Our Nightmare

To quote Bush 41: We are in deep doo-doo. We are hoist by our own petard. If this is (fair & balanced) fear and loathing, so be it.

[x Chronicle of Higher Education]
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).

Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education