Comment
Charlotte Raven
Most people in the world had more than one response to what happened to the United States last week. I think it is safe to say that apart from three or four Palestinians, everyone is sad to see so many of their fellow humans killed in such horrendous circumstances. That goes for most Muslims and the great majority of those who might have been quite pleased to see the US get a different kind of comeuppance.
For this second group, in which I include myself, the unqualified sympathy extended to the victims is underpinned by a feeling that few have dared even to whisper. My neighbour said it, and so did a rogue Palestinian whose views have not yet been censored in the name of “taste”. They are better placed than I am, as a broadsheet commentator, to admit to a part of them that thinks the US might bene-fit from an insight into what it feels like to be knocked to your knees by a faceless power deaf to everything but the logic of its own crazed agenda.
There’s nothing shameful about this position. It is perfectly possible to condemn the terrorist action and dislike the US just as much as you did before the World Trade Centre went down. Many will have woken last Wednesday with that combination of emotions. Some were more “ha” than sorrow, but most had the proportions right and none should be accused of inhumanity. If anti-Americanism has been seized, temporarily, by forces that have done dreadful things in its name, there is no reason for its adherents to retreat from its basic precepts.
The US is the same country it was before September 11. If you didn’t like it then, there’s no reason why you should have to pretend to now. All those who see its suffering as a kind of absolution should remember how little we’ve seen that would support this reading. A bully with a bloody nose is still a bully and, weeping apart, everything the US body politic has done in the week since the attacks has confirmed its essential character.
Given this, it is amazing that so many commentators should feel the need to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with a government that few used to support. Apparently, it is every American’s duty to display their anti-terrorist credentials by refusing to criticise anything about its response to the crisis. For the British, the most pressing task is to reassure our friends across the pond that we don’t support the demolition of their cities by ridding ourselves of any trace of anti-American sentiment.
The great thing about the media in Britain is that it isn’t often reduced to the univocal drone that expat friends complain of in the US. Those who have been there through this crisis have told me how little respect they have for media that believe the whys and wherefores of this situation are somebody else’s concern.
Like so many of the ideas the US is going to war to defend, free speech is a nice thought that hasn’t panned out in practice. The US may think of itself as a nation that nurtures debate but if that happens at all, it’s only when there’s nothing at stake. At this crucial moment in its history, it has eschewed the clamour of conflicting positions in favour of the voice it always returns to when its foundations are shaken. That voice is deeply dumb. Unable to engage with causality and contemptuous of attempts to do so, it explains what it sees in terms that bear no relation to reality.
When the US speaks from its heart, it retreats into a language that none but its true-born citizens can begin to understand. At the root of this is an overwhelming need to control meaning. America can’t let the world speak for itself. It was taken unawares last Tuesday and part of the trauma of that event was the shock of being forced to listen to a message that it hadn’t had time to translate. The subsequent roar of anger was, among other things, the sound of the US struggling to regain the right to control its own narrative.
It did this by declaring war. By this means, President George W Bush ensured that Americans only had to sit with the inexplicable for a couple of anxious days. After that, the sense, so unfamiliar to them, of not knowing what had happened or what it meant was replaced by the reassuring certainties of John Brown’s body and calls for national unity. By turning what should have been a criminal manhunt into an all-out war, Bush was asserting his right to define the US’s reality. Instead of submitting to the reality, he created the situation he wanted, fashioning a plausible, beatable enemy that bore only a passing relation to the ragbag of loons in Osama bin Laden’s camp. They weren’t a worthy enemy of America, so rather than confront what this might mean, Bush has made one up. “International terrorism” has been talked up in the past week to the point where it almost looks like an ideology. Much as the US might want this to be the case, it isn’t. Saying you’re going to “eradicate” it is like pledging to defeat shooting.
Rather than run the risk of seeing what might happen if it listened to the rest of the world, the US is going full square into a war that doesn’t exist. It would rather have a virtual victory than submit to someone else’s agenda. While understandable, this tendency is one of the reasons why some people still have issues with it.