The Other America

A small item in the press a few days ago reported that Prince Ibn Al-Walid of Saudi Arabia had donated 10million dollars to the American University in Cairo to establish a department or centre of American Studiesthere. It should be recalled that the young billionaire had contributed an unsolicited 10 million dollars toNew York City shortly after the 11 September bombings, with an accompanying letter that, aside from describingthe handsome sum as a tribute to New York, also suggested that the United States might reconsider its policytowards the Middle East. Obviously he had total and unquestioning American support for Israel in mind, but hispolitely stated proposition seemed also to cover the general American policy of denigrating, or at leastshowing disrespect, for Islam.

In a fit of petulant rage, the then Mayor of New York (which also has the largest Jewish population of anycity in the world), Rudolph Guiliani, returned the check to Al-Walid, rather unceremoniously and with anextreme and I would say racist contempt that was meant to be insulting as well as gloating. On behalf of acertain image of New York, he personally was upholding the city's demonstrated bravery and its principledresistance to outside interference. And of course pleasing, rather than trying to educate, a purportedlyunified Jewish constituency.

Guiliani's churlish behaviour was of a piece with his refusal several years before (in 1995, well after theOslo signings) to admit Yasser Arafat to the Philharmonic Hall for a concert to which everyone at the UN hadbeen invited. Typical of the cheap theatrics of the below average American big city politician, what NewYork's mayor did in response to the young Saudi Arabian's gift was completely predictable. Even though themoney was intended, and greatly needed, for humanitarian use in a city wounded by a terrible atrocity, theAmerican political system and its main actors put Israel ahead of everything, whether or not Israel's amplyendowed 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 thingsturned out he had nicely preempted even the well- oiled pro-Israeli lobbying apparatus. As the celebratednovelist and essayist Joan Didion wrote in a recent New York Review of Books article, it has become astaple of US policy first articulated by FD Roosevelt that America has tried against all logic to maintain ahopelessly contradictory support for the Saudi monarchy on the one hand and, on the other, with the state ofIsrael, so much so, she adds, that "we have become unable to discuss anything that might be seen astouching 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 beenquite 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 theircountries 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 thoughin its details the notion encompasses a wide, not to say jumbled, range of opinions, from on the one handseeing America as a conspiracy of Jews, to theories on the other stipulating that America is either abottomless well of benign good feeling and help for the downtrodden, or that it is ruled from A to Z by anunchallenged 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 thiswas a complex society with all sorts of currents, interests, pressures, and histories in conflict within itand that far from being ruled the way Syria was, for instance, a different model of power and authority oughtto be studied. I enlisted my late friend, the scholar and political activist, Eqbal Ahmed, who had an expertknowledge of American society but was also perhaps the finest theorist and historian of anti-colonial nationalliberation movements in the world, to talk to Arafat and bring along other experts so that a sharper, morenuanced model might develop for use by the Palestinians during their preliminary contacts with the USgovernment in the late 1980s -- but all to no avail. Ahmed had carefully studied the Algerian FLN'srelationship with France during the war of 1954-62 as well as the North Vietnamese while they were negotiatingwith Kissinger during the 1970s.

The contrast between a scrupulous, detailed knowledge of the metropolitan society with which theseinsurgents had been in conflict and the Palestinians' almost caricatural knowledge of America (based mainly onhearsay and cursory readings in Time magazine) was stark. Arafat's single-minded obsession was to makehis way personally into the White House and talk to that whitest of white men Bill Clinton: in his view thatwould 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, completelyoverwhelming and confusing the Palestinians with his charm and his manipulation of the system, so much theworse for Arafat and his men. Their simplified view of America was monumentally unchanged, as it still istoday. As for resistance or knowing how to play the game of politics in a world with only one, all- conqueringsuper-power in it, matters remain as they have for over half a century. Most people throw up their hands indespair 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 admissionsfor the children.

The other, more hopeful side of the story concerns what seems to have been Prince Al-Walid's later changeof direction, about which I can only surmise. But I do know that apart from a few courses and seminars onAmerican literature and politics scattered throughout the universities of the Arab world, there has never beenanything 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 unboundgreat power there is a vital need for knowing as much about its swirling dynamics as is humanly possible. Andthat, I believe, also includes commanding an excellent working command of the language, something few Arableaders (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, convenientconsumption. But we must also be conscious of from what source these come and in what ways the cultural andsocial processes from which they ultimately derive can be interpreted, especially since the danger of thinkingabout 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 arethe cases of Italy and Spain, an utterly opportunistic alliance with) America as it readies itself for adeeply unpopular war against Iraq. But for the ongoing global demonstrations and protests that have eruptedentirely at the popular level, the war would simply be a brazen act of unopposed cynical domination. Yetcontested as it is by so many Americans as well as Europeans, Asians, Africans and Latin Americans who havetaken to the streets and to their local newspapers at least suggests that at last there is an awakening to thefact that the United States, or rather the small handful of Judeo-Christian white men who currently rule itsgovernment, 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, asseen by someone who is American and has lived comfortably in it for years and years, but who by virtue of hisPalestinian origins, still retains his perspective as a comparative outsider, but a kind of insider also. Myinterest 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 Muslimworlds. What is there to be seen?

The difference between America and the classic empires of the past is that, even though each empireasserted its utter originality and its determination not to repeat the overreaching ambitions of imperialpredecessors, this one does so with an astonishing affirmation of its nearly sancrosanct altruism andwell-meaning innocence. For this alarming delusion there is, even more alarmingly, a new squadron of formerlyLeft or liberal intellectuals alike who had historically opposed American wars abroad but who are now preparedto make the case for virtuous empire (the figure of the lonely sentry has been used) using a variety ofstyles, 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 TwinTowers-Pentagon bombings, horrible though they were, retreated as if they came from nowhere, rather than infact from a world across the seas driven crazy by American intervention and ubiquitous American presence. Thisis of course not to condone Islamic terrorism, which is a hateful thing in every way. But it is to remark thatin all the pious analyses of America's responses to Afghanistan and now Iraq, history and proportionality havesimply dropped out of the picture entirely.

What the liberal hawks specially don't refer to, however, is the Christian Right (so similar to Islamicextremism in fervor and righteousness) and its massive, indeed decisive presence in America today. Thequalities 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 Americansupporters and the Christian extremists is that the latter support Zionism as a way of bringing all the Jewsto the Hold y Land to prepare the way for the Messiah's Second Coming; at which point Jews will either have toconvert to Christianity or be annihilated. The bloody and rabidly anti-Semitic teleologies are rarely referredto, certainly not by the pro-Israeli Jewish phalanx.

America is the world's most avowedly religious country. References to God permeate the national life, fromcoins to buildings to common forms of speech: in God we trust, God's country, God bless America, and on andon. George Bush's power base is made up of the 60-70 million fundamentalist Christians who, like him, believethey 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 thatcontemporary 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. Butthe evidence for that desire is true only up to a point: what matters more is religion by propheticillumination, unshakeable conviction in a sometimes apocalyptic sense of mission, and a heedless disregard ofsmall-scale facts and complications. The enormous geographical distance of the country from the turbulentworld is another factor, as is the fact that Canada and Mexico are continental neighbours with littlecapability 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 tobe ideological, but rather a fact of nature. America=good=total loyalty and love. Similarly there is anunconditional 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 socentral an iconographical role. You see it everywhere, on taxicabs, on men's jacket lapels, on the frontwindows and roofs of houses everywhere. It is the main embodiment of the national image, signifying heroicendurance and a beleaguered sense of fighting of unworthy enemies. Patriotism is still the prime Americanvirtue, tied up as it is with religion, belonging, and doing the right thing not just at home but all over theworld.

Patriotism is also represented in retail consumer spending, as when Americans were enjoined after theevents 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 inorder '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 politicalchallenge to the dogmas of what are referred to as the opportunities of a free market. It's as if no one careswhether the corporate structure in alliance with the federal government, which still hasn't been able toprovide most Americans with decent universal health coverage and a sound education, has to be changed. News ofthe 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 tosimplify into slogans and sound bites. But what one discovers about this amazingly complex society is how manycounter- currents and alternatives run across and around this consensus all the time. The growing resistanceto war that the president has been essentially minimising and pretending to ignore, derives from the otherless formal America that the mainstream media (newspapers of record such as The New York Times, themain networks, the publishing and magazine industries in large measure) always tries to paper over and keepdown.

Never has there been so unashamed, if not scandalous, complicity between TV news and the government's rushto war: even the average newsreader that turns up on CNN or one of the major networks talks excitedly aboutSaddam's evils and how 'we' have to stop him before it's too late. And if that is not bad enough, the airwavesare filled with ex-military men, terrorism experts, and Middle East policy analysts who know none of therelevant languages, may never have seen any part of the Middle East, and are too poorly educated to be expertat 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. Historyis anathema to it, and in accepted public discourse even the word 'history' is a synonym for nothingness ornon-entity, as in the scornful, typically dismissive American phrase, 'you're history.' Otherwise history iswhat 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 amazingpolarity at work here. In the popular mind America is supposed to stand above or beyond history. On the otherhand, there is an all-consuming general interest that one encounters across the country in the history ofeverything, from small regional topics, to the vaster reaches of world empires. Many cults develop out of boththese carefully balanced opposites, which encompass the road from xenophobic patriotism to other-worldlyspiritualism and reincarnation.

One rather more worldly example of the struggle about history is worth recalling here. A decade ago a greatintellectual battle was waged in the public sphere over what kind of history should be taught in schools. Whatwas clear about the va-et-vient that occurred over many weeks was that the promoters of the idea of Americanhistory as a heroically unified national narrative with entirely positive resonances for young minds, thoughtof history as essential not only for the truth, but for the ideological propriety of representations thatwould mould students into essentially docile citizens, ready to accept a set of basic themes as the constantsin 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 divisivehistory (that of minorities, women, slavery, etc) but the result, interestingly enough, was a failure so faras the imposition of such risible standards was concerned. As Linda Symcox sums it up, "Certainly onewould argue, as I do, that...[the neoconservative] approach to cultural literacy is a thinly disguised attemptto inculcate students with a relatively conflict-free, consensual view of history. But the project ended upmoving in a different direction altogether. In the hands of social and world historians, who actually wrotethe Standards with the K-12 teachers, the Standards became a vehicle for the pluralistic vision the governmentwas trying to combat. In the end, consensus history, or cultural reproduction.