Myopia In The Name Of The Weak

Asthe thick gray ash of the World Trade Center poured down on Manhattan, Americanswere moved by messages of solidarity from every land. "We Are All NewYorkers," we heard, and an American could be forgiven for imagining that newunderstandings might be pouring in, too. Here and there, yes. Along withstraightforward, unqualified condemnation of terrorism came the passionate hopethat 11 September’s crimes might elicit from Americans a stronger feeling forthe whole of assaulted humanity.

TheChilean writer, ArielDorfman, would recall that another 11 September –this one in 1973 – was theday of the American-supported coup that installed a dictatorship there. Headded: "One of the ways for Americans to overcome their trauma and survive thefear and continue to live and thrive in the midst of the insecurity which hassuddenly swallowed them is to admit that their suffering is neither unique norexclusive, that they are connected – aslong as they are willing to look at themselves in the vast mirror of our commonhumanity – withso may other human beings who, in faraway zones, have suffered similarsituations of unanticipated and often protracted injury and fury."

Breaking The Chains Of Reflex

Dorfmanwrote with compassion and without bitterness. But from others there have comereversions to old reflexes and tones – smugness,acrimony, Schadenfreude. Long before the attacks on the Taliban regime,the world’s fellow-feeling began to subside, displaced by apprehension aboutthe scale and focus of the impending war – legitimateapprehension, in my view – butother feelings, to that the attacks of 11 September were –well, not a just desert,exactly, but… damnable yet understandable payback… rooted in injustice…reaping what empire had sown. After all, was not America essentially theoil-greedy, Islam-disrespecting oppressor of Iraq, Sudan, Palestine? Were notthe ghosts of the Shah’s Iran, of Vietnam and the Cold War Afghani jihadrattling their bones?

Thentoo, were not Americans, having been jolted into the world of the vulnerable,quickly settling back into their damnable ignorance? Indeed, from Washington,for ten days, spasms of jingo rhetoric sounded like the irrepressible return ofthe repressed. Didn’t George W. Bush speak loosely of a "crusade"?Didn’t the Pentagon float the label Operation Infinite Justice? Were there nothighly placed American howls to "end states," to pulverize Kabul, to makesomeone – anyone– pay?

Bushrepented of his Texas-Christian excess, probably having been told it sounded asthough his remark had been telepathically scripted by Osama bin Laden. Hisspeechwriters, and some reality principle, took over (no doubt with hisgratitude). Flagrant errors receded. Rumsfeld backed down, at leastrhetorically, and Powell spoke sense. The branding brigade reverted to theblander, less euphonious Operation Enduring Freedom. Everyone in authorityrejected indiscriminate retaliation.

But writers who identified America as the unswervingworld bully took little note. Like certain American jingos who thought theeffort to understand terrorists immoral – on the ground that to understand isto endorse – they disdained understanding. Because thought can be burdensome(as if the absence of thought were not), they preferred, rhetorically, to shootfirst and ask questions afterward. This is not the first time such know-nothingspasms have been heard in American history. Neither is it the first time Americahas been equated with vulgar interest and brute power – by those who fear bothand those who boast of them.

Ofthe perils of American ignorance, our fantasy life of pure and unappreciatedgoodness, much can be said. The failures of intelligence that made 11 Septemberpossible include not only security oversights but a widespread combination ofstupefaction and arrogance, from the all-or-nothing thinking that armed theIslamic jihad in Afghanistan to fight our own jihad against SovietCommunism, to a general disrespect for the intellect that not so long agopermitted half the citizens of a flabby, self-satisfied democracy to vote for aman unembarrassed by (even proud of) his lack of acquaintanceship with theworld.

Still,know-nothing sentiments are not unique to the United States. What are we to makeof the fact that some who beg us to understand terrorism, or bin Laden, orIslamic fundamentalism, do not trouble themselves to understand America? Youmust not only know your enemy. You must also know your well-meaning, tolerant,short-sighted, liberal, selfish, generous, trigger-happy, dumb, glorious,fat-headed, on-again-off-again friend.

Thinking The Worst

Not a bad place to start is America’s current,reluctant war-mindedness. Is it surprising that suffering close up is felt moreurgently, more deeply, than suffering at a distance? After disaster comes adesire to reassemble the shards of a broken community, withstand the loss,defeat the enemy. So wounds inflame the identities closest at hand. The attackstirs, in other words, patriotism – love of one’s people and desire to keepthem from being hurt anymore. And then, too, the wound is inverted, transformedinto a badge of honor. It is translated into protestation ("we didn’tdeserve this"), and pride ("they can’t do this to us"). Pride can gotoward the quest for justice, the rage for punishment, the pleasures ofsmugness. The dangers are obvious. But it should not be hard to understand thatthe American flag sprouted first, for many of us, as a badge of belonging, not acall to shed innocent blood.

This sequence is not an artefact of American arrogance,ignorance and insularity. It is simply and ordinarily human. It operates asclearly, as humanly, among nonviolent Palestinians attacked by West Bank andGaza settlers and their soldier-protectors, as among Israelis suicide-bombed ata nightclub or a pizza joint. Yet those who, by argument, tone, and emphasis,are ready with automatic arguments against American policies and dislike ofAmerican wealth, vulgarity, arrogance, and ignorance are slow to acknowledgethat Americans, too, suffer from this sequence. Some who instantly (and rightly)understand that Palestinians may burn to avenge their compatriots killed byAmerican weapons assume that Americans have only interests (at least the elitesdo) and, at best, gullibilities (the best the masses are capable of). Those whoare quick to read the mind of the executioner – crediting him with the longestpossible list of legitimate grievances – forfeit understanding of the victim.

Thestyle of anti-Americanism I am writing about is different from the terrorist’slogic that because, say, the US maintains bases in Saudi Arabia, because yoursymbols in Mecca and Medina have been (in your mind) traduced, God calls you toslaughter innocents and crush their own temples to dust. The terrorist logic ofOsama bin Laden is transpolitical – thatis to say, nihilistic. Issues are fodder for his apocalyptic imagination. Hewants power and calls it God. Were Palestinians to win all their demands, hewould move on, in his next video, to his next issue.

Thesoft anti-American, by contrast, sincerely wants US policies to change, but layseven the mass murderer (if not the mass murder) at the door of the US itself.The soft anti-American not only notes but gloats that, after all, the US builtup Islamic fundamentalism in Afghanistan as a counterfoil to the Russians. TheUS’ part in arming these legions is undeniable and important. But whatfollows? American policy has often been vile (in the name of Islam in this case,but never mind), but must we then be righteously condemned to blowback forever?Since there were American companies and rightists who welcomed Hitler, shouldAmerica not have (belatedly) declared war on Nazi Germany? Since the US tiltedtoward Saddam Hussein against Iran, was his invasion of Kuwait to be cavalierlyaccepted? Is America some frozen essence perennially condemned to be worthy ofcondemnation?

OccidentalistRadicalism

Sowe move quickly past a condemnation of mass murder to a cascade of whataboutism.Americans died on 11 September, that’s terrible, but what about thevictims of American foreign policy? In the present, Palestinians and Iraqis.Half a century back, Iran. For decades, Soviet apologists were quick with theirriposte to Americans: "What about the Red Indians?" Whataboutismis the stuff of feuds, not politics. It is not an engagement with reality,but a retreat from it into stampeding certainty.

Andthe seductions of closure are irresistible even to those dedicated, in othercircumstances, to intellectual glasnost. EdwardSaid, for example, writes of the "depressing" reality that in Americancommentary "little time is spent trying to understand America’s role in theworld", then (in the passive voice, which would seem to not to require anyevidence) of "the vague suggestion that the Middle East and Islam are what‘we’ are up against, and that terrorism must be destroyed" (of the first,only yahoos are guilty, and of the second, what is wrong with it as a goal, wereit possible?), and then adds (with revealingly odd inverted commas): "You’dthink that ‘America’ was a sleeping giant rather than a superpower almostconstantly at war, or in some sort of conflict, all over the Islamic domains."

Anyenlightened American shares Said’s disgust with American ignorance. But evenas a characterisation of American action in relation to "the Islamicdomains", this is breathtakingly skewed. And in two directions – for inflattening a US role in which the complex stories of Suez, Kuwait, the Osloagreement, Bosnia and Kosovo also figure, it also reduces "the Islamicdomains" to homogenised, supine victimhood. Elsewhere, Said has deplored theintellectual slovenliness of reducing all Islam to a single solid substance.Here, he indulges in precisely that: an intellectual legerdemain thatdissolves historical truth into exoticising fantasy.

Fromthe Indian novelist ArundhatiRoy, who has admirably criticised her country’s nuclear weapons anddevelopment policies, there is a tender concern that "American people ought toknow that it is not them but their government''s policies that are so hated."One reason why Americans are not exactly clear about the difference is that themurderers of 11 September did not trouble themselves to make such a nicedistinction. (Just what were some 300 firefighters’ views of Americanbases in Saudi Arabia?). This extends to a fear that if America "doesn''t findits enemy, for the sake of the enraged folks back home, it will have tomanufacture one".

Does Arundhati Roy really need reminding that the enemydoes not need to be manufactured? And when she describes bin Laden as "theAmerican president’s dark doppelganger….the twins are blurring into oneanother and gradually becoming interchangeable", is she aware how the lazy,patronizing coupling demeans its author?

Whatlinks Roy and Said is what demarcates anti-Americanism, that peculiarempire of the one-eyed, from reasoned political opposition to US policies. Real,not gestural politics must worry about the breadth of the brush; butanti-Americanism is one of those prejudices that musters evidence to suit aconclusion already in place. For it, ordinary Americans can never be just that.They can certainly never just be victims, a status already monopolizedelsewhere. Americans, or ‘the West’, are blithely dehumanized into themolecules of a structure, what bin Laden calls America’s "vital organs".As for their government, its policies amount to a condition, an essence. Theactions of various mass murderers (the Khmer Rouge, Bin Laden) must, rightly, be"contextualized." But to the anti-American, American policy never has"context." It is.

The presumptive certainty here, the sneeringly sovereigngaze, the casual contempt for the ordinary humanity of the "other", is allthe more astonishingly unreflective from writers who elsewhere anatomisesensitively the duplicities of imaginative colonisation.

Insofaras Arundhati Roy and Edward Said genuinely want Americans to wake up to theworld – to overcome what Anne Taylor Fleming called our serial innocence, everreplenished, ever absurd – they must speak to Americans, in recognitionof the common perplexity and vulnerability, now globalised forever. Toward thisend, myopia in the name of weak is no help to the weak. Behind the crude clichésabout America and its people can be glimpsed a deeper truth: that we are notalone in either our narrowness or our ignorance.

(Todd Gitlin is a professor of Culture, Journalism and Sociologyat New York University and the author of "TheSixties:Days of Hope, Days of Rage," "The Twilight of Common Dreams" andthe novel "Sacrifice." "Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives" is slated for publication in March 2002. He is also the North Americas Editor of www.opendemocracy.netwhere this piece first appeared under the title "The ordinariness of American feelings")