The other America is America - The Other America/Conclusion - dissent

New Internationalist, Nov, 2002 by David Ransom

Having taken us to Tucson and introduced us to an alternative America not often appreciated by the outside world, David Ransom reflects on the empire's imperial dreams. What looks like perpetual war on the rest of the world, he argues, is also a pre-emptive strike on the American people themselves.

OF course there is another America. The place seethes with inspirational dissent of one kind or another across the vast expanse of a country so bewilderingly diverse it can easily be mistaken for the world itself. Just because no-one was told about it doesn't mean that thousands of people never took to the streets of San Francisco--and every other major American city--to oppose the bombing of Afghanistan. Just because Rupert Murdoch's publishing arm tried to bar it from the bookshelves, that didn't stop Stupid White Men, journalist Michael Moore's attack on America's business and government elite, from becoming an instant best-seller.

On 11 September 2002 the flagship BBC radio news programme Today sent a reporter on to the streets of New York to sample public opinion on the prospect of war with Iraq. During two hours of vox pop he was unable to find a single New Yorker in support of it. Not one. As the rampant Hawks in Washington shamelessly exploited the 9/11 anniversary to promote a 'pre-emptive' war on Iraq, opinion polls suggested that 70 per cent of Americans did not endorse it, at least not without the backing of the UN.

True, 'President' George W Bush has been riding high in the opinion polls since 9/11, In a crisis Americans famously circle the wagons around the President, or the nearest thing they can find to one. By July of this year, however, they were rating him very poorly indeed on social issues like health, education and employment. After all, only a minority ever voted for him in the first place. Most Americans are as far-removed from the power of Washington, the money of Wall Street and the dreams of Hollywood as everyone else.

So let's dispense with myth. The other America--the one in Tucson, Syracuse, Austin, Gainesville, Durham, Yakima, Pittsburgh and Peoria--is America. The question is, why have ordinary Americans--not entirely unlike the rest of us--found it so difficult to make a difference? This matters, because if anything is to be done about this emergent 'Super-Rogue' then the American people are going to have to do a great deal of it themselves.

But how to convince the folks back home that the 'Homeland' faces destruction and that perpetual war is the only valid response? The job of the Federal Government is to impose some sort of conformity on the persistent diversity of the United States. Many Americans--notably those whose forebears were not brought to the country as slaves--share a belief that they or their ancestors fled to 'the last place on earth' from somewhere a great deal worse. By this 'exceptionalism' they are propelled into the immediate future, avoiding if they can any prolonged contemplation of the present for fear of being overtaken by ancestral phantoms from the past. The working assumption in Washington is that if the American people can be corralled into this shared fear of everywhere else, of 'the other', then those approval ratings will stay right up there, come what may.

In 1962, when Washington was looking for precedents for an invasion of Cuba, the State Department obligingly cited no less than 103 foreign military 'interventions' between 1798 and 1895--slightly more, on average, than one a year. (1) Since 1945 Washington has added at least 193--slightly more, on average, than three a year. (2) What is still called 'Yankee imperialism' by its neighbours to the south has been a recurring theme of American history from the day the very first European immigrant set foot on Native American soil. The new 'Bush Doctrine', elucidated for Congress on 1 7 September this year, is that the US Government will 'never' permit anyone to challenge its military supremacy, and will act 'pre-emptively' against anyone who even tries--a recipe for what Gore Vidal styles 'perpetual war for perpetual peace'. (2)

American exceptionalism is, nonetheless, vulnerable to senseless acts like 9/11--the first serious loss of civilian life from foreign 'intervention' on the American mainland since the original European invasion. The present, and a degree of reflection, then become unavoidable--if only because many Americans' own worst fears have caught up with them.

What they are then forced to contemplate looks pretty grim--'President' Bush with his eyes firmly fixed on the mid-term congressional elections in November. Unless otherwise engaged, the American people might just get it into their heads to express their disapproval of the bluff usurper. More particularly, they might be able to focus their attention on a corporate crime wave that, since January, has been threatening to take the oil-soaked, business-friendly regime in Washington with it.

When Enron finally consumed itself with greed in January, so too did Andersen their auditors and JP Morgan their bankers--the zenith of the 'new paradigm' economy on which Americans have come to rely for their daily bread. Combined with a slump on Wall Street, the evaporation of pension funds (though not for the half of all working Americans who don't have them) and the loss of more than a million jobs, the wealth of America was shown to be resting on fake figures buried in a mound of shredded paper.