Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated, by Gore VidalAnti-Americanism is an emotion masquerading as an analysis, a morality, an ideal, even an idea about what to do. When hatred of foreign policies ignites into hatred of an entire people and their civilization, then thinking is dead and demonology lives. When complexity of thought devolves into caricature, intellect is close to reconciling itself to mass murder.
Thunder's Mouth/Nation Books, 2002, 160 pp, $16.50
Why Do People Hate America?, by Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies
Icon Books, 2002, 231 pp, $19.99
"What We Think of America"
Granta Issue 77, Spring 2002, 256 pp, $20.95
"Dissent from the Homeland: Essays after September 11"
The South Atlantic Quarterly, Spring 2002, 200 pp, $12
One might have thought all this obvious. On the evidence of two of the works under review, it is not. Consider the sad case of Gore Vidal, once "a great wit" (in the words of Norman Mailer, who proceeded to skewer him), now a witless crank. Reposing in Ravello, Italy, Vidal maunders from snippet to snippet. His latest volume of musings manages to be skimpy and redundant at once. Collecting one's Vanity Fair pieces as if they would stand up in book covers is an act of, well, vanity. That such an exercise should be escorted into the world by the Nation's book publishing arm speaks unflatteringly about publishing standards on the left.
Toward the likes of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who would define their atrocities as retaliations against the United States of America and its incidental citizens, Vidal burns with sympathy. Not for him so banal an act as moral condemnation or investigation of what sort of person commits mass murder out of political grievance. Rather, Vidal thinks it is tough-minded to indulge his desire to know "the various preoccupations on our side that drove them to such terrible acts." Note: "drove them." These killers were presumably helpless. All one needs to know about them is "the unremitting violence of the United States against the rest of the world." Curiosity succumbs to the caricaturist's crippled imagination. In a follow-up article published in Britain's Observer (October 27, 2002), Vidal takes up the torch for selective agnosticism with this remark: "We still don't know by whom we were struck that infamous Tuesday, or for what true purpose."
Not that Vidal is incapable of generosity. At least one American benefits from it: McVeigh, who in a 1999 letter to Vidal complimented him on being the first "to really explore the underlying motivations for such a strike against the U.S. Government [as the Oklahoma City bombing]." Presumably, it takes one perceptive guy to recognize the genius of another: "McVeigh considered himself, rightly or wrongly, at war." Well, which is it? Vidal does not pause to worry the point. When McVeigh writes that "there is no ... proof that knowledge of the presence of children existed in relation to the Oklahoma City bombing" (love that tortured syntax), Vidal claims that McVeigh "denies any foreknowledge of the presence of children in the Murrah building."
In other words, Vidal has a good word for anyone who likes the sound of "a final all-out war against the 'System,' or "deliberately risks—and gives—his life to alert his fellow citizens to an onerous government." In the end, McVeigh and bin Laden are pikers. "Most of today's actual terrorists can be found within our own governments, federal, state, municipal." "Municipal" is a particularly nice touch: perhaps Vidal means police departments, though for all the care he takes he might just as well be alluding to death squads at work under cover of sanitation departments. If you wonder what might be a better society, Vidal helpfully offers up what he calls "Tim's Bill of Rights," which includes (a) no taxes, (b) metal-based currency, and (c) low legislative salaries. So much for political theory.
Instead of ideas about what makes America tick, Vidal dabbles in conspiracy theory. If McVeigh did not act alone—and there is some interesting reportorial speculation to this effect—then, in Vidal's cockeyed vision, McVeigh gets off the hook. He offers the notion that if McVeigh had been more thoroughly investigated, the September 11 plot might have been scotched. He blasts the New York Times for ignoring the parallel between the demolition of the Federal Building and the Reichstag fire.
To Vidal and his fellow paranoids, everything makes sense. Sources such as a newsletter called Strategic Investment and the inventor of the neutron bomb are drummed up to convince the reader. Vidal's long crank letter to FBI director-designate Robert Mueller is included not to make an argument—something it fails to do—but to demonstrate his superior knowledge. Vidal seems to think that to make a case he need do no more than append any item to which he has put his hand. His laundry lists would be as useful.
Unsurprisingly, Vidal's America is all of a piece, what sixties' crackpots used to call Amerika. It is "a country evenly divided between political reactionaries and religious maniacs... .For Americans, morality has nothing at all to do with ethics or right action ... Morality is SEX, SEX, SEX."
This is reasoning in the fashion of McVeigh and bin Laden. And it is close to the prosecutorial logic of the British writers Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies. The Pakistani-born Sardar is an information scientist, Davies is an anthropologist and former BBC producer. At the outset, they alert their readers that "This is ... not a book about the positive sides of the United States." Why Do People Hate America? is a book of talking points for what the authors consider the global majority, for "loathing for America is about as close as we can get to a universal sentiment." To them, America "forms an immensely coherent whole." And they have no trouble deciding that they don't like it.
Though their documentation is spotty, the strong point of their argument with America concerns corporate and Washington economic policies that magnify poverty elsewhere and despoil the environment. But for them, capitalism is not an economic system: it is a national brand. That America might have allies in this despoliation—Japanese corporations, European corporations, Brazilian corporations, Canadian corporations—does not seem to cross their minds. No Japanese video games hook the world's urban youth. Does Mecca have multilane motorways? Cherchez les Américains!
Indeed, in their accounting, American culture is like the AIDS virus: infectious, self-transforming, and lethal. It doesn't interest them that, loathsome and silly as much of Hollywood and U.S. pop product is, people everywhere mix the stuff into hybrids. They play, hum, watch, and read it because, in strange fashion, it serves not only aggressiveness but (perverted as they frequently are) ideals of freedom from the antimodern traditions that Sardar and Davies lionize but many others wish to transform or escape.
For them, a few idle asides excepted, America and its works amount to nothing but unbridled wickedness, a brief for gunplay, willful stupidity, and closed-mindedness. "Within the U.S. it often seems that the hardest topic to debate is the idea of America itself and its problems... . It is the prime reason for infuriation, antipathy, hostility and even hatred beyond the bounds of America." As if those who would slaughter Americans would sweeten up and address their troubles if we had better debates. As if America-hating began when Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967, or when George W. Bush's clique took power in the 2000 coup d'état. As if the hatred did not have a history in Europe's and Asia's fascist and imperialist pasts.
Until late in their game, Sardar and Davies have no qualms about demonizing the American Empire. Toward this end, they trundle out a potted history of American Manifest Destiny and racism, as if the struggle against racism were not also American. In the end, their answer to the question their title poses is: Because America is Hateful.
"What most people hate," they acknowledge, is not most Americans but "'America,' the political entity based on authoritarian violence, double standards, self-obsessed self-interest, and an ahistorical naivety that equates the Self with the World." That this "political entity" belatedly defended Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo is of no interest to them. Then, after deploying a chain of half-truths for 204 pages, the authors go pious, preaching that "hatred always simplifies." Suddenly, on page 209, "the United States is a very complex country." Oh. Too bad we're two pages from their last word. It's the shabbiest of Hollywood endings, a little grace-note to close out a rant.
In Granta's special spring issue, "What We Think of America," the same Ziauddin Sardar contributes a fine, observant, funny, first-person essay on Mecca, where he lived and conducted research for five years. In the co-authored shadow of a book under review, however, his delicate skepticism toward tradition is not in evidence. By contrast, most of the twenty-four contributors to the Granta symposium draw on experience and display curiosity about the actually existing America, where people live. The Canadian Michael Ignatieff praises America's gift for "democratic reinvention"—badly needed now, I might add. The Indian Ramachandra Guha recalls that the sight of the dean of the Yale Law School carrying his own baggage "was a body blow to my anti-Americanism." The Chilean Ariel Dorfman indispensably warns "how comfortable it is to employ anti-Americanism as a way of avoiding the faults and deficiencies of our own societies, even though such self-criticism should not prevent us from assigning blame to Americans when that blame is due, which it often is." Meanwhile, England's Harold Pinter contributes the sort of judgment that one of his stumbling, punch-drunk characters might make, to the effect that the United States is murderous, period, so there. Almost all the other contributors, writers from many countries, display some or much grace as they try to navigate through America's contradictions. Their political positions are less significant than their attentiveness. Blessedly, they look the abstractions up and down—and dance away from them.
However, speaking of (and in) abstractions, most of the contributors to South Atlantic Quarterly's "Dissent from the Homeland" issue are happy to dwell in a realm where almost any proposition can be rendered acceptable. This special issue oscillates between the approaches of the two editors: the pacifism of the Protestant theologian Stanley Hauerwas and the leftist literary theory of Frank Lettricchia, both of Duke University. In most of the left-wing essays, we leave any recognizable world of life and death and plunge into a world of nothing but language. The dominant tone is sounded by practitioners of literary theory, for whom nothing is real, nothing to get hung about—except American militarism, American capitalism, America. Al-Qaeda is not much of an enemy, but bad interpretation is. Deadpan, the editors offer a translation of Jean Baudrillard's notorious Le Monde piece on the spirit of terrorism, with its claims that the American "superpower ... through its unbearable power is the secret cause of all the violence percolating all over the world, and consequently of the terrorist imagination ..."; that "We could even go so far as to say it is they who perpetrated the attack, but it was we who wished it"; and in a stunning crescendo, possibly the craziest sentence yet written about these awful events: "When the two towers collapsed, one had the impression that they were responding to the suicide of the suicide-jets with their own suicide." "Even go so far..." Those are the operative words, and not just for Baudrillard, from whom one expects this sort of thing.
We find in these pages Fredric Jameson's declaration that Osama bin Laden is "the very prototype of the accumulation of money in the hands of private individuals"; Susan Willis's declaration that "the great majority of the victims died in the service of global finance capital"; and the surmise of John Milbank, Frances Meyers Ball Professor of Philosophical Theology at the University of Virginia, that September 11 "may even have been a preemptive strike by some Islamic forces," along with his Chomskyan claim that to understand the American reaction, "one must ... ignore the pieties about the dreadfulness of terrorism," since "the West and Israel itself engage in or covertly support many acts of terror all over the globe ... " (Milbank also puts scare quotes around "rights," as in "individual 'rights.'" In this fastidiousness, he should find common cause with the Bush administration.) Amid predictable shots at Bush and theme park culture, few of the authors display any curiosity about the mass-murder squads that targeted the United States. This is Hamlet without the usurper king of Denmark—or rather, starring George Bush II as Claudius. Even the sober pacifist appeal by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, puts language at the center. For thirty years, the conservators of literary theory have imagined that they are not only decoding culture but illuminating all of social reality. In the social sciences, the "linguistic turn" emptied out life into a language game in which any proposition sounds about as sensible as any other. In this collection, it's theory that, like Baudrillard's imaginary towers, implodes.
For his part, co-editor Hauerwas finds that "the world was not changed on September 11, 2001. The world was changed during the celebration of Passover in A. D. 33." Straightforwardly rejecting patriotism, Hauerwas embraces not only pacifism but a fatalism without political hope. It should be noted that this special issue includes a few pieces of some discernment, including an essay about a military base by the anthropologist Catherine Lutz, who is actually interested in the density of class relations in the world where Americans live. The most striking item, however, comes from a Muslim professor, Vincent J. Cornell, director of the King Fahd Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies at the University of Arkansas, who takes Islam seriously enough to criticize proponents who would use anti-Americanism as an alibi for their own incapacities.
This is no easy time for anti-anti-Americans, for the Washington usurpers in power actively dare the world to hate the country they bestride. The small-minded Bush cadres are so benightedly self-interested, so contemptuous of world (and American) opinion, so reckless in rhetoric, so heedless of argument, that they will for the next two years pose an immense challenge to people of good will everywhere—to resist their overweening designs without succumbing to barbarism. This is the high-wire act we are called to perform. The auspicious news is that a goodly proportion of Americans—on many issues, a majority—are straining to leave them behind. Quite literally, on issue after issue, the regime in charge does not represent America. This is good news, but it is not necessarily operational news. It entails a sizable moral and intellectual challenge alongside a political one—to sustain complexity of thought about the America these plutocrats command, to stand in their way without bitterness, to refuse to give up on the higher American possibility. Intellectuals must not permit sloppy thinking to cede the usurpers an American future they have not earned, and that, with luck, they will not inherit.
Todd Gitlin's most recent book is Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives. His next is Letters to a Young Activist, to be published this spring by Basic Books. He is a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University. A shorter version of this piece appeared in the Toronto Globe and Mail.
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