Anti anti-Americanism

Citation

Gitlin, T. (2004), "Anti anti-Americanism", European Business Review, Vol. 16 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.2004.05416aab.003

Anti anti-Americanism

Anti anti-Americanism

Todd GitlinGraduate School of Journalism, Columbia University, New York

Abstract This essay is a response to the ideas in two recently published books about the USA and attitudes towards it: Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to be So Hated, by Gore Vidal and Why Do People Hate America?, by Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies. These books, it is argued, represent a strand of left-wing thinking that is uncritically anti-American, even to the point of allying with or justifying forces of extreme reaction, such as the fundamentalist version of Islam. The author is himself one of the leading thinkers and commentators of the American Left. He believes that the Left – in America and elsewhere – is harming itself by “anti-American” prejudices. It should focus instead on helping the USA to live up to its democratic promise, both at home and overseas.

Keywords: United States of America, Foreign relations, War

Anti-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.

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, described by Norman Mailer as having once been a “great wit”. This talent, regrettably, does not show up in his latest volume of musings, which appears to be at once skimpy and redundant. Reposing in Ravello, Italy, Vidal maunders from snippet to snippet. That such an exercise should be escorted into the world by “The Nation’s” book publishing arm speaks unflatteringly about publishing standards on the American 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 USA 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 US against the rest of the world”. Curiosity succumbs to the caricaturist’s crippled imagination. In a follow-up article published in Britain’s Observer (Vidal, 2002) newspaper, 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 US 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.” Rather than examining serious moral dilemmas of violence and power, Vidal takes refuge in simplistic moral relativism. He therefore concludes that “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:

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  no taxes;

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  metal-based currency; and

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  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 paranoiacs, 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 1960s left-wing infantilists 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 US 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 (perverted as they frequently are) but ideals of freedom from the anti-modern 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, wilful stupidity, and closed-mindedness. “Within the US 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 demonising 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 US 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.

This is no easy time for anti-anti-Americans, for the Washington clique who effectively usurped power in November 2000 actively dare the world to hate the country – the country they rule but do not represent. 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 upon to perform. The auspicious news is that a goodly proportion of Americans – on many issues, a majority – are straining to leave Bush and the neo-conservatives 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.