Waking Up From the American Dream
By SASHA ABRAMSKY
Last year I visited London and stumbled upon an essay in a
Sunday paper written by Margaret Drabble, one of Britain's pre-
eminent ladies of letters. "My anti-Americanism has become
almost uncontrollable," she wrote. "It has possessed me, like a
disease. It rises up in my throat like acid reflux, that fashionable
American sickness. I now loathe the United States and what it has
done to Iraq and the rest of the helpless world."
The essay continued in the same rather bilious vein for about a
thousand words, and as I read it, two things struck me: The first
was how appalled I was by Drabble's crassly oversimplistic
analysis of what America was all about, of who its people were,
and of what its culture valued; the second was a sense somewhat
akin to fear as I thought through the implications of the venom
attached to the words of this gentle scribe of the English
bourgeoisie. After all, if someone whose country and class have so
clearly benefited economically from the protections provided by
American military and political ties reacts so passionately to the
omnipresence of the United States, what must an angry,
impoverished young man in a failing third world state feel?
I grew up in London in the 1970s and 1980s, in a country that was
struggling to craft a postcolonial identity for itself, a country that
was, in many ways, still reeling from the collapse of power it
suffered in the post-World War II years. Not surprisingly, there
was a strong anti-American flavor to much of the politics, the
humor, the cultural chitchat of the period; after all, America had
dramatically usurped Britannia on the world stage, and who
among us doesn't harbor some resentments at being shunted onto
the sidelines by a new superstar?
Today, however, when I talk with friends and relatives in London,
when I visit Europe, the anti-Americanism is more than just
sardonic asides, rueful Monty Python-style jibes, and haughty
intimations of superiority. Today something much more visceral is
in the air. I go to my old home and I get the distinct impression
that, as Drabble put it, people really loathe America somewhere
deep, deep in their gut.
A Pew Research Center Global Attitudes Project survey recently
found that even in Britain, America's staunchest ally, more than 6
out of 10 people polled believed the United States paid little or no
attention to that country's interests. About 80 percent of French
and German respondents stated that, because of the war in Iraq,
they had less confidence in the trustworthiness of America. In the
Muslim countries surveyed, large majorities believed the war on
terror to be about establishing U.S. world domination.
Indeed, in many countries -- in the Arab world and in regions,
such as Western Europe, closely tied into American economic and
military structures -- popular opinion about both America the
country and Americans as individuals has taken a serious hit. Just
weeks ago, 27 of America's top retired diplomats and military
commanders warned in a public statement, "Never in the 21/4
centuries of our history has the United States been so isolated
among the nations, so broadly feared and distrusted."
If true, that suggests that, while to all appearances America's allies
continue to craft policies in line with the wishes of Washington,
underneath the surface a new dynamic may well be emerging, one
not too dissimilar to the Soviet Union's relations with its reluctant
satellite states in Eastern Europe during the cold war. America's
friends may be quiescent in public, deeply reluctant to toe the line
in private. Drabble mentioned the Iraq war as her primary casus
belli with the United States. The statement from the bipartisan
group calling itself Diplomats and Military Commanders for
Change focused on the Bush administration's recent foreign
policy. But to me it seems that something else is also going on.
In many ways, the Iraq war is merely a pretext for a deeper
discontent with how America has seemed to fashion a new global
society, a new economic, military, and political order in the
decade and a half since the end of the cold war. America may only
be riding the crest of a wave of modernization that, in all
likelihood, would have emerged without its guiding hand. But add
to the mix a discontent with the vast wealth and power that
America has amassed in the past century and a deep sense of
unease with the ways in which a secular, market-driven world
divvies up wealth and influence among people and nations, and
you have all the ingredients for a nasty backlash against America.
I'm not talking merely about the anti-globalism of dispossessed
Third World peasants, the fears of the loss of cultural sovereignty
experienced by societies older and more traditional than the
United States, the anger at a perceived American arrogance that
we've recently been reading so much about. I'm talking about
something that is rooted deeper in the psyches of other nations. I
guess I mean a feeling of being marginalized by history; of being
peripheral to the human saga; of being footnotes for tomorrow's
historians rather than main characters. In short, a growing anxiety
brought on by having another country and culture dictating one's
place in the society of nations.
In the years since I stood on my rooftop in Brooklyn watching the
World Trade Center towers burn so apocalyptically, I have spent
at least a part of every day wrestling with a host of existential
questions. I can't help it -- almost obsessively I churn thoughts
over and over in my head, trying to understand the psychological
contours of this cruel new world. The questions largely boil down
to the following: Where has the world's faith in America gone?
Where is the American Dream headed?
What is happening to that intangible force that helped shape our
modern world, that invisible symbiotic relationship between the
good will of foreigners and the successful functioning of the
American "way of life," that willingness by strangers to let us
serve as the repository for their dreams, their hopes, their visions
of a better future? In the same way that the scale of our national
debt is made possible only because other countries are willing to
buy treasury bonds and, in effect, lend us their savings, so it seems
to me the American Dream has been largely facilitated by the
willingness of other peoples to lend us their expectations for the
future. Without that willingness, the Dream is a bubble primed to
burst. It hasn't burst yet -- witness the huge numbers who still
migrate to America in search of the good life -- but I worry that it
is leaking seriously.
Few countries and cultures have risen to global prominence as
quickly as America did in the years after the Civil War. Perhaps
the last time there was such an extraordinary accumulation of
geopolitical, military, and economic influence in so few decades
was 800 years ago, with the rise of the Mongol khanates. Fewer
still have so definitively laid claim to an era, while that era was
still unfolding, as we did -- and as the world acknowledged --
during the 20th century, "the American Century."
While the old powers of Europe tore themselves apart during
World War I, the United States entered the war late and fought the
fight on other people's home terrain. While whole societies were
destroyed during World War II, America's political and economic
system flourished, its cities thrived, and its entertainment
industries soared. In other words, as America rose to global pre-
eminence during the bloody first half of the 20th century, it
projected outward an aura of invulnerability, a vision of
"normalcy" redolent with consumer temptations and glamorous
cultural spectacles. In an exhibit at the museum on Ellis Island a
few years back, I remember seeing a copy of a letter written by a
young Polish migrant in New York to his family back home.
Urging them to join him, he wrote that the ordinary person on the
streets of America lived a life far more comfortable than
aristocrats in Poland could possibly dream of.
In a way America, during the American Century, thus served as a
safety valve, allowing the world's poor to dream of a better place
somewhere else; to visualize a place neither bound by the
constraints of old nor held hostage to the messianic visions of
revolutionary Marxist or Fascist movements so powerful in so
many other parts of the globe.
Throughout the cold war, even as America spent unprecedented
amounts on military hardware, enough was left over to nurture the
mass-consumption culture, to build up an infrastructure of vast
proportions. And despite the war in Vietnam, despite the dirty
wars that ravaged Latin America in the 1980s, despite America's
nefarious role in promoting coups and dictatorships in a slew of
countries-cum-cold-war-pawns around the globe, somehow much
of the world preserved a rosy-hued vision of America that could
have been culled straight from the marketing rooms of Madison
Avenue.
Now something is changing. Having dealt with history largely on
its own terms, largely with the ability to deflect the worst of the
chaos to arenas outside our borders (as imperial Britain did in the
century following the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, through to the
disastrous events leading up to World War I in 1914), America
has attracted a concentrated fury and vengeful ire of disastrous
proportions. The willingness to forgive, embodied in so much of
the world's embrace of the American Dream, is being replaced by
a rather vicious craving to see America -- which, under the Bush
administration, has increasingly defined its greatness by way of
military triumphs -- humbled. Moreover, no great power has
served as a magnet for such a maelstrom of hate in an era as
saturated with media images, as susceptible to instantaneous
opinion-shaping coverage of events occurring anywhere in the
world.
I guess the question that gnaws at my consciousness could be
rephrased as: How does one give an encore to a bravura
performance? It's either an anticlimax or, worse, a dismal failure -
- with the audience heading out the doors halfway through, talking
not of the brilliance of the earlier music, but of the tawdriness of
the last few bars. If the 20th century was the American Century,
its best hopes largely embodied by something akin to the
American Dream, what kind of follow-up can the 21st century
bring?
In the immediate aftermath of September 11, an outpouring of
genuine, if temporary, solidarity from countries and peoples
across the globe swathed America in an aura of magnificent
victimhood. We, the most powerful country on earth, had been
blindsided by a ruthless, ingenious, and barbaric enemy, two of
our greatest cities violated. We demanded the world's tears, and,
overwhelmingly, we received them. They were, we felt, no less
than our due, no more than our merit. In the days after the trade
center collapsed, even the Parisian daily Le Monde, not known for
its pro-Yankee sentimentality, informed its readers, in an echo of
John F. Kennedy's famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, that "we
are all Americans now."
Perhaps inevitably, however, that sympathy has now largely
dissipated. Powerful countries under attack fight back --
ruthlessly, brutally, with all the economic, political, diplomatic,
and military resources at their disposal. They always have; like as
not, they always will. In so doing, perhaps they cannot but step on
the sensibilities of smaller, less powerfuldare I say it, less
imperialnations and peoples. And as Britain, the country in which
I grew up, discovered so painfully during the early years of World
War II, sometimes the mighty end up standing largely alone,
bulwarks against history's periodic tidal waves. In that fight, even
if they emerge successful, they ultimately emerge also tarnished
and somewhat humbled, their power and drive and confidence at
least partly evaporated on the battlefield.
In the post-September 11 world, even leaving aside Iraq and all
the distortions, half-truths, and lies used to justify the invasion,
even leaving aside the cataclysmic impact of the Abu Ghraib
prison photographs, I believe America would have attracted
significant wrath simply in doing what had to be done in routing
out the Taliban in Afghanistan, in reorienting its foreign policy to
try and tackle international terror networks and breeding grounds.
That is why I come back time and again in my mind to the tactical
brilliance of Al Qaeda's September 11 attacks: If America hadn't
responded, a green light would have been turned on, one that
signaled that the country was too decadent to defend its vital
interests. Yet in responding, the response itself was almost
guaranteed to spotlight an empire bullying allies and enemies
alike into cooperation and subordination and, thus, to focus an
inchoate rage against the world's lone standing superpower.
Damned if we did, damned if we didn't.
Which brings me back to the American Dream. In the past even as
our power grew, much of the world saw us, rightly or wrongly, as
a moral beacon, as a country somehow largely outside the bloody,
gory, oft-tyrannical history that carved its swath across so much of
the world during the American Century. Indeed, in many ways,
even as cultural elites in once-glorious Old World nations sneered
at upstart, crass, consumerist America, the masses in those nations
idealized America as some sort of Promised Land, as a place of
freedoms and economic possibilities simply unheard of in many
parts of the globe. In many ways, the American Dream of the last
100-some years has been more something dreamed by foreigners
from afar, especially those who experienced fascism or Stalinism,
than lived as a universal reality on the ground in the United States.
Things look simpler from a distance than they do on the ground.
In the past foreigners might have idealized America as a place
whose streets were paved if not with gold, at least with alloys
seeded with rare and precious metals, even while those who lived
here knew it was a gigantic, complicated, multifaceted,
continental country with a vast patchwork of cultures and creeds
coexisting side by messy side. Today, I fear, foreigners slumber
with dreamy American smiles on their sleeping faces no more;
that intangible faith in the pastel-colored hue and soft contours of
the Dream risks being shattered, replaced instead by an equally
simplistic dislike of all things and peoples American.
Paradoxically these days it is the political elites -- the leaders and
policy analysts and defense experts -- who try to hold in place
alliances built up in the post-World War II years as the pax
Americana spread its wings, while the populaces shy away from
an America perceived to be dominated by corporations, military
musclemen, and empire-builders-in-the-name-of-democracy;
increasingly they sympathize with the unnuanced critiques of the
Margaret Drabbles of the world. The Pew survey, for example,
found that sizable majorities in countries such as Jordan,
Morocco, Turkey, Germany, and France believed the war on terror
to be largely about the United States wanting to control Middle
Eastern oil supplies.
In other words, the perception -- never universally held, but held
by enough people to help shape our global image -- is changing.
Once our image abroad was of an exceptional country accruing all
the power of empire without the psychology of empire; now it is
being replaced by something more historically normal -- that of a
great power determined to preserve and expand its might, for its
own selfish interests and not much else. An exhibit in New York's
Whitney Museum last year, titled "The American Effect,"
presented the works of 50 artists from around the world who
portrayed an America intent on world dominance through military
adventurism and gross consumption habits. In the run-up to the
war in Iraq, Mikhail Gorbachev lambasted an America he now
viewed as operating in a manner "far from real world leadership."
Nelson Mandela talked of the United States as a country that "has
committed unspeakable atrocities in the world."
Maybe the American Dream always was little more than
marketing hype (the author Jeffrey Decker writes in Made in
America that the term itself was conjured up in 1931 by a populist
historian named James Truslow Adams, perhaps as an antidote to
the harsh realities of Depression-era America). But as the
savagery of the images coming out of Iraq demonstrate all too
well, we live in a world where image is if not everything, at least
crucial. Perhaps I'm wrong and the American Dream will continue
to sweeten the sleep of those living overseas for another century. I
certainly hope, very much, that I'm wrong -- for a world denuded
of the Dream, however far from complex reality that Dream might
have been, would be impoverished indeed. But I worry that that
encore I mentioned earlier won't be nearly as breathtaking or as
splendid as the original performance that shaped the first
American century.
Sasha Abramsky is a freelance journalist and author of Hard
Time Blues: How Politics Built a Prison Nation (St. Martin's
Press, 2002).
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