Americanism RIP
by Wentworth Sutton,assistant vice-principal, Mitchell Hepburn Collegiate Institute, Don Mills, and president emeritus, Semiologico-Hermeneutic Institute of Toronto.
Well, I was wrong about Iraq. In the recent smoking gun debate I took the position that the American motives for invading Iraq were in part ideological. What we have learned from the invasion of Iraq, though, is that the American ideology is dead.
The tip-off came with the American fury against anyone who refused to support the United States' military adventure in Iraq. Congressmen even saw to it that French fries were renamed freedom fries! The American ambassador to Canada was instructed to insult Canada, and George W. Bush cancelled a visit to Ottawa. In general, America was consumed by vituperation against anyone who dared to question the purity of the United States' motives or the utility of its actions.
In the old days, of course, Americans wouldn't have cared. Confident in their belief that the United States represented the highest stage of civilization, and that their country's mission was to spread that civilization throughout the world by whatever means necessary, Americans would not even have paid attention. Now, however, they are so unsure of themselves and of the rightness of their actions that they must reassure themselves by extravagantly threatening any non-Americans who share their doubts.
America's current pop psychology guru, Dr. Phil, would tell Americans that their problem is that their fictional selves are not congruent with their authentic selves. What that psychobabble means is that Americans have let others dictate what they should do and believe. As usual, the complete opposite of Dr. Phil's analysis is the true explanation – the problem is that Americans' fictional selves have become perilously similar to their authentic selves.
Americans have become uncomfortably aware that for a century or more the United States' true mission in history has been to spread the influence of the United States rather than to spread democracy. The penny has finally dropped, and Americans have noticed that the avatars of democracy their country has supported over the years tend to run to the likes of the Somozas, General Pinochet, Ferdinand Marcos, Shah Reza Pahlevi, and the entire enormous royal house of the feudal state of Sa'udi Arabia. That, of course, has played hob with a commodity Americans hold dear, their self-esteem.
Having an accurate opinion of oneself has its benefits, but having an inflated opinion of oneself feels a lot better. Believing that there are aspects of your being that could be improved is psychologically damaging to a people which has been raised to believe that it is the incarnation of all that is good and pure. You have to do something about it, and you have a choice of two things to do.
The first choice is actually to improve yourself, but apparently Americans, saturated with the moral ideas of Christian fundamentalism and evangelicalism, are too vulnerable to feelings of guilt, shame, and disgrace to undertake that option – they'd have to admit that they had sinned. Therefore they have chosen the second option, which is to accuse everyone else of being worse than you are.
And then they feel guitly about that. As evidence of this analysis I offer the current behaviour of the United States toward Canada. All of a sudden Paul Cellucci is making nice again, assuring us that relations between Canada and the States are "nearly back to normal." As I said, the American psyche is vulnerable to guilt, and Americans are trying to assuage their guilt over their attacks on other countries by putting on the shit-eating grin and talking about bygones being bygones.
But how, you ask, did Americans come to abandon their old self-justifying ideas? The answer is easy – neo-conservatism and neo-liberalism. By reducing all social issues to issues of profit and loss, neo-politicians taught Americans not to be ideological Iin fact, they boast about how they have eradicated ideology). Neo-conservatives and neo-liberals both of course claim to have democratic values, but their actions gave the lie to those beliefs. In any conflict between democracy and "efficiency" (also known as whatever the government wants), efficiency wins out.
These two movements were especially effective in the United States because until their arrival there had really been no American political ideologies. As late as the 1960s the Democratic Party, for example, consisted of large numbers of both integrationists and segregationists. The American parties were simply organizations of convenience. They had nothing to offer in place of neo-politics.
In Canada, on the other hand, neo-conservatism ruptured the Progressive Conservative party, while neo-liberalism drove thousands from the New Democratic Party. There was no enthusiastic wholesale latching on to the idea of the state as business enterprise.
So what happens now? What - am I a psychic? No. I just explain things. That's what we experts do. Okay, I'll make a prediction. The current shamefacedness of Americans suggests to me that ventures like the invasion of Iraq will not be frequent in the near future. I believe the United States feels as if it is just waking up after a night of drunkenness in which it tried to pick fights with all the neighbours and then drove its car into one of their porches. Of course, a real drunk has to cope with the addictive powers of alcohol, but the power-hungry don't get withdrawal symptoms when they abstain from the exercise of power. To avoid more guilt jags, the United States will just try to get along.
So that's my prediction. The United States will become virtuous, a model to all nations, just as it used to think it was. Then they'll develop that into an ideology and start invading the rest of us again to bring us the benefits of their greater virtue. Until then, enjoy the break.
Posted May 8, 2003
Americanism RIP © John FitzGerald, 2003
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