‘Let’s drop the Big One now’

No one likes us, I don’t know why,

Let’s drop the Big One, see what happens …

American singer-songwriter Randy Newman’s Political Science offers a clue to that most baffling of enigmas: How can a murderous clown like George W Bush seriously contend for re-election as president of the United States, the world’s richest and most technically advanced nation? After four years of failure on every front?

US presidential elections are supposed to revolve around domestic issues, principally including stewardship of the economy. Yet, since 2001, US manufacturing has entered its deepest and most protracted recession, shedding close to three million jobs.

Bush has presided over a ballooning trade deficit that, at $166-billion, is now the largest ever, both as a share of the economy and in dollar terms. After inheriting a record surplus, his tax cuts for the rich have opened a $413-billion budget shortfall that has broken through a Congress-imposed debt ceiling. In any Third Word country, this would have drawn the International Monetary Fund like a vulture to a stricken buffalo. (Republicans, mind you, style themselves as the party of frugality and small government.)

An important contributor, US debt has been Bush’s Iraq misadventure, undertaken on a false pretext, in defiance of international law and world sentiment, and before United Nations weapons inspectors had finished their work.

Expecting an ecstatic reception from a ”liberated” populace, Bush and his advisers were wrong-footed by guerrilla resistance that has killed more US soldiers than the conventional phase, embroiled Iraqi civilians in unprecedented horrors, fuelled the near-doubling of global oil prices and further radicalised the Islamic world.

Compounding the latter trend has been the blank cheque given to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to terro- rise the Palestinians and annex their land. Whatever the short-term gains of Bush’s ”war on terrorism”, the longer-term potential for terrorist violence has been immeasurably heightened.

Writing his satirical song 30 years ago, Newman could not have foreseen Britain would follow the US into an illegal conflict. But a recent survey by 10 of the world’s leading newspapers underlines the extent to which Bush has alienated the US’s ”old friends”: five Britons oppose him for every two in favour, and nearly three-quarters believe the US now wields excessive influence in world affairs. A clear majority in Britain, Australia, Canada, France, Japan, Spain and South Korea rejects the Iraq invasion, feels contempt for Bush and growing hostility to the US.

Unsurprisingly, the strongest support for Bush — by two to one — came from Israel.

We give them money, but are they grateful?

Let’s drop the Big One, and pulverise ’em …

Foreign antagonism does not seem to have forced many Americans back on themselves — quite the reverse. The initial response to the global repudiation of the Iraq war, and France’s spearhead role in it, was not self-inquiry but an outraged boycott of French imports.

The Mail & Guardian has received countless pained, uncomprehending Internet messages from Americans about its anti-war stance, some asking whether we are ”jealous of America’s freedom”, others calling for the suspension of US aid to South Africa.

To argue that Bush ”stole” the 2000 election, or that he is simply the servant of US big business, is to misread his genuinely popular support base. Like Reagan, he is that all-American political animal — a right-wing populist.

Dirty industry, the oil business and what president Dwight D Eisenhower called ”the military-industrial complex” may have good reason to back the incumbent. But multinational capital cannot be blamed for the pro-Bush bumper stickers that read: ”Kick their ass and take their gas”.

What is clearly paramount for the roughly 50% of Americans who vote Republican is the bellicose symbolism that has been central to Bush’s campaign. ”I’m a war president; I’ve always got war on my mind,” he told TV reporters. Significantly, his support in the US’s enormous standing army is running at three to one, far higher than the national average.

He knows that post-9/11 what many people want is not national security achieved by diplomatic means, but the catharsis of violent self-assertion against a hostile and contemptuous outside world — and particularly Arab world.

In this perspective, it matters little that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and was marginal to the war on terror. What counted was an overwhelming display of the power of American arms.

For the Republican rank-and-file, John Kerry pushes all the wrong buttons. Despite his war record, vote for the Iraqi invasion and every possible attempt to out-sabre-rattle his opponent, he is too civilised, too cosmopolitan in his imagery.

Time magazine solemnly reported some months ago that 48% of Americans surveyed trusted Bush on Iraq, while only 17% felt similar faith in Kerry. However he tries escape the pigeon-hole, the Democratic candidate stands for the pointy-headed Eastern establishment and its ”bleeding-heart” virtues of dialogue, rationality and internationalism.

It not just Bush’s war-mongering profile that commends him to the Republican faithful as ”one of us”. For such, his dyslexia, incoherence and policy blankness are virtues, not failings.

Indeed, one of the US’s great paradoxes — and what makes it uniquely dangerous — is its marriage of scientific brilliance and popular irrationalism. It is the country of the moon probe and the Stealth bomber, which annually delivers the lion’s share of Nobel science laureates. But it is also a country of astral travellers, Aids conspiracy theorists, women who have been impregnated by aliens, and diehard campaigners against the Zionist Occupation Government (in Washington, not Jerusalem).

It is, above all, the world headquarters of right-wing fundamentalist Christianity, a tradition traceable to the popular dissenters of 17th-century England, the Ranters, Seekers, Fifth Monarchists and others, many of whom sought refuge in the New World.

From them it inherits the idea of ”one man, one church” (hence the endless proliferation of fundamentalist ministries), the primacy of ecstatic religious experience; and fevered millenarian expectations. Millions of Americans believe in the imminence of a Second Coming they call ”the rapture”, which will lift them bodily into heaven through car roofs and ceilings.

An atheist US president is unthinkable, and Kerry seldom neglects to trumpet his Catholicism. But Bush, with his Armageddon vibe and deliberate pandering to the irrational — notably the anti-stem cell research crowd and creationists — has America’s large religious twaddle constituency in the palm of his hand.

Asia’s crowded, Europe’s too old,

Let’s drop the Big One, there’ll be no one left to blame us.

We’ll save Australia, don’t wanna hurt no kangaroo,

They’ve got surfin’ too!

It is hard to overestimate the influence of belligerent parochialism in US politics. Only 20% of Americans have passports; the American mass media are notoriously indifferent to international affairs. It was the wit Ambrose Bierce who observed that wars are needed to teach Americans geography.

One consequence of this is reflexive public support for armed interference in the affairs of other states — the US has mounted 200 such operations since World War II — combined with quite extraordinary public ignorance about what is at issue.

Six months after the Iraqi invasion, half the Americans surveyed still thought Hussein was behind the attack on the Twin Towers. At about the same time, a visiting American journalism student insisted to incredulous M&G staffers that Gulf War II had uncovered chemical weapons in Iraq.

Bush has probably benefited from widespread ignorance and the — belatedly acknowledged — reporting failures of the US media. But even if the facts were better known, the popular taste for kragdadigheid in dealing with the outside world would doubtless redeem him in many voters’ eyes.

Newman captures the obverse of hostility to non-America — missionary faith in the ”American way”, now much bolstered by the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites.

It is this that makes it possible for Bush to flout world opinion and moves to legislate world norms, whether in the shape of the Kyoto Protocol or the World Criminal Court; and to detain foreign nationals indefinitely, in degrading conditions without charging them. It also underlies the doomed attempt to impose, at bayonet point, elected governments on Afghanistan and Iraq.

Boom goes London! Boom Paree!

Would just be another American town …

Some argue that American voters have no real choice. Such thoughts should be dispelled by examining the freak parade of the hard-core Republican vote, which includes the most dangerous and backward elements of American society: the no-neck Southern oilmen, the polluting industrialists, the rednecks whose daddies burned black churches, the bombers of abortion clinics, the religious screwballs who want Genesis taught as science, the ”Rapture Ready”, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the anti-communist dinosaurs of the John Birch Society, the National Rifle Association, the hang ’em high and sterilise ’em crowd, the gay-baiting moral majoritarians … and the diehard flag-wavers and chip-on-shoulder xenophobes who would like to stick it to a disapproving world:

They all hate us anyhow

Let’s drop the Big One now.