The United States is not the monolith many
Arabs presume it to be. It is more accurate
to apprehend America as embroiled in a serious clash of identities whose
counterparts are visible as similar contests throughout the rest of the world
A small item in the press a few days ago [1] reported that Prince Ibn Al-Walid
of Saudi Arabia had donated 10 million dollars to the American University in
Cairo to establish a department or centre of American Studies there. It should
be recalled that the young billionaire had contributed an unsolicited 10
million dollars to New York City shortly after the 11 September bombings, with
an accompanying letter that, aside from describing the handsome sum as a
tribute to New York, also suggested that the United States might reconsider its
policy towards the Middle East. Obviously he had total and unquestioning
American support for Israel in mind, but his politely stated proposition seemed
also to cover the general American policy of denigrating, or at least showing
disrespect, for Islam.
In a fit of petulant rage, the then Mayor of New York (which also has the
largest Jewish population of any city in the world), Rudolph Guiliani, returned
the check to Al-Walid, rather unceremoniously and with an extreme and I would
say racist contempt that was meant to be insulting as well as gloating. On
behalf of a certain image of New York, he personally was upholding the city's
demonstrated bravery and its principled resistance to outside interference. And
of course pleasing, rather than trying to educate, a purportedly unified Jewish
constituency.
Guiliani's churlish behaviour was of a piece with his refusal several years
before (in 1995, well after the Oslo signings) to admit Yasser Arafat to the
Philharmonic Hall for a concert to which everyone at the UN had been invited.
Typical of the cheap theatrics of the below average American big city
politician, what New York's mayor did in response to the young Saudi Arabian's
gift was completely predictable. Even though the money was intended, and
greatly needed, for humanitarian use in a city wounded by a terrible atrocity,
the American political system and its main actors put Israel ahead of
everything, whether or not Israel's amply endowed and highly mobilised
lobbyists would have done the same thing. In any case, no one knows what would
have occurred if Guiliani didn't return the money; but as things turned out he
had nicely preempted even the well- oiled pro-Israeli lobbying apparatus. As
the celebrated novelist and essayist Joan Didion wrote in a recent New York
Review of Books article, it has become a staple of US policy first articulated
by FD Roosevelt that America has tried against all logic to maintain a
hopelessly contradictory support for the Saudi monarchy on the one hand and, on
the other, with the state of Israel, so much so, she adds, that "we have
become unable to discuss anything that might be seen as touching on our
relationship with the current government of Israel" (p56, Jan 16, 03).
The two stories about Prince Al-Walid dovetail nicely with each other, and show
a continuity that has been quite rare so far as Arab views of America have been
concerned. For at least three generations, Arab leaders, politicians, and their
more often than not American-trained advisers have been formulating policies
for their countries whose basis is an almost completely fictitious and quite
fanciful idea of what America is. Far from coherent, this idea is at bottom all
about how 'the Americans' really run everything, even though in its details the
notion encompasses a wide, not to say jumbled, range of opinions, from on the
one hand seeing America as a conspiracy of Jews, to theories on the other
stipulating that America is either a bottomless well of benign good feeling and
help for the downtrodden, or that it is ruled from A to Z by an unchallenged
white man sitting like an Olympian figure in the White House.
I recall many times during the 20 years that I knew Yasser Arafat well, trying
to explain to him that this was a complex society with all sorts of currents,
interests, pressures, and histories in conflict within it and that far from
being ruled the way Syria was, for instance, a different model of power and
authority ought to be studied. I enlisted my late friend, the scholar and
political activist, Eqbal Ahmed, who had an expert knowledge of American society
but was also perhaps the finest theorist and historian of anti-colonial
national liberation movements in the world, to talk to Arafat and bring along
other experts so that a sharper, more nuanced model might develop for use by
the Palestinians during their preliminary contacts with the US government in
the late 1980s -- but all to no avail. Ahmed had carefully studied the Algerian
FLN's relationship with France during the war of 1954-62 as well as the North
Vietnamese while they were negotiating with Kissinger during the 1970s.
The contrast between a scrupulous, detailed knowledge of the metropolitan
society with which these insurgents had been in conflict and the Palestinians'
almost caricatural knowledge of America (based mainly on hearsay and cursory
readings in Time magazine) was stark. Arafat's single-minded obsession was to
make his way personally into the White House and talk to that whitest of white
men Bill Clinton: in his view that would be the equivalent perhaps of getting
things done with Mubarak of Egypt or Hafez Al-Assad of Syria. If in the
meantime Clinton revealed himself to be the master- creature of American
politics, completely overwhelming and confusing the Palestinians with his charm
and his manipulation of the system, so much the worse for Arafat and his men.
Their simplified view of America was monumentally unchanged, as it still is
today. As for resistance or knowing how to play the game of politics in a world
with only one, all- conquering super-power in it, matters remain as they have
for over half a century. Most people throw up their hands in despair like
disappointed lovers: America is hopeless, and I don't ever want to go back
there, they often say, though one also notices that green, permanent residence
cards are much in demand, as are university admissions for the children.
The other, more hopeful side of the story
concerns what seems to have been Prince Al-Walid's later change of direction,
about which I can only surmise. But I do know that apart from a few courses and
seminars on American literature and politics scattered throughout the
universities of the Arab world, there has never been anything like an academic
centre for the systematic and scientific analysis of America, its people,
society, and history, at all. Not even in American institutions like the
American Universities of Cairo and Beirut. This lack may also be true
throughout the Third World, and maybe even in some European countries. The
point I am making is that to live in a world that is held in the grip of an
extraordinarily unbound great power there is a vital need for knowing as much
about its swirling dynamics as is humanly possible. And that, I believe, also
includes commanding an excellent working command of the language, something few
Arab leaders (as a case in point) possess. Yes, America is the country of
McDonald's, Hollywood, blue jeans, Coca-Cola and CNN, all of them products
exported and available everywhere by virtue of globalisation, multinational
corporations, and what seems to be the world's appetite for articles of easy,
convenient consumption. But we must also be conscious of from what source these
come and in what ways the cultural and social processes from which they
ultimately derive can be interpreted, especially since the danger of thinking
about America too simply or reductively and statically is so obvious.
Even as I write these lines much of the world is being bludgeoned into a
restive submission by (or, as are the cases of Italy and Spain, an utterly
opportunistic alliance with) America as it readies itself for a deeply
unpopular war against Iraq. But for the ongoing global demonstrations and
protests that have erupted entirely at the popular level, the war would simply
be a brazen act of unopposed cynical domination. Yet contested as it is by so
many Americans as well as Europeans, Asians, Africans and Latin Americans who
have taken to the streets and to their local newspapers at least suggests that
at last there is an awakening to the fact that the United States, or rather the
small handful of Judeo-Christian white men who currently rule its government,
is bent on world hegemony. What to do then?
In what follows I shall offer a rapid sketch of the extraordinary panorama
presented by today's America, as seen by someone who is American and has lived
comfortably in it for years and years, but who by virtue of his Palestinian
origins, still retains his perspective as a comparative outsider, but a kind of
insider also. My interest is simply to suggest ways of understanding,
intervening in, and if the word isn't too inappropriate, resisting a country
that is far from the monolith it is usually taken to be, specially in the Arab
and Muslim worlds. What is there to be seen?
The difference between America and the
classic empires of the past is that, even though each empire asserted its utter
originality and its determination not to repeat the overreaching ambitions of
imperial predecessors, this one does so with an astonishing affirmation of its
nearly sancrosanct altruism and well-meaning innocence. For this alarming
delusion there is, even more alarmingly, a new squadron of formerly Left or
liberal intellectuals alike who had historically opposed American wars abroad
but who are now prepared to make the case for virtuous empire (the figure of
the lonely sentry has been used) using a variety of styles, from tub-thumping
patriotism to sly cynicism. The events of 11 September play a role in this
volte face, but what is surprising is that the Twin Towers-Pentagon bombings,
horrible though they were, retreated as if they came from nowhere, rather than
in fact from a world across the seas driven crazy by American intervention and
ubiquitous American presence. This is of course not to condone Islamic
terrorism, which is a hateful thing in every way. But it is to remark that in
all the pious analyses of America's responses to Afghanistan and now Iraq,
history and proportionality have simply dropped out of the picture entirely.
What the liberal hawks specially don't refer to, however, is the Christian
Right (so similar to Islamic extremism in fervor and righteousness) and its
massive, indeed decisive presence in America today. The qualities of that
vision derive from mostly Old Testament sources, very much of a piece with
those of Israel, its close partner and analogue. A peculiar alliance between
Israel's influential neoconservative American supporters and the Christian
extremists is that the latter support Zionism as a way of bringing all the Jews
to the Hold y Land to prepare the way for the Messiah's Second Coming; at which
point Jews will either have to convert to Christianity or be annihilated. The
bloody and rabidly anti-Semitic teleologies are rarely referred to, certainly
not by the pro-Israeli Jewish phalanx.
America is the world's most avowedly religious country. References to God
permeate the national life, from coins to buildings to common forms of speech:
in God we trust, God's country, God bless America, and on and on. George Bush's
power base is made up of the 60-70 million fundamentalist Christians who, like
him, believe they have seen Jesus and are here to do God's work in God's
country. Some sociologists and journalists (including Francis Fukuyuma and
David Brooks) have argued that contemporary American religion is the result of
a desire for community and a long-gone sense of stability, given the fact that
approximately 20 per cent of the population is moving from home to home all the
time. But the evidence for that desire is true only up to a point: what matters
more is religion by prophetic illumination, unshakeable conviction in a
sometimes apocalyptic sense of mission, and a heedless disregard of small-scale
facts and complications. The enormous geographical distance of the country from
the turbulent world is another factor, as is the fact that Canada and Mexico
are continental neighbours with little capability of tempering American
enthusiasm.
All of those things converge around an idea of American rightness, goodness,
freedom, economic promise, social advancement that is so ideologically woven
into the fabric of daily life that it doesn't even appear to be ideological,
but rather a fact of nature. America = good = total loyalty and love. Similarly
there is an unconditional reverence for the Founding Fathers, and for the
Constitution, an amazing document, it is true, but a human one nevertheless.
Early America is the anchor of American authenticity. In no country that I know
does a waving flag play so central an iconographical role. You see it everywhere,
on taxicabs, on men's jacket lapels, on the front windows and roofs of houses
everywhere. It is the main embodiment of the national image, signifying heroic
endurance and a beleaguered sense of fighting of unworthy enemies. Patriotism
is still the prime American virtue, tied up as it is with religion, belonging,
and doing the right thing not just at home but all over the world. Patriotism
is also represented in retail consumer spending, as when Americans were
enjoined after the events of 9/11 to do a lot of shopping in defiance of evil
terrorists. Bush and employees of his like Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice and Ashcroft
have tapped into all of that to mobilise the military for war 7000 miles away
in order 'to get' Saddam, as he is referred to universally. Underlying all this
is the machinery of capitalism, now undergoing radical and, I think,
destabilising change. The economist Julie Schor has shown that Americans now
work far more hours than they did three decades ago, and are making relatively
less money for their efforts. But still there is no serious, systematic
political challenge to the dogmas of what are referred to as the opportunities
of a free market. It's as if no one cares whether the corporate structure in
alliance with the federal government, which still hasn't been able to provide
most Americans with decent universal health coverage and a sound education, has
to be changed. News of the stock market is more important than re-examining the
system.
This is a crude summary of the American consensus, which in fact politicians
exploit and try endlessly to simplify into slogans and sound bites. But what
one discovers about this amazingly complex society is how many counter-
currents and alternatives run across and around this consensus all the time. The
growing resistance to war that the president has been essentially minimising
and pretending to ignore, derives from the other less formal America that the
mainstream media (newspapers of record such as The New York Times, the main
networks, the publishing and magazine industries in large measure) always tries
to paper over and keep down. Never has there been so unashamed, if not
scandalous, complicity between TV news and the government's rush to war: even
the average newsreader that turns up on CNN or one of the major networks talks
excitedly about Saddam's evils and how 'we' have to stop him before it's too
late. And if that is not bad enough, the airwaves are filled with ex-military
men, terrorism experts, and Middle East policy analysts who know none of the
relevant languages, may never have seen any part of the Middle East, and are
too poorly educated to be expert at anything, all of them arguing in a
memorised jargon about the need for 'us' to do something about Iraq, while
preparing our windows and cars for an impending poison gas attack.
Because it is a managed and constructed
thing the consensus operates in a sort of timeless present. History is anathema
to it, and in accepted public discourse even the word 'history' is a synonym
for nothingness or non-entity, as in the scornful, typically dismissive
American phrase, 'you're history.' Otherwise history is what as Americans we
are supposed to believe about America (not about the rest of the world, which
is 'old' and generally left behind, hence irrelevant) uncritically, loyally,
unhistorically. There is an amazing polarity at work here. In the popular mind
America is supposed to stand above or beyond history. On the other hand, there
is an all-consuming general interest that one encounters across the country in
the history of everything, from small regional topics, to the vaster reaches of
world empires. Many cults develop out of both these carefully balanced
opposites, which encompass the road from xenophobic patriotism to other-worldly
spiritualism and reincarnation.
One rather more worldly example of the struggle about history is worth
recalling here. A decade ago a great intellectual battle was waged in the
public sphere over what kind of history should be taught in schools. What was clear
about the va-et-vient that occurred over many weeks was that the promoters of
the idea of American history as a heroically unified national narrative with
entirely positive resonances for young minds, thought of history as essential
not only for the truth, but for the ideological propriety of representations
that would mould students into essentially docile citizens, ready to accept a
set of basic themes as the constants in America's relationships with itself and
the rest of the world. Purged from this essentialist view were to be the
elements of what was called postmodernism and divisive history (that of
minorities, women, slavery, etc) but the result, interestingly enough, was a
failure so far as the imposition of such risible standards was concerned. As
Linda Symcox sums it up, "Certainly one would argue, as I do, that...[the
neoconservative] approach to cultural literacy is a thinly disguised attempt to
inculcate students with a relatively conflict-free, consensual view of history.
But the project ended up moving in a different direction altogether. In the
hands of social and world historians, who actually wrote the Standards with the
K-12 teachers, the Standards became a vehicle for the pluralistic vision the
government was trying to combat. In the end, consensus history, or cultural
reproduction... was challenged by those historians who felt that social justice
and the redistribution of power demanded a more complex telling of the
past."
In the public sphere over which in so many
ways the mass mainstream media preside there are thus a series of what one
might call narrathemes that structure, package and control discussion, despite
the appearance of variety and diversity. I shall discuss only a small number of
them that strike me as acutely pertinent at this time. One of course is that
there is a collective 'we', a national identity represented without apparent
demurral by our president, our secretary of state at the UN, our armed forces
in the desert, and our interests, which are routinely seen as self-defensive,
without ulterior motive, and in an overall way, innocent in the way that a
traditional woman is supposed to be innocent, pure, free of sin, etc. Another
narratheme is the irrelevance of history, and the inadmissibility of illegitimate
'linkage', for example, the facts that the US once had armed and encouraged
Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden, or that Vietnam (when it is mentioned at
all) and its particular form of devastation was 'bad' for the country or, as
Jimmy Carter once put it memorably, that it was a form of "mutual"
self-destruction. Or even more staggering, the ongoing and even institutional
irrelevance of two immensely important and constitutively American experiences,
the slavery of the African-American people and the dispossession and
quasi-extermination of the native American population. These have yet to be
figured into the national consensus in any serious way. (Whereas there is a
major Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, no such memorial exists either for
African-Americans or native Americans, anywhere in the country).
A third is the unexamined conviction that opposition to our policies is
'anti-Americanism' which is based on jealousy about 'our' democracy, freedom,
wealth and greatness or, as the current obsession with French resistance to an
American war against Iraq has it, plain and ordinary foreign nastiness. In this
context Europeans are constantly reminded of how America saved them twice in
the past century, with the subsidiary implication that most Europeans simply
sat back watching while American troops did all the real fighting. And when it
comes to places where the US has been extraordinarily entangled for at least 50
years like the Middle East or Latin America, the narratheme of America as the
honest broker, the impartial adjudicator, the entirely well-intentioned
international force for good, has no serious competitor to it; what we have
therefore is a strand of thought that has little place in it for issues
relating to power, or financial gain, or resource grabbing, or ethnic lobbying,
or forcible and/or surreptitious regime change (as in Iran and Chile, for
instance), and as a result remains quite undisturbed except for occasional
efforts to recall them. The closest one gets to that kind of realism is in the
abhorrently euphemistic idiom of the thinktanks and the government, idioms that
discuss soft power and projection and American vision. Still less represented
(or even alluded to) are policies of extraordinary cruelty or invidiousness for
which America is directly responsible like support for the Sharonian campaign
against Palestinian civilian life, or the terrible civilian casualties incurred
by Iraqi sanctions, or the support given the Turkish and Columbian regimes for
horrendously inhuman punishments against ordinary citizens. These are
considered out of bounds during serious discussions of 'policy'.
Finally, the narratheme of unchallenged moral wisdom as represented in figures
with official authority (eg Henry Kissinger, David Rockefeller, plus every present
official of the current administration) is reproduced over and over without
very much of a twinge of doubt. The fact, for instance, that two Nixon-era
convicted felons (Elliott Abrams and John Poindexter) have recently been
endowed with significant government positions attracts little comment, much
less objection. This sort of blind appreciation of authority past or present,
pure or sullied, occurs in many different forms, all the way from the
respectful, even abject forms of address used by commentators and pundits, to a
total unwillingness to see anything in the authority figure except his or her
polished appearance (for instance, the de rigueur dark suit, white shirt, and
red tie), unscarred by anything in the past record that might be incriminating
to a serious degree. Buttressing that is, I believe, the American belief in
pragmatism as a philosophic system of dealing with reality that is
anti-metaphysical, anti- historical and, curiously, even anti-philosophical.
Postmodern anti-nominalism of the kind that reduces everything to sentence
structure and linguistic context is allied with this, and is a very influential
style of thought existing alongside analytic philosophy in the American
university. In my own university, figures such as Hegel and Heidegger, for
example, are taught in literature or art history departments, rarely in
philosophy.
It is this amazingly persistent set of
master stories that the newly organised and mobilised American information
effort (especially in the Arab and Islamic worlds) is designed by hook or crook
to spread. What gets deliberately obscured in the process are the stunningly
obstinate dissenting traditions -- America's unofficial counter-memory that
stem in large part from the fact that this is an immigrant society -- that
flourish alongside, or at the interior of this handful of narrathemes. Few
commentators abroad take much notice of this forest of dissent, alas. These
clumps of both the progressive or regressive kind provide and to a trained observer
make visible linkages between the master narrathemes that are normally not in
evidence. If one were to examine the components of the impressively strong
resistance to the proposed Bush war against Iraq, for example, a very
different, highly mobile picture of America emerges, one that is much more
amenable to foreign cooperation, dialogue and significant action. I shall leave
aside the considerable number of people who oppose the war on grounds having to
do with its human cost in blood and treasure as well as its disastrous effect
on an already badly disturbed economy. I shall also not discuss the great swirl
of Right-wing opinion that sees America as traduced by treacherous foreigners,
the United Nations, and godless communists. In addition, the libertarian and
isolationist constituency, which is a strange combination of Left and Right,
needs no further comment here. I would also include among these categories that
must be left unexamined here a very large and idealistically inspired
university student population that is deeply suspicious of American foreign
policy in almost all of its forms, especially economic globalisation: this is a
principled and sometimes quasi-anarchical group that has kept American
university and college campuses alive to such issues in the past as the war in
Vietnam, South African apartheid, and civil rights at home.
This leaves several important and in many ways formidable constituencies of
experience and conscience for me to survey very rapidly here. These generally
pertain, in European and Afro-Asian terms, to the Left, given that anything
like an organised parliamentary Left-wing or socialist movement has never
really existed for any length of time in post-World War Two America, so
powerful is the grip of the two-party apparatus. As for the Democratic Party
today, it is in a shambles from which it will not soon recover. One would have
to include for a start the positively disaffected and still fairly radical wing
of the African-American community, that is, those urban groups who agitate
against police brutality, job discrimination, housing and educational neglect,
and are led or represented by iconic or charismatic figures such as Rev Al
Sharpton, Cornel West, Muhammad Ali, Jesse Jackson (faded as a leader though he
is) and several others who see themselves as continuing in the tradition of
Martin Luther King Jr. Associated with this movement are numerous other
activist ethnic collectivities, including Latinos, Native Americans, and
Muslims, each of which of course has devoted considerable energy to trying to
slip into the mainstream, in pursuit of important political assignments in
local and national governments, appearance on prestigious television talk
shows, and membership on governing boards of foundations, colleges, and corporations.
But in the main, however, most of those groups are still more activated by a
sense of injustice and discrimination than they are by ambition, and therefore
aren't ready to enlist completely in the American (mostly white and
middle-class) dream. The interesting thing about someone like Sharpton, for
example, or say Ralph Nader and his loyal supporters in the protesting but
still struggling Green Party, is that though they may have visibility and a
certain degree of acceptability they remain outsiders, basically uncoopted, too
intransigent, and not sufficiently interested in the routine rewards that the
society offers.
One huge wing of the women's movement, active on behalf of abortion rights,
abuse and harassment issues, professional equality is also a major asset to the
dissenting current in American society. Similarly, sectors of the normally
sedate, interest- and advancement-oriented professional groups (physicians,
lawyers, scientists, academics in particular, as well as a number of labor unions,
and a sector of the environmental movement) feed into the dynamic of counter-
currents I am listing here, even though of course as corporate bodies they
retain a major interest in the orderly functioning of society and the agendas
that derive from them.
Then too the organised churches themselves can never be discounted as seedbeds
of change and dissent. Their membership is to be clearly distinguished from the
fundamentalist and televangelist movements I mentioned above. Catholic Bishops,
for example, the laity and clergy of the Episcopal Church, in addition to the
Quakers and the Presbyterian synod -- despite the various travails that include
sexual scandals in the first and depleted memberships in most of the others --
have been surprisingly liberal on war and peace questions, and quite willing to
speak out against international human rights abuses, the hyper-inflated
military budgets, and neo-liberal economic policies that have mutilated the
public sphere since the early 1980s. Historically there was always a segment of
the organised Jewish community involved in progressive minority rights causes
domestically and abroad, but since the Reagan period the ascendancy of the
neo-conservative movement, the alliance between Israel and the religious Right
in this country, and feverish Zionist- organised activity equating criticism of
Israel with anti-Semitism and even fear of a new American Auschwitz, have
reduced the positive agency of that force quite considerably.
Finally, a large number of groups and individuals sought out for rallies,
protest marches, and peaceful demonstrations has stood out of the
mind-deadening patriotism in the post-9/11 period. These have clustered around
civil liberties (including free speech and constitutional guarantees) that have
been threatened by the Terrorist and Patriot Acts. Agitation against capital
punishment, occasional protests at the abuses represented by the detention
camps at Guantanamo Bay, a general distrust of civilian authorities in the
military, as well as an increasing discomfort at the increasingly privatised
carceral system that has locked up the highest number of people per capita in
the world (a disproportionate number of them men and women of color), all these
radiate like so many perpetual disturbances inside the prevailing middle class
social order. A correlative of this is of course the rough and tumble of
cyberspace, fought over unrelentingly by both the official and unofficial
Americas. In the current malaise produced by an unmistakably steep decline in
the country's economy, disruptive themes like the growing difference between
rich and poor, the extraordinary profligacy and corruption of the corporate
higher echelons, and the manifest danger to the social security system through
various audaciously rapacious schemes of privatisation, continue to take a
heavy toll out of the firmly held and much celebrated virtues of the capitalist
system that is uniquely American.
Is America indeed united behind this
president, his bellicose foreign policy, and his dangerously simple-minded
economic vision? This is another way of asking whether American identity has
been settled once and for all and whether for a world that has to live with its
far- reaching military power (there are American troops now in dozens of
countries) there is something monolithic that the rest of the world that isn't
willing to be quiescent can deal with as a sort of fixed entity lurching all
over the place with the full support of all 'Americans'. I have tried to
suggest another way of seeing America as indeed a troubled country with a more
contested actuality than is usually ascribed to it. I think it is more accurate
to apprehend America as embroiled in a serious clash of identities whose
counterparts are visible as similar contests throughout the rest of the world.
America may have won the Cold War, as the popular phrase has it, but the actual
results of that victory within America are very far from clear, the struggle
not yet over. Too much of a focus on the American executive's centralising
military and political power ignores the internal dialectics that continue and
are nowhere near being settled. Abortion rights and the teaching of natural
evolution are still issues of unsettled contentiousness.
The great fallacy of Fukuyama's thesis about the end of history, or for that
matter Huntington's clash of civilisation theory, is that both wrongly assume
that cultural history is a matter of clear-cut boundaries or of beginnings,
middles and ends, whereas in fact, the cultural- political field is much more
an arena of struggle over identity, self-definition and projection into the
future. They are fundamentalists when it comes to fluid, turbulent cultures in
constant process, trying to impose fixed boundaries and internal rules of order
where none really can exist. Cultures, specially America's, which is in effect
an immigrant culture, overlap with others, and one of the perhaps unintended
consequences of globalisation is the appearance of transnational communities of
global interests, as in the human rights movement, the women's movement, the
anti-war movement and so on. America is not at all insulated from any of this,
but one has to excavate beyond the intimidatingly unified surface to see what
lies beneath, so as to be able to join in that set of disputes, to which many
of the people of the world are a party. There is hope and encouragement to be
gained from that view.
1. This article first appeared in Le Monde Diplomatique and Ahram Weekly in Spring 2003