in a memorised jargon about the need for
'us' to do something about Iraq, while preparing our windows
and cars for an impending poison gas attack.
Because it is a managed and constructed
thing the consensus operates in a sort of timeless present. History
is anathema to it, and in accepted public discourse even the
word 'history' is a synonym for nothingness or non-entity, as
in the scornful, typically dismissive American phrase, 'you're
history.' Otherwise history is what as Americans we are supposed
to believe about America (not about the rest of the world, which
is 'old' and generally left behind, hence irrelevant) uncritically,
loyally, unhistorically. There is an amazing polarity at work
here. In the popular mind America is supposed to stand above
or beyond history. On the other hand, there is an all-consuming
general interest that one encounters across the country in the
history of everything, from small regional topics, to the vaster
reaches of world empires. Many cults develop out of both these
carefully balanced opposites, which encompass the road from xenophobic
patriotism to other-worldly spiritualism and reincarnation.
One rather more worldly example of the
struggle about history is worth recalling here. A decade ago
a great intellectual battle was waged in the public sphere over
what kind of history should be taught in schools. What was clear
about the va-et-vient that occurred over many weeks was that
the promoters of the idea of American history as a heroically
unified national narrative with entirely positive resonances
for young minds, thought of history as essential not only for
the truth, but for the ideological propriety of representations
that would mould students into essentially docile citizens, ready
to accept a set of basic themes as the constants in America's
relationships with itself and the rest of the world. Purged from
this essentialist view were to be the elements of what was called
postmodernism and divisive history (that of minorities, women,
slavery, etc) but the result, interestingly enough, was a failure
so far as the imposition of such risible standards was concerned.
As Linda Symcox sums it up, "Certainly one would argue,
as I do, that...[the neoconservative] approach to cultural literacy
is a thinly disguised attempt to inculcate students with a relatively
conflict-free, consensual view of history. But the project ended
up moving in a different direction altogether. In the hands of
social and world historians, who actually wrote the Standards
with the K-12 teachers, the Standards became a vehicle for the
pluralistic vision the government was trying to combat. In the
end, consensus history, or cultural reproduction... was challenged
by those historians who felt that social justice and the redistribution
of power demanded a more complex telling of the past."
In the public sphere over which in so
many ways the mass mainstream media preside there are thus a
series of what one might call narrathemes that structure, package
and control discussion, despite the appearance of variety and
diversity. I shall discuss only a small number of them that strike
me as acutely pertinent at this time. One of course is that there
is a collective 'we', a national identity represented without
apparent demurral by our president, our secretary of state at
the UN, our armed forces in the desert, and our interests, which
are routinely seen as self-defensive, without ulterior motive,
and in an overall way, innocent in the way that a traditional
woman is supposed to be innocent, pure, free of sin, etc. Another
narratheme is the irrelevance of history, and the inadmissibility
of illegitimate 'linkage', for example, the facts that the US
once had armed and encouraged Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden,
or that Vietnam (when it is mentioned at all) and its particular
form of devastation was 'bad' for the country or, as Jimmy Carter
once put it memorably, that it was a form of "mutual"
self-destruction. Or even more staggering, the ongoing and even
institutional irrelevance of two immensely important and constitutively
American experiences, the slavery of the African-American people
and the dispossession and quasi-extermination of the native American
population. These have yet to be figured into the national consensus
in any serious way. (Whereas there is a major Holocaust Museum
in Washington DC, no such memorial exists either for African-Americans
or native Americans, anywhere in the country).
A third is the unexamined conviction
that opposition to our policies is 'anti-Americanism' which is
based on jealousy about 'our' democracy, freedom, wealth and
greatness or, as the current obsession with French resistance
to an American war against Iraq has it, plain and ordinary foreign
nastiness. In this context Europeans are constantly reminded
of how America saved them twice in the past century, with the
subsidiary implication that most Europeans simply sat back watching
while American troops did all the real fighting. And when it
comes to places where the US has been extraordinarily entangled
for at least 50 years like the Middle East or Latin America,
the narratheme of America as the honest broker, the impartial
adjudicator, the entirely well-intentioned international force
for good, has no serious competitor to it; what we have therefore
is a strand of thought that has little place in it for issues
relating to power, or financial gain, or resource grabbing, or
ethnic lobbying, or forcible and/or surreptitious regime change
(as in Iran and Chile, for instance), and as a result remains
quite undisturbed except for occasional efforts to recall them.
The closest one gets to that kind of realism is in the abhorrently
euphemistic idiom of the thinktanks and the government, idioms
that discuss soft power and projection and American vision. Still
less represented (or even alluded to) are policies of extraordinary
cruelty or invidiousness for which America is directly responsible
like support for the Sharonian campaign against Palestinian civilian
life, or the terrible civilian casualties incurred by Iraqi sanctions,
or the support given the Turkish and Columbian regimes for horrendously
inhuman punishments against ordinary citizens. These are considered
out of bounds during serious discussions of 'policy'.
Finally, the narratheme of unchallenged
moral wisdom as represented in figures with official authority
(eg Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, plus every present official
of the current administration) is reproduced over and over without
very much of a twinge of doubt. The fact, for instance, that
two Nixon-era convicted felons (Elliott Abrams and John Poindexter)
have recently been endowed with significant government positions
attracts little comment, much less objection. This sort of blind
appreciation of authority past or present, pure or sullied, occurs
in many different forms, all the way from the respectful, even
abject forms of address used by commentators and pundits, to
a total unwillingness to see anything in the authority figure
except his or her polished appearance (for instance, the de rigueur
dark suit, white shirt, and red tie), unscarred by anything in
the past record that might be incriminating to a serious degree.
Buttressing that is, I believe, the American belief in pragmatism
as a philosophic system of dealing with reality that is anti-metaphysical,
anti- historical and, curiously, even anti-philosophical. Postmodern
anti-nominalism of the kind that reduces everything to sentence
structure and linguistic context is allied with this, and is
a very influential style of thought existing alongside analytic
philosophy in the American university. In my own university,
figures such as Hegel and Heidegger, for example, are taught
in literature or art history departments, rarely in philosophy.
It is this amazingly persistent set of
master stories that the newly organised and mobilised American
information effort (especially in the Arab and Islamic worlds)
is designed by hook or crook to spread. What gets deliberately
obscured in the process are the stunningly obstinate dissenting
traditions -- America's unofficial counter-memory that stem in
large part from the fact that this is an immigrant society --
that flourish alongside, or at the interior of this handful of
narrathemes. Few commentators abroad take much notice of this
forest of dissent, alas. These clumps of both the progressive
or regressive kind provide and to a trained observer make visible
linkages between the master narrathemes that are normally not
in evidence. If one were to examine the components of the impressively
strong resistance to the proposed Bush war against Iraq, for
example, a very different, highly mobile picture of America emerges,
one that is much more amenable to foreign cooperation, dialogue
and significant action. I shall leave aside the considerable
number of people who oppose the war on grounds having to do with
its human cost in blood and treasure as well as its disastrous
effect on an already badly disturbed economy. I shall also not
discuss the great swirl of Right-wing opinion that sees America
as traduced by treacherous foreigners, the United Nations, and
godless communists. In addition, the libertarian and isolationist
constituency, which is a strange combination of Left and Right,
needs no further comment here. I would also include among these
categories that must be left unexamined here a very large and
idealistically inspired university student population that is
deeply suspicious of American foreign policy in almost all of
its forms, especially economic globalisation: this is a principled
and sometimes quasi-anarchical group that has kept American university
and college campuses alive to such issues in the past as the
war in Vietnam, South African apartheid, and civil rights at
home.
This leaves several important and in
many ways formidable constituencies of experience and conscience
for me to survey very rapidly here. These generally pertain,
in European and Afro-Asian terms, to the Left, given that anything
like an organised parliamentary Left-wing or socialist movement
has never really existed for any length of time in post-World
War Two America, so powerful is the grip of the two-party apparatus.
As for the Democratic Party today, it is in a shambles from which
it will not soon recover. One would have to include for a start
the positively disaffected and still fairly radical wing of the
African-American community, that is, those urban groups who agitate
against police brutality, job discrimination, housing and educational
neglect, and are led or represented by iconic or charismatic
figures such as Rev Al Sharpton, Cornel West, Muhammad Ali, Jesse
Jackson (faded as a leader though he is) and several others who
see themselves as continuing in the tradition of Martin Luther
King Jr. Associated with this movement are numerous other activist
ethnic collectivities, including Latinos, Native Americans, and
Muslims, each of which of course has devoted considerable energy
to trying to slip into the mainstream, in pursuit of important
political assignments in local and national governments, appearance
on prestigious television talk shows, and membership on governing
boards of foundations, colleges, and corporations. But in the
main, however, most of those groups are still more activated
by a sense of injustice and discrimination than they are by ambition,
and therefore aren't ready to enlist completely in the American
(mostly white and middle-class) dream. The interesting thing
about someone like Sharpton, for example, or say Ralph Nader
and his loyal supporters in the protesting but still struggling
Green Party, is that though they may have visibility and a certain
degree of acceptability they remain outsiders, basically uncoopted,
too intransigent, and not sufficiently interested in the routine
rewards that the society offers.
One huge wing of the women's movement,
active on behalf of abortion rights, abuse and harassment issues,
professional equality is also a major asset to the dissenting
current in American society. Similarly, sectors of the normally
sedate, interest- and advancement-oriented professional groups
(physicians, lawyers, scientists, academics in particular, as
well as a number of labor unions, and a sector of the environmental
movement) feed into the dynamic of counter- currents I am listing
here, even though of course as corporate bodies they retain a
major interest in the orderly functioning of society and the
agendas that derive from them.
Then too the organised churches themselves
can never be discounted as seedbeds of change and dissent. Their
membership is to be clearly distinguished from the fundamentalist
and televangelist movements I mentioned above. Catholic Bishops,
for example, the laity and clergy of the Episcopal Church, in
addition to the Quakers and the Presbyterian synod -- despite
the various travails that include sexual scandals in the first
and depleted memberships in most of the others -- have been surprisingly
liberal on war and peace questions, and quite willing to speak
out against international human rights abuses, the hyper-inflated
military budgets, and neo-liberal economic policies that have
mutilated the public sphere since the early 1980s. Historically
there was always a segment of the organised Jewish community
involved in progressive minority rights causes domestically and
abroad, but since the Reagan period the ascendancy of the neo-conservative
movement, the alliance between Israel and the religious Right
in this country, and feverish Zionist- organised activity equating
criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism and even fear of a new
American Auschwitz, have reduced the positive agency of that
force quite considerably.
Finally, a large number of groups and
individuals sought out for rallies, protest marches, and peaceful
demonstrations has stood out of the mind-deadening patriotism
in the post-9/11 period. These have clustered around civil liberties
(including free speech and constitutional guarantees) that have
been threatened by the Terrorist and Patriot Acts. Agitation
against capital punishment, occasional protests at the abuses
represented by the detention camps at Guantanamo Bay, a general
distrust of civilian authorities in the military, as well as
an increasing discomfort at the increasingly privatised carceral
system that has locked up the highest number of people per capita
in the world (a disproportionate number of them men and women
of color), all these radiate like so many perpetual disturbances
inside the prevailing middle class social order. A correlative
of this is of course the rough and tumble of cyberspace, fought
over unrelentingly by both the official and unofficial Americas.
In the current malaise produced by an unmistakably steep decline
in the country's economy, disruptive themes like the growing
difference between rich and poor, the extraordinary profligacy
and corruption of the corporate higher echelons, and the manifest
danger to the social security system through various audaciously
rapacious schemes of privatisation, continue to take a heavy
toll out of the firmly held and much celebrated virtues of the
capitalist system that is uniquely American.
Is America indeed united behind this
president, his bellicose foreign policy, and his dangerously
simple-minded economic vision? This is another way of asking
whether American identity has been settled once and for all and
whether for a world that has to live with its far- reaching military
power (there are American troops now in dozens of countries)
there is something monolithic that the rest of the world that
isn't willing to be quiescent can deal with as a sort of fixed
entity lurching all over the place with the full support of all
'Americans'. I have tried to suggest another way of seeing America
as indeed a troubled country with a more contested actuality
than is usually ascribed to it. I think it is more accurate to
apprehend America as embroiled in a serious clash of identities
whose counterparts are visible as similar contests throughout
the rest of the world. America may have won the Cold War, as
the popular phrase has it, but the actual results of that victory
within America are very far from clear, the struggle not yet
over. Too much of a focus on the American executive's centralising
military and political power ignores the internal dialectics
that continue and are nowhere near being settled. Abortion rights
and the teaching of natural evolution are still issues of unsettled
contentiousness.
The great fallacy of Fukuyama's thesis
about the end of history, or for that matter Huntington's clash
of civilisation theory, is that both wrongly assume that cultural
history is a matter of clear-cut boundaries or of beginnings,
middles and ends, whereas in fact, the cultural- political field
is much more an arena of struggle over identity, self-definition
and projection into the future. They are fundamentalists when
it comes to fluid, turbulent cultures in constant process, trying
to impose fixed boundaries and internal rules of order where
none really can exist. Cultures, specially America's, which is
in effect an immigrant culture, overlap with others, and one
of the perhaps unintended consequences of globalisation is the
appearance of transnational communities of global interests,
as in the human rights movement, the women's movement, the anti-war
movement and so on. America is not at all insulated from any
of this, but one has to excavate beyond the intimidatingly unified
surface to see what lies beneath, so as to be able to join in
that set of disputes, to which many of the people of the world
are a party. There is hope and encouragement to be gained from
that view.
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Take a Bite Out of Phil Knight's Bottom Line: Buy No Sweat Apparel!
Alexander
Cockburn
Moran
and the Dixie Chicks; Hitchens and Horowitz
Peter Linebaugh
Terror
of the Petrolarchs
Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity
Cooking
Intelligence for War
Anne Gwynne
Anger and Tears at Israel's Wall of Apartheid
Pablo Mukherjee
Why Certain Liberals Love the War
Adam Lebowitz
The Fire Last Time: Remembering the Tokyo Air Raids
Kurt Nimmo
If You Care About Elizabeth Smart, Why Not the Kids of Iraq?
John Ross
Endgame
in Baghdad: a Human Shield Returns Home to Protest
Fran Shor
The Grunts of Empire
Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
The Muslim World and the West: the Roots of Conflict
Ben Tripp
Support Our Troops...Quick!
Dr. Susan
Block
Bukkake Bombing Crusade
Harvey Wasserman
The Emerging Superpower of Peace
Anthony Gancarski
Elizabeth Smart: the Face of War?
Seymour Melman
In the Grip of the Permanent War Economy
Joe Quandt
Do You Know What War Is?
Adam Engel
Indian Museum
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Richey, Becker, Perelman and Katz
March 8 /
9, 2003
Edward Said
Who's
In Charge?
Bruce Jackson
Elegy
for Two Giraffes and a Zebra
Perry Anderson
The Casuistries of Peace and
War
Joanne Mariner
Patriot
Act II's Attack on Punishment
William Lind
A Warning from Clausewitz on 4th Generation Warfare
Sam Husseini
Why
So Long for Iraq to Comply? Follow the Policy
Forrest Hylton
Business as Usual in Bolivia?
David Lindorff
Race and the Death Penalty in Pennsylvania
Ben Tripp
Is There
a Eurologist in the House?
Anthony Gancarski
W's Personal Jesus
Jon Elmer
An Interview with William Blum
Douglas Valentine
The Clash of the Icons
Norman Madarasz
Radical Politics and the Writer:
Maurice Blanchot
Gordon Solberg
There's
Got to be a Better Way
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Engel, Bernard
Weekend Website
The
White House
February 28,
2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Meet
the New Yorker's Chief Hack: Jeffrey Goldberg
Saul Landau
Now
It's Personal
Michael Neumann
A Plea for Hysteria
Karima Bennoume
The UN: Tool for Peace or War?
The Black
Commentator
The Rev. Sharpton and the Soul of the Democrats
Jennifer Loewenstein
Don't Turn Off the War
Richard Levins
Cuba's Biological Weapons: Why the World Needs More of Them
M. Shahid Alam
Is This a Clash of Civilizations?
Clay Conrad
Juries
and Judges: What's Relevant?
Ben Tripp
Speaking in Tongues: a Guide to Gibberish in the Age of Bush
Eliot Katz
To Declare Preemptive War is to Declare a Bankrupt Imagination
Kurt Nimmo
Paying Through the Nose to Kill Iraqi Kids
Matt Vidal
George W. Bonaparte
Mark Zepezauer
Why the Right Hates America
Mickey Z.
The Anti----War Talk I Never Gave
Jerry Kroth
Jung and the Space Shuttle Revisited
Shyam Oberoi
Chronicle of a War Foretold
Ron Jacobs
What If the Firebombing of Baghdad Were a Nightclub Fire?
Poets' Basement
Eliot Katz and Jim Cohn
Website of
the Weekend
Defense
Tech
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
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