Part 1. The Idealistic Version
Boy, are these guys dumb. Dangerous, but dumb. They actually think America
is a thing, a place. They think that by destroying some buildings and killing some people
they can get rid of America.
How stupid can you get.
Sure, America is a place and it is also people. But America is far more
than that. America is an idea. And as long as one brain survives in which that idea lives,
you have not destroyed America.
These guys have a big job ahead of them. First they have to kill all human
beings who have American passports. Then they have to kill all human beings who are
waiting in line to emigrate to America. Even that is only for starters.
Because then they have to kill all human beings everywhere who, while
pursuing lives in their own countries, draw sustenance and hope and inspiration from the
idea of America.
How stupid can you get.
What is this idea of America?
Once, an Asian student who had been in America for a couple of years asked
me to write for him a definition of America.
I tried, and failed.
From the failure I learned something. I learned that America is a work in
progress. The definition I would give is different from the definition you would give. And
probably both our definitions would themselves change in another ten or twenty years.
I realized that the very idea of America itself is in constant flux. It is
a continuing experiment in the meaning of human freedom.
"America," the country, the place, has made huge, terrible
mistakes throughout its history: slavery, near-genocide on the Indians, uncontrolled
greed, jackboot militarism, dictatorial religion.
But something, this IDEA of America, always draws us back. We consider our
mistakes and change to avoid or at least lessen the mistakes next time.
What does "America" mean to us, to the world?
Is it freedom? Sure. Is it hope? Of course. Is it opportunity? Yes. Is it
stability? Yes. This ineffable "thing," this idea, contains all that, all those
best human aspirations, which we have rolled up in one ball called "America."
Imperfect? Yes. Severely, embarrassingly, humanly imperfect.
I finally came to see that America is so difficult to define because at
its heart is a paradox. The idea of America is the outrageous belief that humans can
create a society which simultaneously protects, nurtures, and encourages both those who
believe and those who do not believe, those who agree with me and those who don't, those
who agree with you and those who don't.
A difficult undertaking, that. The experiment of America is to find out if
it is even possible.
So far, I would say, in spite of our grievous errors and many
shortcomings, the signs continue to be good.
These guys, these suicidal guys, are hell-bent on stopping the experiment,
which is nothing less than the great human experiment in freedom for me and for you,
together at the same time on this one tiny planet.
How stupid are they? They see our endless internal disagreeing and think
it means weakness. They see Madonna and forget the 10,000 madonnas in American churches.
They see the inane commercialism of American television and forget that in one year
America spends more on creating art than ALL civilizations in history put together did.
They see media sex and violence everywhere and are blind to uncountable daily acts
of love and compassion.
What they don't realize is this: I, for example, delight through this
publication in skewering politicians and industrialists and religionists who I think are
on a wrong and dangerous track. And those people delight in skewering people like me with
whom they disagree. But what we all share, what all "Americans" share--those
with passports and those without--is a rock-solid belief in the social and political
SYSTEM that enables all of us to exist together even as we disagree.
At bottom America is tolerance.
Lots of luck, guys. You may kill some more of us. In fact, I suspect
you're going to try to kill many many more of us. And you can certainly cause a lot of
pain, suffering, and grief. But at the end of your bloody days, you're still going to be
just as plain dumb as you were at the beginning. Because the idea of America, which may in
the future even have a different name, cannot be destroyed.
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Part 2. The Realistic VersionTrying to find their way
toward a "successful" life, humans move through a minefield of rules: do this,
don’t do that. Problems arise because not all rules are stated, and the ones that are
stated are not to be taken as absolute. A study of history shows that the widespread rule
against killing is widely honored in the breach. Thou shalt not kill… well, OK,
except in self-defense, um, and in case of a just war…
The "great" nations and leaders of history are those who have figured out a
way through this minefield, who have realized that the unstated rules teach us that
it’s OK and even necessary to kill sometimes. The tricky part, the part which if you
figure it out means you go down in history as a great person or nation, is to figure out
how much violence is enough. How much territory and how many people can you subjugate and
then exert continuing successful control?
The glory that was Greece pretty well collapsed when Alexander over-reached in a big
way. But the Romans were pretty good at realizing that the area around the Mediterranean
Sea was about all they could handle. The Chinese for millennia, maybe for geographic
reasons, maybe for cultural or other reasons, also found East Asia to be just about the
right size. The British bit off way to much and were pretty quickly forced back and back
and back. Similarly with Napoleon. And, of course, Hitler.
"Realpolitik" is the name that has come to be applied to the study of
"permissible" violence in international affairs. "Peaceniks" are
denigrated by serious students of Realpolitik who proceed on what they take to be
the true Golden Rule of human history: "Those who have the gold make the rules."
Of course "gold" here actually means power, which comes in many forms:
"Those who have the armies / the weapons / the ships / the economic resources, etc.
make the rules."
Serious students of Realpolitik also realize that ideology, whether political or
religious, is mere underpinning for the raw exercise of power. Worship of a flag, a
nation, a god is valuable only to the extent that it braces a population for the coming
sacrifice of its sons and daughters.
Future historians will no doubt study the first 200 years of United States history as a
fascinating example of carefully exercised and usually cleverly restrained Realpolitik.
In the end, even Vietnam indicates an American ability to see that it had overstepped the
poorly defined line of permissible international violence.
Survivors are the ones who learn the very difficult lesson of balancing greed and
restraint, even in the face of extraordinary gains. Hitler didn’t know where to stop
and was no doubt genuinely puzzled by the reactions to his continuing greed. After all, in
his view he was no doubt doing only what other "great" leaders had done
throughout history. If he could have contented himself with occupied continental Europe,
his thousand-year empire might have lasted more than 12 years.
The present conflagration, the "War on Terrorism," offers two different but
dangerous and revealing lines of thought in terms of Realpolitik.
1. The extremist Muslims have themselves obviously overstepped the line. Yes, in many
ways their objections and complaints about the way the world is have some validity. But
their enormous and fatal mistake is in believing that they can undertake any level of
violence to achieve some kind of justice in the world. They see (of course rightly) other
nations acting unilaterally and violently to reach their own ends, so why can they not do
so?
Their stupidity became apparent on September 11. With the attack on the Pentagon, they
struck violently and symbolically at the capital of what they see as the oppressor. But
they also struck at the actual heart of the global financial empire. The attack on the
World Trade Center was violent and symbolic, but it was also terrifyingly actual, a real
threat not just to the populace of New York or the United States, but to the continued
existence of the global financial network which forms the secure foundation for ALL
presently constituted governments.
A symbolic attack confined solely to Washington would have produced a global response,
but nothing like the unified response we’ve seen. Why this response? Because our
greedy Muslim guys overstepped and scared EVERYBODY, from the pettiest of banana republic
tyrants to the most progressive and democratic rulers shitless.
No doubt, just as Hitler was in denial in his bunker in Berlin right up to the end, our
Muslin guys in their caves are having a lot of trouble assimilating the unity of the
response to their attacks, which they no doubt see as incredibly successful.
That they are smart cannot be denied, but unfortunately and fatally for them, they are
so smart they can’t see their own stupidity.
2. Far more troubling is the longer-term effect on the United States. American leaders
repeatedly speak of the "War on Terrorism" as a war not of months but of years.
Whatever its duration, it is the biggest test of the extension of American military power
and reach. Even American wealth is finite, great but finite. The early, measured responses
to September 11 have hardly strained American resources. The big unknown factor is what
the United States can do and what it will attempt to do if faced with a spreading
recalcitrance in the Muslim world, and perhaps elsewhere, to accept its terms for a
continuing war.
Stupidity, once it is loose in the world, is dangerously
infectious. It’s easy to see the stupidity of the perpetrators of September 11. The
mote in their eye is readily visible. What of the beam in our own?
END
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