I’m watching New American Foundation fellow Anatol Lieven on C-SPAN. He’s thoughtful and he works with my brother. I will find a way to get this man drunk. In the meantime, check out this Brit’s analysis of what is wrong with America.
The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 were an atrocious assault on the American homeland. Any United States administration would have had to respond to them by seeking to destroy the perpetrators. The war to destroy the al-Qaida forces in Afghanistan and their Taliban backers was therefore a completely legitimate response to “9/11”, as are US actions against al-Qaida and its allies elsewhere.
What the George W Bush administration did, however, was to instil in the American public a fear of much wider threats to the homeland – from Iraq, Iran and North Korea. These states had no connection to al-Qaida. By acting thus, the administration created a belief that anything America does is essentially defensive and a response to “terrorism”.
What were the roots of this belief? Traumatised by the events of 11 September, Americans very naturally reacted by falling back on old patterns of thinking and behaviour shaped by their nationalism. This nationalism embodies beliefs and principles of great and permanent value for America and the world. But it also contains very great dangers. Aspects of American nationalism imperil both America’s global leadership and its success in the struggle against Islamist terrorism and revolution.
More than any other factor, it is the nature and extent of this nationalism which at the start of the 21st century divides the United States from a largely post-nationalist western Europe. Some neo-conservative and realist writers have argued that American behaviour in the world, and American differences with Europe, stem simply from the nation’s possession of greater power and responsibility. It would be truer to say that this power enables America to do certain things. What it does, and how it reacts to the behaviour of others, is dictated by America’s political culture. Different strands of nationalism are critically important parts in this.
The disaster of 9/11 should have been enough to produce a serious examination among Washington policy elites not only of past US policies, but of the American political cultures which helped to produce them.
In fact, as the genesis and conduct of the Iraq war of 2003 demonstrated, large sections of those elites have learned precisely nothing from the folly and wickedness of their past conduct. And this failure is above all because they have been blocked from doing so by certain key features of American nationalism.
Moreover, insofar as American nationalism has become mixed up with a chauvinist version of Israeli nationalism, it also plays an absolutely disastrous role in the US’s own relations with the Muslim world, and in fuelling terrorism. One might say, therefore, that while America keeps a splendid and welcoming house, it also keeps a family of demons in its cellar. These demons, usually kept under certain restraints, were released by 9/11.
Neither patriotism or imperialism
After the 9/11 terrorist attacks the United States had the chance to create a concert of all the world’s major states (including Muslim ones) against Islamist revolutionary terrorism. Why instead did it choose to pursue policies which divided the west, further alienated the Muslim world, and exposed America itself to greatly increased danger?
The most important reason is the character of American nationalism. This explains why many Americans reacted in the way that they did to 9/11 and why it was possible for the Bush administration later to extend the “war on terror” to Iraq, and in doing so to retain the support of a majority of Americans.
Nationalism has not been the usual prism through which American behaviour has been viewed. Most Americans have spoken of their attachment to their country as “patriotism”, or in an extreme form, superpatriotism. Critics of the United States, at home and abroad, have tended to focus on what has been called American imperialism.
Is the United States an empire? In openDemocracy, Stephen Howe retrieves past answers to the question, and surveys the work of one of the foremost current advocates of American hegemony, Niall Ferguson:
The US today does harbour important forces that can be called imperialist in their outlook and aims. However, although large in influence, people holding these views are relatively few in number. They are to be found above all in overlapping sections of the intelligentsia and the foreign policy and security establishments, with a particular concentration among the so-called neo-conservatives.
Unlike large numbers of Englishmen and Frenchmen during their countries’ imperial phase, the vast majority of ordinary Americans do not think of themselves as imperialist, or as possessing an empire. The aftermath of the Iraq war seems to be demonstrating that they are not prepared to make the massive long-term commitments and sacrifices necessary to maintain a direct American empire in the middle east and elsewhere.
Apart from the effects of modern culture on attitudes to military service and sacrifice, American culture historically has embodied a strong strain of isolationism. This isolationism is, however, a complex phenomenon, which should not be understood simply as a desire to withdraw from the world. Rather, American isolationism forms another face, both of American chauvinism and American messianism – united by a belief in America as a unique “city on a hill”.
The result is a view that if the US really has no choice but to involve itself with disgusting and inferior foreigners, it must absolutely control the process, and must under no circumstances subject itself to foreign control or even advice.
Again, unlike previous empires, the US national identity and what has been called the “American Creed” are founded on adherence to democracy. However imperfectly democracy may be practiced at home, and hypocritically preached abroad, this democratic faith does set real limits to how far the US can exert direct rule over other peoples. Therefore, since 1945 the United States has been an indirect empire, resembling more closely the Dutch in the East Indies in the 17th and 18th centuries than the British in India.
As far as the mass of the American people is concerned, even an indirect American empire is still an empire in denial. In presenting its imperial plans to the American people, the Bush administration has been careful to package them as something else: on one hand, as part of a benevolent strategy of spreading American values of democracy and freedom; on the other, as an essential part of the defence not of an American empire, but of the American nation itself.
Under the George W Bush administration the United States has driven towards empire, but the domestic political fuel fed into the engine was that of a wounded and vengeful nationalism. After 9/11, this sentiment is entirely sincere as far as most Americans are concerned, and it is all the more dangerous for that. In fact, to judge by world history, there is probably no more dangerous element in the entire nationalist mix than a sense of righteous victimhood. In the past this sentiment helped wreck Germany, Serbia and numerous other countries, and is now in the process of wrecking Israel.
The two souls of American nationalism
Like other nationalisms, American nationalism has many different faces. Erik Erikson wrote that “every national character is constructed out of polarities.” This is certainly true of the United States, which embodies amongst other things both the most modern and the most traditionalist society in the developed world.
Have changes in American society helped increase the political dominance of the American right? Read Godfrey Hodgson in openDemocracy:
The clash between the two is contributing to the growing political polarisation of American society. At the time of writing, the American people are more sharply and more evenly divided along party lines than at any time in modern American history. This political division in turn reflects greater differences in social and cultural attitudes than at any time since the Vietnam war. White evangelical Protestants vote Republican rather than Democrat by a factor of almost two-to-one, with corresponding effects on the parties’ stances on abortion and other moral issues.
The gap is almost as great in regard to nationalism: 71% of Republicans in 2003 describe themselves as “very patriotic” compared to 48% of Democrats. This partly reflects racial political allegiances; 65% of whites describe themselves as “very patriotic” compared with 38% of blacks. Gaps concerning attitudes to crime and faith in American business are even greater.
It is however not the opposition, but the combination of these different strands which determines the overall nature of the American national identity and largely shapes American attitudes and policies towards the outside world.
The first of these strands stems from American Creed (or the “American Thesis”): the set of great democratic, legal and individualist beliefs and principles on which the American state and constitution is founded. These principles form the foundation of American civic nationalism, and also help bind the United States to the wider community of democratic states. They are shared with other democratic societies, but in America they have a special role in holding a disparate nation together. As the term Creed implies, they are held with an ideological and almost religious fervour.
The second element forms what I call the American nationalist “antithesis”. It stems above all from ethno-religious roots. Aspects of this tradition have also been called “Jacksonian nationalism”, after President Andrew Jackson (1767-1845). Because the US is so large and complex compared to other countries, and has changed so much over time, this nationalist tradition is correspondingly complex.
Rather than the simple, monolithic identity of a Polish or Thai ethno-religious nationalism, this tradition in the United States forms a diffuse mass of identities and impulses, including nativist sentiments on the part of America’s original white population, the particular culture of the white south, and the beliefs and agendas of ethnic lobbies.
Nonetheless, these nationalist features can often be clearly distinguished from the principles of the American Creed and of American civic nationalism; and although many of their features are specifically American – notably, the role of fundamentalist Protestantism – they are also related to wider patterns of ethno-religious nationalism across the world.
These strands in American nationalism are usually subordinate to American civic nationalism stemming from the Creed, which dominates America’s official and public political culture. However, they have a natural tendency to rise to the surface at times of crisis and conflict. In the specific case of America’s attachment to Israel, ethno-religious factors have become dominant, with extremely dangerous consequences for the war on terror.
In 1983, one of the fathers of the neo-conservative school in the US, Irving Kristol drew a distinction between a patriotism that “springs from love of the nation’s past” and a nationalism that “arises out of hope for the nation’s future, distinctive greatness”; American foreign policy, he went on, “is the national interest of a world power, as this is defined by a sense of national destiny.”
In the perspective of such thinkers, nationalism has always had a certain revolutionary edge to it. In American political culture at the start of the 21st century, there is certainly a very strong element of patriotism, of attachment to American institutions and to America in its present form; but as Kristol’s words indicate, there is also a revolutionary element, a commitment to a messianic vision of the nation and its role in the world.
It is this feature that links the American nationalism of today to the “unsatisfied”, late-coming nationalisms of Germany, Italy and Russia, rather than the satisfied and status-quo patriotism of the British.
But if one strand of American nationalism is radical because it looks forward to “the nation’s future, distinctive greatness”, another is radical because it continuously looks backwards, to a vanished and idealised national past. This “American antithesis” is a central feature of American radical conservatism: the world of the Republican right, and especially the Christian right, with their rhetoric of “taking back” America, and restoring an older, purer American society. This longstanding tendency in American culture and politics reflects the continuing conservative religiosity of many Americans; however, it also has been an expression of social, economic, ethnic and above all racial anxieties.
In part, these anxieties stem from the progressive loss of control over society by the “original” white Anglo-Saxon and Scots-Irish populations, later joined by other similar groups. Connected to this are class anxieties – in the past, the hostility of the small towns and countryside to the new immigrant-populated cities; today, the economic decline of the traditional white working classes recently examined by Thomas Frank.
As a result of economic, cultural and demographic change, large numbers of Americans feel defeated even though their country is the supremely victorious nation of the modern age. The domestic anxieties this generates spill over into attitudes to the outside world.
These fears help give many American nationalists their curiously embittered, mean-spirited and defensive edge, so curiously at variance with America’s image and self-image as a land of success, openness, wealth and generosity. Over the years, the hatred generated by this sense of defeat and alienation has been extended to both domestic and foreign enemies.
This too is a very old pattern in different nationalisms worldwide. In European history, radical conservatism and nationalism have tended to stem from classes and groups in actual or perceived decline as a result of socio-economic change. One way of looking at American nationalism, and America’s troubled relationship with the contemporary world, is to understand that many Americans feel threatened by and are in revolt against the world which America itself has made.
Living in an American nightmare
However, except for the extreme fringe among the various “militia” groups and neo-Nazis, these forces of the American antithesis are not in public revolt against the American Creed and American civic, or democratic, nationalism as such. Most radical nationalist and radical conservatives movements elsewhere in the world have in the past opposed democracy and demanded authoritarian rule; by contrast, Americans from this tradition generally believe strongly in the American democratic and liberal Creed.
However, they also believe – consciously or unconsciously, openly or in private – that the Creed is the product of a specific white Christian American civilisation, and that it is threatened by immigration, racial minorities, and foreign influence. The many contemporary trends that can be seen as justifying this belief naturally leave its adherents feeling embattled, embittered, and defensive.
American Protestant fundamentalist groups also do not reject the Creed as such. But their attitudes to culture and the intellect mean that their rejection of contemporary America is even deeper, for they refuse key aspects of modernity itself. For them, modern American mass culture is a form of daily assault on their passionately held values; their reactionary religious ideology in turn reflects the sense of social, cultural and racial embattlement among their white middle class constituency. Even as America is marketing the “American dream” to the world, at home many Americans feel that they are living in an American nightmare.
For America is the home of by far the most deep, widespread, and conservative religious belief in the western world, including a section of society possessed by wild millenarian hopes, fears and hatreds.
Moreover, these two phenomena are intimately related: a Pew Research Centre survey of 2002 demonstrates that the United States as a whole is much closer to the developing world in terms of religious belief than to the advanced industrial countries. For example, 59% of American respondents agreed that religion plays a very important role in their lives – a figure that put the US closer to Pakistan (91%) than to France (12%); as of 1990, 69% of Americans believed in the personal existence of the Devil.
The religious beliefs of large sections of this core population are under constant, daily challenge from modern secular culture, above all via the mass media. And perhaps of equal importance in the long term will be the relative decline in recent decades in the real incomes of the American “middle classes”, where these groups are situated socially. This decline and the wider economic changes which began with the oil shock of 1973 have had the side-effect of forcing more and more women to go to work, thereby undermining traditional family structures even among those groups most devoted to them.
The relationship between this traditional white Protestant world and the forces of American economic, demographic, social and cultural change may be compared to the genesis of a hurricane. A mass of warm, humid air rises from the constantly churning sea of American capitalism, to meet a mass of cooler layers of air, and as it rises it sucks in yet more air from the sides, in the form of immigration.
The cooler layers are made up of the white middle classes and their small-town and suburban worlds in much of the United States; the old white populations of the greater south with their specific culture; and the especially frigid strata of old Anglo-Saxon and Scots-Irish fundamentalist Protestantism.
The result of this collision is the release of great bolts and explosions of political and cultural electricity. Like a hurricane, the resulting storm system is essentially circular, continually chasing its own tail; and essentially self-supporting, generating its own energy – until, at some unforeseeable point in future, either the boiling seas of economic change cool down, or the strata of religious belief and traditional culture dissolve. Among these bolts is hatred, including nationalist hatred.
In the United States context it is also crucial to remember that – as in a hurricane or thunderstorm – the two elements combining to produce this system work together rather than in opposition. In a curious paradox, the political representatives of Protestant America’s old conservative religious and cultural communities are encouraging the very unrestrained free-market capitalism that promises to dissolve those communities.
This was not always so. In the 1890s and 1900s, this sector of America formed the backbone of the Populist protest against the excesses of American capitalism, and in the 1930s it voted solidly for Roosevelt’s New Deal. Today, however, the religious right has allied itself solidly with extreme free-market forces in the Republican party – although it is precisely the workings of unanchored American capitalism which are eroding the world which the religious conservatives wish to defend.
The threat to America is America
In the vision set out in its National Security Strategy of 2002 (NSS 2002), embodying the so-called Bush doctrine, American sovereignty was to remain absolute and unqualified. The sovereignty of other countries was to be heavily qualified by America, and no other country was to be allowed a sphere of influence, even in its own neighbourhood.
In this conception, “balance of power” – a phrase used repeatedly in the NSS – was a form of Orwellian doublespeak. The clear intention actually was to be so strong that other countries had no choice but to rally to the side of the United States, concentrating all real power and freedom of action in the hands of America.
This approach was basically an attempt to extend a tough, interventionist version of the Monroe doctrine (1823) to the entire world. This plan is megalomaniac, completely impracticable (as the occupation of Iraq has shown) and totally unacceptable to most of the world. Because, however, this programme was expressed in traditional American nationalist terms of self-defence and the messianic role of the US in spreading freedom, many Americans found it entirely acceptable, and indeed natural.
The Bush administration, then, like European elites before 1914, has allowed its own national chauvinism and limitless ambition to compromise the security and stability of the world capitalist system of which they are the custodians and greatest beneficiaries. In other words, they have been irresponsible and dangerous not in Marxist terms, but in their own.
What ideology drives the Bush administration? In openDemocracy, Danny Postel interviews Shadia Drury, anatomist of the influence of the political philosopher Leo Strauss: “Noble lies and perpetual war: Leo Strauss, the neo-cons, and Iraq” (October 2003)
This point is vitally important in relation to the stability of the world and of United States hegemony in the world. A relatively benign version of American hegemony is by no means unacceptable to many people round the world – both because they often have neighbours whom they fear more than America, and because their elites are to an increasing extent integrated into a global capitalist elite whose values are largely defined by those of America.
But American imperial power in the service of narrow American nationalism is a very different matter, and an extremely unstable base for hegemony. It involves power over the world without accepting any responsibility for global problems and the effects of US behaviour on other countries – and power without responsibility was defined by Rudyard Kipling as “the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.”
American nationalism has already played a key role in preventing America from taking advantage of the uniquely beneficent world-historical moment following the fall of communism. Instead of using this moment to create a “concert of powers” in support of regulated capitalist growth world stability, and the relief of poverty, preventable disease and other social ills, nationalism has helped direct America into a search for new enemies.
Such nationalism may encourage its adherents to cultivate not only specific national hatreds, but also hostility to all ideals, goals, movements, laws and institutions which aim to transcend the nation and speak for the general interests of mankind. This form of nationalism is therefore in direct opposition to the universalist ideals and ambitions of the American Creed – upon which, in the end, rests America’s role as a great civilisational empire and heir to Rome and China; and upon which is based America’s claim to represent a positive example to the world.
The historical evidence of the dangers of unreflecting nationalist sentiments should be all too obvious, and are all too relevant to US policy today. Nationalism thrives on irrational hatreds and on the portrayal of other nations or ethno-religious groups as congenitally, irredeemably wicked and hostile. Yesterday many American nationalists felt this way about Russia. Today those or other nationalists may regard the Arab and Muslim worlds, and to a lesser extent any country that defies American wishes, in the same way. Hence the astonishing explosion of chauvinism directed against France and Germany in the approach to the war in Iraq.
When other nations are declared to be irrationally, incorrigibly and unchangingly hostile, it is obviously pointless to seek compromises with them or to try to accommodate their interests and views. And because they are irrational and barbarous, America is free to dictate to them or even conquer them for their own good. This is precisely the discourse of nationalists in the leading European states towards each other and “lesser breeds without the law” (Kipling again) before 1914, which helped drag Europe into the great catastrophes of the 20th century. It was also a central part of the old hideous discourse of anti-Semitism.
If such visions spread in the United States, they will be disastrous not only for American interests and American security but for America’s soul. Pathological hatred and fear of the outside world will feed the same emotions in American domestic politics, until the nation’s moral and cultural greatness lies in ruins, and its legacy to the future is broken beyond repair.
Larry Johnson is speaking now on C-SPAN.
Great statement by Larry…especially his point about our human rights public image.
G. K. Chesterton once said that “Saying ‘My country, right or wrong’ is like saying ‘My wife, drunk or sober.'”
But I also agree with Senator Carl Schurz from Missouri (a Republican, it might be noted), who said: “My country, right or wrong; when right, to be kept right, and when wrong, to be put right.“
yea, those Republicans went the way of the dinosaur, too bad really.
about the same American “exceptionalism” that DTF has been railing against here . . . and he’s saying the same tings about it that DTF has been saying. They are, of course, both right . . . and the response to DTF here has shown that the self righteous arrogance embodied in that exceptionalist delusion is not limited to Republican neo-cons.
Ours is one sick country . . .
My mother always said ‘sometimes it’s not what you say, but how you say it.’
Yes that’s exactly it isn’t it? How hard is that to figure out?
I’ve had this very argument with Armando more than once over at Kos. Tone matters. Enormously. Always has, always will.
If you’re under the impression that Armando’s problems are basically one of tone, I’ve got some gorgeous lakeside condo’s in Baghdad you might be interested in.
about Kos’ tone, but I understand your point.
If my people were being indiscriminantly bombed to bloody pieces I wouldn’t be worried about offending anyone’s sensibilities. The real atrocity is the action of this government and Israel’s, not the language used to confront those of us who pay for the weapons that do the killing.
If it’s to inflame the debate on both sides and increase tensions and violence, then not worrying about offense is a grand idea. If it’s to get people to agree with you and modify their behavior toward peace, than you might want to consider not deliberately offending them. A person can decide to do either.
When crimes are being commited with the direct material support of those, including me, who claim to be against the crimes, then there is no debate and niceties are nescesarilly thrown out the window. To me it comes down to which really is worse, the crimes, or understandably angry expressions against it’s supporters. We are all supporting it, whether it fits our self image or not.
I’m asking, what’s your goal? If your methods support that goal, more power to you. If they don’t, then maybe pursuing other methods is a better plan.
My apologies for not answering the question. The goal is the same. Only looked at from the eyes of a victim, rather than an aggressor by proxy. If someone I knew was harboring someone who raped one of my daughters, even if that person was against raping children, I doubt I would worry too much about crafting my language in such a way as to politely convince him of his complicity. I’d smack in the head with a 2×4 and ask him what his fucking problem was.
but I suspect that unless you killed that man, you would only perpetuate the violence. Chances are his response to being hit would not be to realize his mistake and appologize, but rather to get a gun and escalate the situation. Would I be able to refrain from going the 2×4 route? I don’t know. Should I refrain from going the 2×4 route, that’s a very different question.
Not sure Super,
I don’t think I am supporting this war at all. I was vocal against it since November 2001, when, still in a NG unit, the Battalion Commander, whose day job was at the pentagon, told us in formation to “get ready for Iraq” – only a month after the fireworks started in Afganistan. I was vocal against it within the CoC (career suicide except I was headed to the IRR because of disability).
Paying taxes? Nope, I live off of my tax-free compensation from the VA and university financial aid, none of which is taxed and not enough to be taxed.
Lastly, living in self-exile in Europe and active in the Left party here, very much against the war. Due to location, I obviously don’t buy American products, so there’s no input from me into the US economy.
Geez, you could probably consider me a parasite. Well, not you Super, but in freeperville….
So some of us do not have any direct material support for this. I don’t blame those who do because until there is an organized committment of a majority of US citizens not to file taxes, the admirable individual who tries it will only end up in jail with a small blurb on page A8 at most. That’s not a cost-effective form of protest. So at the moment, no one really has a choice not to have material support. Unless you are like me and I consider myself poor – but lucky.
No one can be held responsible for events they cannot control. Period.
Hell, I’m so poor I didn’t even pay federal taxes last year. So, not even remotely am I providing “direct material support” for our government’s crimes. I never voted for Nixon or Reagan or either Bush. I don’t deserve blame or guilt and I don’t need to be hit upside the head to be made aware of the brutality of the corporate/facist empire. I’m just a friggin’ serf!
It is irrational to blame all the people living in a given geographical area for the actions of their rulers. And we are ruled, we are powerless against the actions of those who control our economy, our military, and the very electricity that powers our keyboards.
So, DTF, and maybe you, want to incite a revolution? You think if you could even mobilize a million of us to hit the streets that you could defeat the powers against us?
A million would be an encouraging start. Though not nearly enough to counter the many, many millions who do support our aggresion, whether they know it, or like it, or not.
Myriad’s comment below expresses that which I can’t. And I really think that it’s quite pathetic to be so outraged at the outraged words of a Muslim, who’s culture is under a world wide assault by America and it’s Americans. You feel no responsibility at all? No sense of culpability? No guilt? I wish I were so free of those burdens.
One man’s insulting language is another man’s desperate plea for help.
So now that tone is everything, howzabout this:
“Pretty please, with sugar on top…stop killing the mothafuckin’ civilians.”
With apologies to Pulp Fiction.
but tone matters. Are you going to deny that?
So I’m saying to all those American exceptionalists: Pretty please, with sugar on top…stop killing motherfuckin’ civilians & and stop making excuses for it.
That curt tone that gets way too many Americans all bent out of shape sometimes is the only one that actually wakes them up enough to realize what’s going down. Maybe the recipient hates the message or hates the messenger, but then again, maybe it isn’t the messenger’s problem.
Where’s your evidence? People who feel attacked attack back. It doesn’t stop violence, it perpetuates it.
Words are not violence. I’m not coming at you with Mr. 9mm or a lead pipe, right?
All I’m saying is a healthy dose of curtness can get the job done – Ray Nagin’s profanity laced radio interview back in early Sept. of last year seems to have been the catalyst for gettting the feds to actually DO something besides scratch their asses. Being “nice” and deferential sure didn’t seem to be working all that well at persuading those idiots to actually do their jobs. If anyone from FEMA or the White House ended up feeling “attacked” in the process, well that’s just too bad. Maybe a few lives got saved that wouldn’t have been otherwise.
Ah, but Mr. Benjamin,
Words ARE violence. Language is violence. Language is much more deadly than Mr. 9mm! They’ll lock up the math and science professors first, because the speak the truth – but the humanities, well that is forming our youth’s minds. A national literature is a mirror for the national culture and the propaganda uses are almost limitless. Indoctrination makes things so much easier as the people you educate with the information and language you provide with succumb to your whims, once you train them correctly. How do you think the fascist got their message out and convinced millions of people? At that time of power grabbing the radio was just making it’s way into individual homes. Hitler was ingenious at manipulating it…well at that time, I would argue now that our corporate media would make Goebbels look like a kindergarten prankster.
Don’t take my ‘word’ for it, check out thinkers such as: Noam Chomsky, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler of UC Berkley, Susan Sontag, Bertolt Brecht, Paul DeMan, Hannah Arendt, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault…. the list goes on.
The key is not to focus on the front line grunts like Ray Nagin, they’re merely dupes. No, you have to go to the source if you can find it: follow the money AND follow the language.
One bullet will kill one person, but one word will kill a million.
Jeez, Super, don’t you get it yet? Everything is OK if it is said by some erudite Brit who quotes Kipling, but not OK if it is said by an angry Muslim? Americans can’t bother our beautiful minds with having to hear about American transgressions from someone who has deep feelings about it. (Please note that I’m not talking about the vast majority of Americans, certainly not anyone who might be reading this comment, as I would never wish to offend anyone’s beautiful mind who might be happily ribbiting in the Pond.)
Furthermore, if an angry Muslim says angry things about Americans and fails to except the vast majority of Americans by posting disclaimers every few sentences (preferably in parentheses in the middle of each sentence), Americans can’t be bothered to hear with their heart’s ears. That’s just too hard, darnit. Americans must instead insist on erudite and polite speech with redundant disclaimers aplenty (please note that I’m not talking about the vast majority of Americans, certainly not anyone who might be reading this comment, as I would never wish to offend anyone’s beautiful mind who might be happily ribbiting in the Pond) and at least a few quotes from poetry.
Americans much prefer to be mollycoddled while hearing anything bad about how SOME Americans act and think. They can’t allow unfiltered and forcefully verbalized R-rated truth to arrive in the mental inbox, it would just dirty things up too badly and make thier minds all ugly and stuff. (Please note that I’m not talking about the vast majority of Americans, certainly not anyone who might be reading this comment, as I would never wish to offend anyone’s beautiful mind who might be happily ribbiting in the Pond.)
After all, isn’t ‘communication’ all about being gently cajoled and loved into understanding? Please, please, please Super, don’t ever allow your true feelings to show, particularly if you feel anger. It would just be too harmful to American ears (please note that I’m not talking about the vast majority of Americans, certainly not anyone who might be reading this comment, as I would never wish to offend anyone’s beautiful mind who might be happily ribbiting in the Pond) to allow that to happen. Limited amounts of sadness, regret, shame, joy and happy happy are acceptable feelings, but anger is not, so please, don’t ever forget that, OK?
Because if you do say something angry, erudite Americans (please note that I’m not talking about the vast majority of Americans, certainly not anyone who might be reading this comment, as I would never wish to offend anyone’s beautiful mind who might be happily ribbiting in the Pond) will have their feelings hurt so badly that your words will be deemed to be as meaningless as if you had never said them. or worse.
Some tactics work. Some don’t. Which should we use?
SHOULD is a nasty term my friend. Please be careful with it. It smacks of pontification. In my opinion, one should almost never use it – only very carefully if at all. In most cases, it is a dysfunctional word used by dysfunctional people to communicate dysfunctional desires for control.
My point is that it is NOT what anyone SHOULD do that really matters. It is what human beings ACTUALLY do that really matters, NOT what we think they SHOULD do.
Listen with your heart, my friend. Listen to what real humans say, not what you think they SHOULD say. To become offended by speech and to insist that others SHOULD speak as one wishes them to in order to have access to one’s beautiful mind is indeed elitist.
Humans are imperfect. Would you rather have someone listen to you with their heart’s ears or would you have them insist that your emotional and verbal grammar be perfect before allowing you to have access to them? If something horrible happened to one of your family, would you want your friends to insist that you stop being so angry before offering you comfort? Or would you expect them to listen to you regardless of your anger? Would you comfort your family member in their moments of anger and despair over a loss or would you insist that they SHOULD act or speak a certain way before you listened to them?
There is too much cold-heartedness in the world already, friend, please open your heart to people who may not be able to speak out as you wish they would. Perhaps, to you, every communication is a mere ‘tactic’. If this is so, you will disregard everything I have said because you never listen with your heart’s ears, anyway. It would sadden me to know that.
But I will answer your question directly, too. When I am communicating, I try to choose non-violent means of communicating my beliefs and my desires. I am not capable of perfection, though, and I am far more well trained at persuasive communication than most of the humans on this planet. I believe that I ‘should’ strive to be the most effective communicator possible, but that desn’t mean that I ‘should’ hold everyone else on the planet to my own personal standards before listening to them.
in caps. That wasn’t my intent, and why I framed it as a question. I’ll give you a longer more careful response, because that’s what you’ve given me.
I listened to DTF, I think I got what he was trying to convey. At the same time I watched many people who would be his allies if he let them being driven away by his rhetoric. I saw long time friends with common goals being driven apart. Why did this happen? Because the way things were said was bludgeoning and angry and engendered responses of the same nature. If that was what he wanted, he was successful, but that’s not what I got out of his message.
As for listening and speaking from the heart, I write fiction for a living. Listening and speaking from the heart is my bread and butter.
That’s why I commented on the tactics of language. If you put your message in language that doesn’t speak to your audience, you’ve lost more than half the battle to be heard by head or by heart. And that is the way things ACTUALLY work in the real world with real humans. That’s my entire point. As for offence, I wasn’t personally offended by DTF’s language. If I had been, I wouldn’t have bothered to write any of these posts.
I apologize if I read your ‘should’ improperly. It always appears in CAPS in my mind, as I have personally heard it far too often when the speaker intended to slide it by without dealing with the CAPS implications of it.
Perhaps the ones who ‘should’ have done something differently were the ones who refused to read his disclaimer, which was embedded in the text of his diary.
Perhaps the ones who ‘should’ have done something differently were the ones who refused to view the writing in its totality and instead picked out certain phrases and sentences and threw them back at him without acknowledging the disclaimer.
Perhaps we need to know who among us will do these things to one another. I certainly found it enlightening, in a bad sort of way.
I am no lover of DTF, by the way, as I have many of my own differences with him. I once chose to pursue him until the bitter end of a certain thread many moons ago, and I think that both he and I were better for having pursued a mutual understanding instead of mutual destruction. I’m not sure either of us changed much, but we did not sow seeds of hatred between us, either.
I do believe that sometimes the proper blame may lie with the reader, not the writer. Perhaps it is easier to blame the author of comments that seemingly incite ill will, but perhaps, from time to time, what the author says is not the real problem, or is only a small part of the problem.
If one’s only goal in writing something is to please one’s readers, your point is well taken. Perhaps, though, there is a place in political discourse for an angry rant. Stirring emotions may be an end in itself, and such communications may reveal some important things to a careful listener. And is it necessarily always the point of a communication to reach the largest number? I would rather convince one of a crowd of readers to change than please the whole crowd and change nothing.
Though I’d love to carry on with this, I have to go out the door in a few minutes. My final not is this, I never said a thing about pleasing readers. I spoke of reaching readers. It’s a subtle difference but a very important one. You can reach without pleasing. But you can rarely reach by generating anger, at least when you generate anger directed at you the writer.
I do believe that one can “reach” a reader without pleasing them, which is my point, in part. Where we differ is in the personal belief that anger has no place in reaching a reader. Accepting for the moment that the anger is properly placed upon the writer, it does not necessarily follow that the readers that the writer is trying to reach will be turned off to the message. I have been angry at writers of one comment or another, but learned from them nonetheless – as a result of beginning to understand the roots of my own anger…
That’s exactly the AmerIsraelican exceptionalism that both are writing about . . . watch your tongue when you talk to us . . .
“we’re going to keep killing your family until you learn your manners and show some respect to your superiors”
I mean . . . it’s so important when someone says “stop dropping cluster bombs on my kids” that he says it in the right tone of voice . . . and with the right tone of obsequious supplication.
Gee, what I meant was the message often gets lost in the vitriol.
That’s not how it came across.
Maybe it was the air of superiority and the condescending manner . . .
Oh, sorry, Deward. I’ll tell my mother.
but it was quite clear to me, and probably to the other six people who gave the comment a four.
that might be true if I didn’t apply the same standards to everybody. I don’t think the way Bush talks to the world is useful either. Do you? Belligerence begets belligerence.
Bush is a mass murdering war criminal. And we’re supplying his weapons. How would you feel if Putin was raining bombs down on your people and the so-called opposition in Russia was doing next to nothing to bring a halt to it? And then had the nerve to tell you that they didn’t appreciate your tone when you point out some inconvenient truths about your complicity?
about their complicity
Shit, Super – I so hate this. I’m going to weigh in one more time and I’m outta here.
Let’s say I wrote something like this:
On this Thursday in August I say that you are a scumbag and you bite the heads off of puppies. And furthermore your children are scumbags and your neighbors are murderous thieves and the whole lot of you would gladly pull the arms off of babies and burn them in a trash can.
Would the essential truth of this being a Thursday in August be what you responded to?
Why do you hate it? Because we like each other, but disagree? Sure, I don’t like arguing with my friends, but my feelings and yours pale in importance to how we’d feel if the shoe were on the other foot. It’s as simple as that to me. Trying to put myself in the shoes of the other side. I think the majority of Americans just can’t get past their own self importance and at this point a few rhetorical smacks in the head with a 2×4 are called for. I don’t like hearing those things said to me anymore than you or anyone else. But I understand the source of it.
Nah, I don’t like hearing negative but true things about myself, but I take my medicine when I need to. But what I really don’t like is hearing negative, FALSE things about myself. It’s as simple as that for me.
If I thought the 2×4 method would do a lick of good, I’d happily chop down the trees and mill ’em up for you or for DTF or for whoever wanted to use them, but I don’t believe it works that way. When you hit someone, it never makes them want to listen to you. It makes them angry or frightened or both. And then they (and their friends and relatives) want to hit you back. The idea that you can bludgeon someone into agreeing with you just doesn’t play in the real world.
I’m amazed that this same argument comes up time and time again.
Count me on the side of the people that think political discourse should be about getting the most votes and not about the ‘truth’ or ‘being right’.
That creates a natural tension. But then politicians have a well-earned reputation for being ill-acquainted with the truth.
That’s why they all want to win a war. It’s the only time they get any respect.
A case in point on all this is the thread on Iran. Some people seem to think that we can magically get the majority of Americans to trust Democrats on national security if we can just convince them that all our security problems are of our own making. I wish it were so, but it isn’t. Unfortunately, voters are not inclined to hear bad news or embrace the idea that ‘we had it coming’.
Super, some people like to hit me over the head with a 2×4 labeled “you’re a sanctimonious single-issue voter” because I refuse to vote for anti-choice candidates like Bob Casey. I have to confess that every time I hear that I’m a moron or whatever for refusing to vote against my own personal rights, my ears stop hearing. To quote John Prine:
My body’s in this room with you just catching hell
While my soul is drinking beer down the road a spell
You might think I’m listening to your grocery list
But I’m leaning on the jukebox and I’m about half … way there
A clown puts his makeup on upside down
So he wears a smile even when he wears a frown
You might think I’m here when you put me down
But actually I’m on the other side of town.
I’m sittin’ on a chair just behind my ear
Playing dominoes and drinking some ice cold beer
When you get done talking I’ll come back downstairs
And assume the body of the person you presume who cares
I’m across the river on the other side of town
In my mind I’m on the other side of town
Maybe some people are motivated by a verbal beating, but I sure as hell am not one of them.
I don’t think that DTF is asking you to vote against your personal rights. In a not so nice way he’s imploring you to help save your own future and the futures of his and your ancestors.
I guess I need to make my point a little more clearly. I was talking about strategies that I find ineffective for persuading me to see things from another point of view.
DTF had nothing to do with my comment.
I think you meant descendents rather than ancestors.
If my goal was to rant and vent and blow off steam, I’d be pretty honked. If my goal was to change minds and get help, and someone pointed out to me what might be a more effective way of getting that help, I might at least try to think about it from the point of view of achieving those goals and see if what was said might help me. Particularly if there was strong evidence that the ranting was actually actively driving wedges between those who would otherwise be my allies.
Sometimes it takes an outsider to put things into perspective. His take on the mindset of those who feel culturally threatened is quite good.
What is missing is any discussion of why the US is trying to be an empire. The reason, of course, is primarily economic. We wish a steady supply of raw materials and manufactured goods at favorable terms.
The US creed doesn’t permit us to admit that our insatiable desire for cheap oil and Chinese widgets is unfair to the rest of the world. So politicians and others present socially acceptable formulations about bringing freedom to others and helping with economic development. In other words, a modern version of “the white man’s burden”.
The truth is the US is about 6% of the world’s population and uses about 40% of the resources. Our standard of living can’t be reached by the rest of the world, there just isn’t enough “stuff”. So we either strong arm the weak into giving us more, or we adapt to a lower standard ourselves.
By picking our leaders and a strong military model we have voted for the former, whether we admit it to ourselves or not.
As Pogo said: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
How DTF communicates vs this article
I’m going to stick my neck out and say what I think is the fundamental `problem’ here with DTF & those who don’t get him; the difference between this article and DTF’s approach. In doing so I am making the enormous presumption of speaking for DTF’s methods and motivations. This is going to seem like a tangent, but stick it out.
Each organisation of influence/power has a collective voice at the global level. We normally associate this with nations. So, the USA has a collective voice at the global level, largely dictated by government, but also informed at the grossest level by the populace. Often, individual instances as a result of coincidence based on frequency, or by manipulation/selectiveness, reinforce the overall collective/national voice. At the global level, actions more than anything define the collective voice of a nation. Words frame those actions to either create dissonance or resonance for those receiving the message.
Peoples and nations of the world react and respond to each others’ collective voice. Most Bootribbers I know agree that the USA’s current collective voice is overwhelmingly violent, inhumane, callous, arrogant and deeply exceptionalist to the point of fascism, racism and a whole suite of other really nasty -isms. I know you feel this, I know it tears many of you up, robs you of sleep, angers you beyond speech, motivates you like nothing else to try and save your country. I also know most think that the most significant cause is your government.
Many would argue that the USA’s collective voice right now is just at the extreme of an unpleasant scale it has largely occupied throughout modern history. That causes a great deal of disagreement, and it’s not what I want to get into with this post, but I think it’s important to understand that many people, in responding to the USA’s collective voice, are not just responding to the shameful horror of our current time, but for them, a long history.
What DTF writes is not an individual, reasoned response to the USA’s collective voice. I believe his style is a deliberate choice to channel back to American progressives the collective voices of those on the receiving end of the USA right now. At that scale, broad, damming, offensive, sweeping statements make perfect sense. In response to the USA’s global collective voice, if you are sitting in the shattered remains of your house, your neighbourhood, dried blood on the walls, with so many loved ones in shallow graves – is it really any surprise that the response is that ALL Americans are racist, would kill their children for their fascist government (how else to interpret the troop deployment in Iraq from an outsiders perspective?), are cruel and inhumane, and above all, uncaring and apathetic in the face of overwhelming suffering?
Do we really expect those in Beirut and Baghdad and so many other parts of the world to look firsthand at their shattered lives and enormous suffering caused by the American collective voice, and then look at the deafening inaction (as in action that will stop the carnage anytime remotely resembling soon) of Americans internally, and not conclude that the global USA collective voice, and the internal American collective voice, is not one and the same? How indeed can they conclude anything else having watched the USA let its own suffer and die, and continue to suffer after Hurricane Katrina?
This is the terrible, at many levels unfair, but nevertheless brutally honest and truthful collective voice that DTF channels at Bootribbers. I assume he does it because he believes in bearing witness, and above all because he respects Bootribbers, he doesn’t think he should spare you the raw response. I think he thinks its critical that caring Americans try and confront the visceral hate and rage their collective actions are generating, in order to find the resolve and means to stop it as soon as possible, and stop it ever happening again – in other words to take responsibility for their collective voice. I believe it is because he deeply respects many people here that he refrains from sugar-coating the pill. I believe he is reflecting back to Americans the collage of horror their national collective voice creates and emits to the world, in the same brutal and irrational `tone’ that the American voice itself comes across to those on the receiving end.
It is an entirely different beast to the western-paradigm based, `logical’, `reasoned’ peer-level, critique in this article from a country unscathed by the American collective voice.
Thank you Myriad. I don’t think DTF could have said it better, or worse, depending on one’s perspective, than this.