9 February 2010
The Statesman
The American fantasyMr Obama And The Dream Of Exceptionalism
By ND Batra
THE hope that Barack Obama the presidential candidate raised in the hearts and minds of his ardent supporters, who saw in him a redeemer like Abraham Lincoln, has begun to fade.
Mr Obama has turned out to be more like Cardinal Barberini in Bertolt Brecht’s play Life of Galileo, who unlike the Church would not “set myself up against the multiplication tables” and “the physical facts.” And when he is elected to become the Pope, he raises hope not only in Galileo, but the whole scientific community. But as Barberini gets ready to make a public appearance, and gracefully assumes the vestments of the Pope, he acquiesces in the demands of the Inquisitor. Barberini, the Pope, embraced the Church fantasy of the earth-centric heavenly order as Mr Obama, the President, has embraced the Bush rhetorical fantasy of saving the Homeland from evil doers. There is little difference between Mr Bush’s determination to break the “the axis of evil” and what Mr Obama said during his Nobel Peace Award acceptance speech, “Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince Al Qaida’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism -- it is a recognition of history, the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.”
Mr. Bush would have been equally comfortable with these words. As Galileo was let down by his hero Barberini, many Americans must be feeling let down by Mr. Obama, who has now become part of the system that must fight evil.
The governing mythsGREAT historical crisis have to be mythologized in order to make them and their resolution acceptable to people in a “morally significant way.” The persuasive power of the overarching and governing myths, the meta narratives, like the Virgin Land, Ground Zero and Homeland, comes from their ability “to produce and conserve national traditions”. Therefore, they “function as unacknowledged legislators that regulate people’s thought and behaviour” says Donald E. Pease, a distinguished literary scholar and social critic at Dartmouth College in his thought-provoking book, The New American Exceptionalism.
The myths of the Virgin Land, the Wild West, the New Frontier, and American Exceptionalism, reverberate throughout American history, giving rationale and moral significance to the domestication of Native Americans into reservations, as well as nation building at home and abroad, says Mr. Pease. “The Virgin Land” stands for an America that is an “open national landscape that fostered the construction and realization of self-reliant individualists,” a fundamental bonding fantasy that melded the people with their land. Divisiveness is natural to humans. The sudden end of the Cold War and the consequent disappearance of the “Other,” the Soviet Union from American consciousness exposed a terrifying geo-political faultline in American society, which though not visible during the George HW Bush administration due to Operation Desert Storm, subsequently found a strong expression in two contesting visions: Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America enclosing the red states and Bill Clinton’s multicultural New Covenant, covering the blue states.
The government’s mishandling of the fundamentalist Branch Davidian church at Waco in 1993 and two years later the Oklahoma City bombing exposed a nation violently divided against itself. The traumatic events of 9/11 closed the faultline in the nation’s geopolitical psyche and provided the state with an opportunity to mythologize the World Trade Center site as “Ground Zero,’ a thumbnail glimpse of Hiroshima, what the “Other” might have done to America if it had WMD. “The Shock and Awe” was a brutal response to the attack on the Americans’ self-image of being an exceptional people, people of the Virgin Land. The horrific event restored to the American people their meta-narrative as a “collectively shared state fantasy,” which united them once again, as they had been during the Cold War. The Bush-generated state fantasy of protecting the Homeland by waging a global war on terrorism nullified the Clinton-Gingrich divisive fantasies and reunited America, but transformed the nation from citizenry into a domestic protectorate, much like what Supreme Court Justice John Marshall in 1830 had done to Native Americans’ homelands. In order to fight the enemy who wanted to destroy the fantasy of American Exceptionalism, Mr Bush ushered in emergency rules by enacting the US Patriot Act that suspended the rule of law and abridged freedom, the very rule of law to protect which he wanted to fight the enemy in the first place. Re-conceptualizing Guantanamo Bay as a foreign country enabled the Bush administration to put it outside the jurisdiction of US courts, thus, turning the inmates into “unlawful enemy combatants,” beyond the protection of the Geneva Conventions. By creating such “master fictions,” the administration succeeded in engineering public consent, thereby making the American people complicit in the state’s violation of the rule of law, according to Mr. Pease.
By expropriating “We the people” into Homeland Security State, it also deprived the people of their right to citizenship. But how the administration’s fantasy work or propaganda succeeded in doping the tri-part structure of co-equals in power and the news media for so long is not explained. The news media nonetheless asserted its freedom on 28 April 2004 when “60 Minutes” broadcast the horrific pictures of Abu Ghraib prisoners that shocked the world. Americans learned that they were repeating the acts of violence that had been committed against the slaves as if the past they had been trying to disavow had suddenly surged up through the subconscious terrain. The hatred and cruelty never went away, it seemed. “Man on the box” looked a figure of sacrifice as well as a slave being lynched. “The images mobilized opposition to the occupation in the name of Abu Ghraib prisoners who had been victimized by this oppression,” says Mr. Pease. Abu Ghraib was a turning point in American consciousness. Exceptional people do not do such things. The war against terrorism was being fought through culturally degrading images.
Shame and sorrow
ALTHOUGH “the pictures of these repugnant forms of violence” created a deep sense of shame and sorrow amounting to compassion, the support for war would continue, argues Mr. Pease, “as long as US public remains captivated by the spectacles of violence the state had erected at the site of Ground Zero.” And Mr. Pease issues a prescient warning: “If US enemies were so “barbaric” that they would not surrender even in the face of these acts of degradation, US troops were in it for a long haul.” Such has been the hold of the Homeland-the Virgin Land on the people’s imagination that they went on supporting the war until they heard the heart-wrenching cry of Cindy Sheen, the mother who lost her son in the war but refused to accept the war in Iraq that “redefined maternity as sacrifice for the cause of nation.” Support for the war had been declining. How much it was due to Cindy Sheen, whom Mr. Pease compares with Sophocles’ Antigone, it is difficult to say; but along with Abu Ghraib and the non-existence of WMD, the Bush-created rhetorical fantasy had begun to dissipate. “The order to come,” Mr. Pease says, “will not begin until the global state of emergency is itself exposed as the cause of the traumas it purports to oppose.” But that would still leave us with Af-Pak and Yemen; North Korea and Iran. Some would strongly disagree but the fantasy of American exceptionalism, which Mr. Obama has embraced ~ “the American dream, the perfectible Union, and the land of promise “ ~ needs a fourth grand theme: America ~ like Atlas ~ must accept the responsibility of “having the weight of the world on his shoulders.” Otherwise who will take care of poor Haiti? Atlas must not shrug.
(The writer is the author of Digital Freedom. He teaches communication and diplomacy at Norwich University)
The Statesman
The American fantasyMr Obama And The Dream Of Exceptionalism
By ND Batra
THE hope that Barack Obama the presidential candidate raised in the hearts and minds of his ardent supporters, who saw in him a redeemer like Abraham Lincoln, has begun to fade.
Mr Obama has turned out to be more like Cardinal Barberini in Bertolt Brecht’s play Life of Galileo, who unlike the Church would not “set myself up against the multiplication tables” and “the physical facts.” And when he is elected to become the Pope, he raises hope not only in Galileo, but the whole scientific community. But as Barberini gets ready to make a public appearance, and gracefully assumes the vestments of the Pope, he acquiesces in the demands of the Inquisitor. Barberini, the Pope, embraced the Church fantasy of the earth-centric heavenly order as Mr Obama, the President, has embraced the Bush rhetorical fantasy of saving the Homeland from evil doers. There is little difference between Mr Bush’s determination to break the “the axis of evil” and what Mr Obama said during his Nobel Peace Award acceptance speech, “Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince Al Qaida’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism -- it is a recognition of history, the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.”
Mr. Bush would have been equally comfortable with these words. As Galileo was let down by his hero Barberini, many Americans must be feeling let down by Mr. Obama, who has now become part of the system that must fight evil.
The governing mythsGREAT historical crisis have to be mythologized in order to make them and their resolution acceptable to people in a “morally significant way.” The persuasive power of the overarching and governing myths, the meta narratives, like the Virgin Land, Ground Zero and Homeland, comes from their ability “to produce and conserve national traditions”. Therefore, they “function as unacknowledged legislators that regulate people’s thought and behaviour” says Donald E. Pease, a distinguished literary scholar and social critic at Dartmouth College in his thought-provoking book, The New American Exceptionalism.
The myths of the Virgin Land, the Wild West, the New Frontier, and American Exceptionalism, reverberate throughout American history, giving rationale and moral significance to the domestication of Native Americans into reservations, as well as nation building at home and abroad, says Mr. Pease. “The Virgin Land” stands for an America that is an “open national landscape that fostered the construction and realization of self-reliant individualists,” a fundamental bonding fantasy that melded the people with their land. Divisiveness is natural to humans. The sudden end of the Cold War and the consequent disappearance of the “Other,” the Soviet Union from American consciousness exposed a terrifying geo-political faultline in American society, which though not visible during the George HW Bush administration due to Operation Desert Storm, subsequently found a strong expression in two contesting visions: Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America enclosing the red states and Bill Clinton’s multicultural New Covenant, covering the blue states.
The government’s mishandling of the fundamentalist Branch Davidian church at Waco in 1993 and two years later the Oklahoma City bombing exposed a nation violently divided against itself. The traumatic events of 9/11 closed the faultline in the nation’s geopolitical psyche and provided the state with an opportunity to mythologize the World Trade Center site as “Ground Zero,’ a thumbnail glimpse of Hiroshima, what the “Other” might have done to America if it had WMD. “The Shock and Awe” was a brutal response to the attack on the Americans’ self-image of being an exceptional people, people of the Virgin Land. The horrific event restored to the American people their meta-narrative as a “collectively shared state fantasy,” which united them once again, as they had been during the Cold War. The Bush-generated state fantasy of protecting the Homeland by waging a global war on terrorism nullified the Clinton-Gingrich divisive fantasies and reunited America, but transformed the nation from citizenry into a domestic protectorate, much like what Supreme Court Justice John Marshall in 1830 had done to Native Americans’ homelands. In order to fight the enemy who wanted to destroy the fantasy of American Exceptionalism, Mr Bush ushered in emergency rules by enacting the US Patriot Act that suspended the rule of law and abridged freedom, the very rule of law to protect which he wanted to fight the enemy in the first place. Re-conceptualizing Guantanamo Bay as a foreign country enabled the Bush administration to put it outside the jurisdiction of US courts, thus, turning the inmates into “unlawful enemy combatants,” beyond the protection of the Geneva Conventions. By creating such “master fictions,” the administration succeeded in engineering public consent, thereby making the American people complicit in the state’s violation of the rule of law, according to Mr. Pease.
By expropriating “We the people” into Homeland Security State, it also deprived the people of their right to citizenship. But how the administration’s fantasy work or propaganda succeeded in doping the tri-part structure of co-equals in power and the news media for so long is not explained. The news media nonetheless asserted its freedom on 28 April 2004 when “60 Minutes” broadcast the horrific pictures of Abu Ghraib prisoners that shocked the world. Americans learned that they were repeating the acts of violence that had been committed against the slaves as if the past they had been trying to disavow had suddenly surged up through the subconscious terrain. The hatred and cruelty never went away, it seemed. “Man on the box” looked a figure of sacrifice as well as a slave being lynched. “The images mobilized opposition to the occupation in the name of Abu Ghraib prisoners who had been victimized by this oppression,” says Mr. Pease. Abu Ghraib was a turning point in American consciousness. Exceptional people do not do such things. The war against terrorism was being fought through culturally degrading images.
Shame and sorrow
ALTHOUGH “the pictures of these repugnant forms of violence” created a deep sense of shame and sorrow amounting to compassion, the support for war would continue, argues Mr. Pease, “as long as US public remains captivated by the spectacles of violence the state had erected at the site of Ground Zero.” And Mr. Pease issues a prescient warning: “If US enemies were so “barbaric” that they would not surrender even in the face of these acts of degradation, US troops were in it for a long haul.” Such has been the hold of the Homeland-the Virgin Land on the people’s imagination that they went on supporting the war until they heard the heart-wrenching cry of Cindy Sheen, the mother who lost her son in the war but refused to accept the war in Iraq that “redefined maternity as sacrifice for the cause of nation.” Support for the war had been declining. How much it was due to Cindy Sheen, whom Mr. Pease compares with Sophocles’ Antigone, it is difficult to say; but along with Abu Ghraib and the non-existence of WMD, the Bush-created rhetorical fantasy had begun to dissipate. “The order to come,” Mr. Pease says, “will not begin until the global state of emergency is itself exposed as the cause of the traumas it purports to oppose.” But that would still leave us with Af-Pak and Yemen; North Korea and Iran. Some would strongly disagree but the fantasy of American exceptionalism, which Mr. Obama has embraced ~ “the American dream, the perfectible Union, and the land of promise “ ~ needs a fourth grand theme: America ~ like Atlas ~ must accept the responsibility of “having the weight of the world on his shoulders.” Otherwise who will take care of poor Haiti? Atlas must not shrug.
(The writer is the author of Digital Freedom. He teaches communication and diplomacy at Norwich University)
