Obama and the "birthers"

     The perceived need for the President of the United States to make public the official long copy of his birth certificate to prove that he is, indeed, a citizen of the U. S. is a shameful moment in the American past.  It is likely to prove as embarrassing as John Adams's refusal to stay in Washington, D. C. to see his former friend, Thomas Jefferson, inaugurated. It reminds one of all of the loyalty tests devised during the Cold War, and Joe McCarthy's disgusting brow-beating and berating of those testifying before his committee, and the House on Un-American Activities Committee hauling all sorts of terrified persons before their committee to humiliate the testifier and his/her families and friends.
     The fact that President Obama felt compelled to offer this evidence is disgusting in several ways. First, on the political level, it is apparent that the Republican Party leadership had many opportunities and plenty of time to quell the "birther" movement from the start. It did not do so out of fear of its most vocal social (not financial) benefactors on the far, far right. Yet, the Republicans had every interest in doing the right thing. In the 1960s, when former governor of Michigan, George Romney, was considering a run at the presidency, a small number of persons raised the point that Romney had been born in Mexico, not in the U. S., and since the 14th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution states clearly that:  "Persons born in the United States are citizens of the Uniteds States and the state wherein they reside," they thought they might have a point.  Yet, it had long been understood that children born of American parents while they were abroad were also considered to be American citizens. No political opponents made much of this issue, and Romney remained a legitimate candidate in everyone's eyes until he decided not to run. One would think that one of the current Republican candidates, Mitch Romney, who knows the story of his father's political career full well, would have been loud in his condemnation of those who would keep the "birther" issue alive.
     Second, the sub-text of race is hardly hidden by those who oppose President Obama's claim to be a citizen. It has only been about fifty years since African Americans could indeed claim the practical rights of U. S. citizens, and many who deny the legitimacy of his citizenship now would willingly return to the era of the 1950s, when Blacks in most of America knew their place, which was not in public office or even voting for that matter. There is more than a little truth to the fact that right-wing Republicans (and let's face it, they are almost all right wing) sentimentalize the 1950s and would like to return to the Eisenhower era, when true family values prevailed. There was more ugly about the 1950s than good, however. The decade did witness the rise of a broad American middle class, caused by the fact that the U. S. was not devastated by the World War II as was most of Europe and much of Asia, but it was also the era of racism, the suppression of women, and a period of anti-intellectualism.
     Finally, the even more disturbing element in the origin's of Obama's birth issue is what it reflects about American notions of the "other." In fact, only American intellectuals would use the term the "other" because most non-intellectual Americans either bask in the misperception that everyone is included in America, or they complain that America is not pure enough, i. e., pure white, conservative, native born, and christian. As I have argued in other places, Americans are not familiar with the outer world, especially that exotic world of Africa and Indonesia (and we might as well say Hawaii, in regard to those who hate the "other") which helped to inform and educate Barack Obama. A majority are ethnocentric. In fact, a majority are xenophobic in a way that only the world's most backward, remote, and traditional nations can be identified as xenophobic. For a country that often lauds its heritage as a land of immigrants, this narrow view of human acceptance is especially troubling.

Post-Democratic America

            In a recent opinion column in the NYTimes, Thomas Friedman made the smart connection between Barack Obama’s election to the U. S. presidency and the democratic uprisings in north Africa and the Middle East. Might it not be possible, Friedman ruminated, that the election of a black man to the presidency inspired young, dispossessed members of nations currently ruled by used-up dictators to rebel? It will be an enduring irony of this period of history that a nation and a society – the United States of America – which is in many ways moving rapidly away from the demands of living democracy, has inspired others to take up the “struggle for democracy.”

            The phrase, “Struggle for Democracy,” which has been used in book titles and television series and in common parlance, is an apt one in regard to what democracy is. Democracy is not a place of arrival, it is a process of living together in a nation and a society. Many Americans ascribe to that understanding. Even more Americans struggle in some way for inclusion in their own society, or to extend liberties essential in a democratic state. The political culture of the United States as a whole has eroded into something entirely different, however. The U. S. has arrived at the doorstep of post-democracy.

            The phrase – post-democratic – is oxymoronic, of course, but it does describe the process of cultural drift and the evolution of political mental states that has occurred in the U. S. since at least the 1950s. The neo-conservative, consensus history that emerged in the 1950s with historians like Daniel Boorstein, proclaimed a history of fulfillment and accomplishment for American democracy – as if the struggle were over. The election of John F. Kennedy gilded the lily of accomplishment, offering us less an effective presidency than a cult of personality and a royal family Americans could call their own. Then everything went wrong. Political assassinations were followed by the impeachment of Richard Nixon, which was followed by the election of an anti-government president, Ronald Reagan. “Camelot” became a wistful remembrance. Politics became something dirty, something a decent person avoided. And, ordinary citizens and elites alike began to avoid political engagement.

            This decline in a vital political culture in the U. S. was accompanied by the rise of baby boomers who claimed they had a right to prosper, and they did prosper. Indeed, the raison d’etre of that generation, despite the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, was not social service and the collective improvement of society (except for a few counter-culture individuals) but one’s own ability to become rich and to hold onto those riches. Baby boomers passed on to their offspring the ideals of material wealth and entitlement. The term democracy elided into something akin to the sanctity of the individual and claims for individual privacy. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the importance of politics and government in democratic America was eclipsed by the quest for individual prosperity, greed, and the anti-political, anti-democratic culture of “looking out for number one.”

            The rise of popular culture from the 1950s onward was both symptomatic of these fundamental changes, and a driving force away from democratic political engagement in its own right. Over time, young and old alike could name prominent bands and singers, or members of sports teams, but could not name their congressman/woman or identify the principle political issues of their time. As my students would say with pride, “I am not political.” By our own time, the Speaker of the House of Representatives and prominent Tea Party spokespersons could not even distinguish the different phrases and contents of the Declaration of Independence (which has no legal standing) and the Constitution of the United State. Over the past sixty years, we have not only become “dumbed-down,” we have become proud of our stupidity. It matters not that one knows nothing of complex issues: “this is what I believe, and my opinion is as good as yours.” In contemporary America more than any place on the face of the earth today, one’s mere opinion successfully claims equal status with scientific theory, rational arguments, or even truth itself. In the realities of democratic government, politics as the “art of the possible” has been replaced by ideological certainties born of one’s mere opinions, much to President Obama’s dismay.

            In my own field of America History, the evolution of historiography has been from the prominence of political history in the 1950s to social history in the 1970s and 1980s to the prominence of cultural history today. I respect this shift in emphasis and have participated in it myself but I find that many of today’s American historians have limited understanding of political history and therefore little interest in the issue of democracy, insofar as democracy is a political or governmental matter.

            It has been suggested to me that in the American context perhaps democracy follows a natural pattern not unlike that of a climax forest.  We should all hope that this analogy is appropriate, and that we can anticipate the peaceful decline of the old stands of timber for new growth from the bottom up.

Humility Before Civility

     It is difficult to discover appropriate “first principles” of social conduct, and we often do a very poor job of sorting out “first principles” from imagined or perceived needs of a secondary order. Over the past half century, for example, we have witnessed a headlong rush to give “the economy” priority over “society.” Protecting and improving “the economy” is the current mythical “first principle” in North America. Although the idea of “the economy” is somewhat abstract, “the economy” never seems to encompass the real local economic needs of ordinary people, and it as often does not even mean the needs of a national economy, but rather some fictive, imagined capitalist dream world and/or the remote and heartless idea of a world economy. No day passes without someone making the absurd declaration that we humans need to serve the gods of economic growth first (usually meaning undisturbed, unalloyed market-capitalism), and the health and other social needs of human beings and societies need to be served second, if at all. Rather than have recognized this no-holds-barred, capitalist ideology for what it is -- a Hobbesian “war of all against all,” and a survivalist, social Darwinism “red in tooth and claw” mentality -- we have allowed “the economy” to assume the vestments of an unimpeachable “first principle” not unlike the “first principles” established by Thomas Aquinas in relationship to Christian theology in the High Middle Ages.

     So, now, when everyone in the U. S. has come to call for a new “civility” in American politics and life, we are confronted again with the question: should “civility” be recognized as a first principle for human conduct  and social organization, or, is the “first principle” concept of civility first analogous to the idea of “the economy” outlined above. Is “civility” really a second order condition that flows from some first order idea, just as a good economy should be a second order consequence of a first order emphasis on good societies? Of course, I believe “civility” as the consequence of the success of a more important “first principle” – namely, “humility.” “Civility” is the happy result of widespread “humility.” (And, one could argue, as I have in other blogs, that humility itself is a second order quality derived from empathy, but I will leave that discussion for another time).

     To be humble is often defined as to be “without pride,” and for this reason humility has failed as it runs up against has the boastful, self-confident, cocksure, mythology of laissez-faire or free market thinking and behavior. This is not to say that people can be perfectly free of personal “pride.” And, if we believe the New Testament to be at least fundamentally accurate as an historical account (as I think we can), then even Jesus sometimes acted in a prideful manner. The implicit assumption in achieving practical humility is that we try to restrain an excess of pride in ourselves.

     A more fundamental, rational, and useful way to understand humility as a first principle -- from which civility is a derived consequence -- is to consider humility as the conscious ability to understand that we are not, individually, the measure of all things. Whatever our talents and abilities, other persons have correspondent talents and abilities, and no matter how intellectually or socially accomplished we may be, someone else, indeed, many other people, are more intellectually or socially accomplished than we are. No matter how kind and generous we may be, there are others who are more kind and generous; no matter how smart we may be, there are others smarter. And so on and on.

     It is always a surprise to me (although it should not be) when I read obituaries, and discover the uniqueness and richness of almost every human life described in those remembrances. It is even more surprising when we are told about the rich and meaningful lives of persons who are the victims of mass killings (as in the recent Tucson case in which six people died in the aftermath of an assassin’s attempt to kill Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords). One of these was a young girl whom one might first guess was just another mall pedestrian but who, as it turned out, was a inquiring young person eager to learn more about democratic politics work. Who would have considered this? Or, who would have guessed that some people, in the midst of the this melee, including a federal judge who was killed, would have heroically intervened to try to stop the killer. The point is not entirely the heroism that people display but the breadth and depth of their lives that emerges from their biographies. To know another person at all, is to recognize the integrity of that person.

     We need not feel abject inferiority in the face of the humbling truth that almost every other person we encounter contributes something important to society, and has some quality from which we can learn important individual lessons. In fact, rather than retreat into some kind of Calvinist despair about our unworthiness in the face of this truism, we should consciously and rationally begin to approach every other human being with the understanding that they have some quality or virtue which we undoubtedly wish we possessed, or possessed in a larger measure. Every person we encounter need not prove to us beyond a reasonable doubt that they are virtuous in some specific way. It is simply sensible for us to assume that they are.

     If we move from accepting the necessity of humility to its operational consequences, we arrive at “civility.” How could we treat any other person with something less than dignity, if we accept the rational argument for humility. Because we are currently living in Mexico, we have come to understand the importance of saying “Buenos Dias” when meeting someone on the street. Mexicans, more than many people on this earth, know the necessity of humility. Acknowledging others on the street, or in passing, used to be a standard element of “civility” but it is interesting that that acknowledgement has now – after the rise of an “every-man-for-himself” market-place ideology – become optional. (Yes, people have baldly told me that whether you greet someone with a “hello” or “how are you” is entirely optional, even with people you already know).

     Small courtesies like taking one’s turn in line or giving someone space to pass you on the sidewalk have fallen into similar disuse, as we fail to acknowledge that others even exist, let alone possess those personal qualities that are similar, equal, or superior to our own. So, if other persons do not matter, if we are not humble in the presence of others, why should we listen to the ideas or opinions of others? Why should we hope for anything other than the elimination of our political opponents? No one used to use the term “bully pulpit,” but it is now used routinely in regard to the advantage that the President of the U. S. possesses in being heard. But the “bully pulpit,” so to speak, is not held in monopoly by the President; legions of others – especially radio hate mongers like Rush Limbaugh – conduct grandiose, uninterrupted monologues in which the worth of other opinions is completely ignored or disdained. Only humility, which is something individuals can come to understand rationally and apply willingly, will provide an antidote to the uncivil behaviors that surround us today.

     On the other hand, it is not easy to assume that some transformation in American manners and “civility” will soon take place. I have read some journalists who argue that when Joe Welch, the attorney for the U. S. Army in the Army-McCarthy hearings of the early 1950s, finally got thoroughly disgusted with Senator Joe McCarthy’s behavior and resignedly asked, “Senator McCarthy, have you no decency?,” that American “civility” suddenly returned to American life. It did not. The incivility of American life continued, and although it was sometimes pushed underground for a time, incivility has largely remained a chief feature of American political life.

     In fact, incivilities are more prominent in American history than almost any other element. To name only a few  “uncivil” cases in historic American political culture – cases having to do with the much vaunted “founding fathers” and their generation -- look at the Matthew Lyon – Roger Griswold assault in Congress in the 1790s, or the vituperative attacks on both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson in the 1790s and early 1800s, or the famous Alexander Hamilton-Aaron Burr duel, in which Hamilton was killed by one of the most “promising” political figures of the early 19^th century. An early American historian, Joanne Freeman, who has written brilliantly on “honor” in early American political life in an earlier book, recently published a revealing article on political violence and the bearing of weapons in Congress from the 1820s through the 1860s. “Incivility” in the form of violence, in Congress, was more pronounced in some periods of American History than it was on the nation’s streets. Freeman is apparently writing a new book on American political violence which will reveal how central “violence” and “incivility” have been in American political life.

     In regard to more contemporary times, Barbara Ehrenreich’s recent book, Bright-Sided:  How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, presents another angle on America’s no-humility, no-civility culture.  While Ehrenreich attacks the false notion that being positive and cheery in one’s outlook and emotions results in greater happiness, health, and prosperity, and while she lambastes the many self-help speakers, organizations, and gurus, and their methods of operation, the most important message to be derived from her well-researched book is that American history from its beginnings has focused on how individual Americans are solely responsible for their own well-being (whether that well-being is spiritual or economic or physical or mental). In my work as an American historian, I have always come to the conclusion that the American perception is that every individual should pursue and possess three things:  autonomy (freedom to construct one’s own life), authority (freedom from others governing one’s life), and agency (the innate capacity to make whatever you want of yourself). Ehrenreich convincingly details the course of what she calls “bright-sided” positivism from Calvinist beginnings to R. W. Emerson and Mary Baker Eddy to Norman Vincent Peale to almost every management or business school to the American Psychology Association to modern therapists, and so on. The unifying message throughout is that everyone should be positive (in fact, must be positive and cheery), that we are in control of making ourselves better through work, and that failure only happens when we do not consistently act in a positive manner (even if such an attitude is entirely inappropriate in certain circumstances). No wonder the American rich (and even not so rich) today argue that they should keep whatever wealth they have “earned” (when, in fact, they have truly earned very little of the wealth they possess. Fortuitous circumstances of birth and place of residence and education, inheritance, infrastructure, subsidies, a nation not leveled by war in the 1940s, and even chance, are far more important than the usually puny “valued added” work of the individual claiming that “they” earned their wealth).

     And, where does “humility” fit into my “autonomy, authority, agency” triad, or Ehrenreich’s review of a “self-help culture” that has always pervaded American history and, more importantly, bamboozled gullible Americans? It does not. It cannot. Yet, Americans may yet have “humility” thrust upon them, and have “civility” follow as a consequence. The poor have always discovered the reality and necessity for humility. Many of the poor have also come to realize the promise that humility possesses for some kind of self justification and hope. The way the U. S. is going, there will be many more poor citizens in their future, and they will learn, through experience, all too well the limits of “rugged individualism” or “pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps” or “naming and claiming wealth” or “owning one’s responsibility for one’s self.” Humility should be embraced as a reasonable necessary condition to civility but future circumstances may well decide the fate of humility and civility for America.

"Eliminationist" America

     The assassination attempt on the life of Representative Gabrielle Giffords this past weekend has already aroused the old – and sadly too old – American debate (and it is a thoroughly American debate) as to whether this would-be assassin and accomplished killer of six others was a lone deranged person or someone whose acts were stimulated, perhaps even initiated by political rhetoric and an unyielding political right-wing ideology. There is no need to repeat or analyze again the singularities of this case. There is the need for Americans to ask themselves some hard questions about their peculiar “culture,” however.

     The isolated, deranged gunman argument, which I have seen repeated again and again throughout my life, and is repeated today by Ross Douhat in the NY Times is getting harder and harder to support as a simple explanation. American political assassinations are simply too frequent, in comparison to acts of political murder in other “advanced” democratic and modern states, to allow the crazy -loner theory to inure us to such a sorry lament of inevitability. Paul Krugman’s observation in today’s NY Times, that an “eliminationist” political culture is at least partly a factor in this assassination (and I would argue it plays a part in other American political assassinations as well) is closer to the mark in explaining how mentally troubled persons (who can be found in all societies) are tempted to act out their politically bizarre and awful dreams in America.

     Many on the so-called American left (N.B.:  people living in the sane rest of the world should be reminded that the American “left” is the equivalent to your centre to moderate centre left) blame gun control, which is only a secondary issue in assassinations. Most on the right, as I have said, blame individuals whose mental health has simply failed. As this argument implies, these damaged individuals have become damaged by means of bad hard wiring in their brains or drugs or chemicals or anything that has to do with the discrete individual and nothing to do with the society and culture in which they live.

     The American public – unfortunately including too many American historians -- are keen to proclaim the doctrine of American Exceptionalism as a means to define themselves, and to detach themselves from the evils and inferiorities of a European past. But when it comes to accepting the negative qualities of their “exceptionalism,” such as an historic pattern of political assassinations and attempted assassinations, which are at least as prevalent as any observable positive “exceptionalisms” they may trumpet, they are silent. This hypocrisy is no problem, however, because American exceptionalism allows – no, it insists -- that Americans remain the sole judges of their own behavior and their own past. In a wonderful exercise of tautological thinking, to do otherwise would be to deny their  own exceptionalism. Americans need answer to no one but themselves (morally or for purposes of public image) and they are thus free to construct whatever historical narratives and structural arguments that will satisfy their sense of comfort.

     We need to remind ourselves of two necessary truths:

1. American political violence “is as American as cherry pie,” even if H. Rap Brown was wrong on so many other political levels. But, hey, if you are God’s chosen people or at least a culture more favored than any other in the world, you need not seriously address this “manifest tendency” of “manifest destiny.” Even those on the so-called left like to suggest that the latest round of political violence is new, and a product of America “now,” rather than acknowledge that it has been there all along. The “eliminationist” politics that Paul Krugman laments comes, in fact, from a long American heritage beginning with Puritan authoritarianism and the ruthless winner-take-all politics of colonial Virginia through the uncompromising politics of High Federalism and the Essex Junto through Jacksonian extremism and the emergence of the “No Nothing” Party through abolitionists versus slave owners through American industrial capitalists like John D. Rockefeller versus progressivism through the same laissez-faire capitalist ethic of 1920s and 1930s Republicans versus the New Deal and FDR, and on and on (as you all know) to today. If Americans were more familiar with other political traditions:  the common law of England; parliamentary democracy and the idea of a “loyal opposition”; minority government and the compromises it imposes; and, just the sheer political humility that some nations – e.g., Germany, by necessity – have come to terms with, Americans might be able to moderate, and perhaps even subdue, the “eliminationist” cancer of their political heritage.

2. American ignorance of an outer world persists throughout American history. Until recent decades, for example, most American presidents had never traveled nor lived abroad. Most Americans (other than the very rich), historically did not travel abroad at all, and when they did they often incubated themselves from the “locals” and their culture.  The flagship of American travel today is the “Luxury Cruise,” which isolates travelers just about as completely as anything can from encounters with another culture. Many Americans love to be tourists but most do not want to be travelers or to live, even for a moment, the life of the expatriate. Until Americans grow more curious of the outer world (not the outer world of empire, or the world they felt they had to subdue), their hope for their own inner political peace is not likely to be fulfilled.

[N.B.  It is necessary to always state the following caveat regarding my political blogs:  what I write above does not apply to twenty to thirty per cent of American citizenry at any given time in recent American history. Diane Athill in her book Stet talks of hoping and trying to be in the thirty per cent or so of all persons in the world who are thoughtful, reflective, generous, and broad-minded. I believe that that many Americans have also always been in that category, including many Republicans I know. Unfortunately, twenty to thirty per cent does not equal the fifty to sixty per cent that would improve American culture and democracy.]

Jan. 10, 2011                                                                Tlaquepaque, Mexico

America’s Near Future and the Failure of American History

It must be clear by now that, in a few more years or a few more decades, the U. S. A. will no longer be the chief arbiter of relations among nations. It will not be the world’s primary democracy nor the political beacon for emerging free societies. It will not be the hub of the world economy, and its dollar will not be the center around which other currencies will orbit.

Yet, contrary to those who subscribe to linear historical inevitability, it will not “collapse” (in some Jared Diamond conceptualization of societal collapses). It still has massive agricultural resources, industrial capacity, and educational/intellectual potential. It could even become a leader in what we now call “alternative energy” or the “eco-friendly” revolution. (We call this “future” by various names but what it will be – very soon -- is simply what we will come to accept as the normative future in terms of energy-power, human interrelations, human mobility, and so on).

Like other modern nation-states that have felt the sting – and the embarrassment – of losing their leading roles on the center-stage of the world’s nation-states, the U. S. will go through a transition of denial. England, or what became the U. K., lost its primacy in the West in 1919. It did not recognize this loss for several decades, although it did recede from empire to commonwealth with more grace than India, for example, may be willing to acknowledge. France lost its moral center in 1940, disgraced itself in Vietnam and some of its other former colonies, and grudgingly gave up its European continental importance (in the 1950s) in favor of a gallic sense of internal, cultural superiority (starting with De Gaulle and lasting until Sarkozy).

The U. S. will react to its decline in a more exaggerated way than either the U. K. or France have done. Although the two latter nations are renowned for their haughty claims to cultural superiority, and for their too frequent displays of insular “jingoism,” the U. S. is an even more profoundly proud and smug nation. Its origins are based on a mythology of colonial rebellion against religious authority and arbitrary government. Its two central historical motifs – the American Revolution and the Civil War – have to do with victories for local autonomy and self-rule, in regard to the former, and the morally purposeful, industrialized, unified nation-state, in regard to the latter. “Conquering” the “empty” frontier, “stabilizing” the Western Hemisphere, and “Saving the World for Democracy” through the two World Wars, have further gilded the ornate frame around the mirror into which all Americans gaze narcissistically.

What do Americans see as they peer, seemingly perpetually, into that elaborately framed mirror? They see EXCEPTIONALISM writ large. American historical debates about who they are as Americans, or how they got here, may be sharply debated between leftist historians and rightist historians, but both sides agree that Americans have possessed, and continue to possess, a special “genius” not shared – indeed, not shareable – with or among other peoples of the world. American ideals may or may not have been achieved, depending on which group of historians (past or present) one is reading, but they are special American ideals, and not international ones.

American “EXCEPTIONALISM” has been supported by most importantly by one thing – American historians. The products of these historians have represented a nation in ways that are largely self-congratulatory and entirely self-referential. It is true that a few American historians have refused to play that game, but most American historians deal in the matter of: “how did we get to be so good and great” or “how did we fail, given our special dispensation of historical grace, to become so good or great”? The proof of this failure of written American history is to be seen in what American historians study and write about, and what they do not study or write about. Much of American history has been political, and much of that political history has been “heroic.” Until recently, it has been top-down history, from presidents down to mayors and city councils. Witness, for example, the “PBS New Hour” having a “presidential historians” panel, but no other American history panel. American History is an in-house game. Although many British and French historians, for example, live in and were educated in countries other than the U. K. of France, very few American historians are to be found outside the U. S. For ordinary Americans, what happens in America, stays in America. Its borders are sharp. Canada and Mexico might as well be the North Pole and Antartica. It is true that a few American historians have now ventured into things like “Atlantic Culture History” which links the U. S. to England and Europe. But, American History is mainly limited to the continental geography of the U. S. (Hawaii and Alaska intrude uncomfortably, occupying folding chairs at the family dinner table). When American historians are adventuresome, they consider things like “popular culture,” which, of course, is an American product with world derivations. Comparative history, which exists in the rest of the historical world, is an unknown thing to Americans and American historians. How, after all, can America be compared to anything else?

So, the prospectus for how Americans will react in the next few decades to what is only a partial demise in their importance, is not a promising one. Their claims of exceptionalism are likely to become more shrill. Their detestation for the “other,” in all forms, is likely to become more extreme. The best the rest of the world can do is to try to welcome Americans into the broader world, and that may take a great deal of good will and time.

The Destructiveness of Words

In the last two days, we have heard two people use words that say more than they, and even we, want to acknowledge. First, President Obama, in his speech yesterday, referred to people in Louisiana and Alabama as “our neighbors.” I do not believe that anyone, even those criticizing the speech for partisan reasons, has picked up on this “mistake.” If the President were queried on the matter, I am certain that he would say that he meant that all Americans who did not live in those two states were neighbors of those who have suffered misfortune, etc., etc. In fact, however, Louisianans and Alabamans are full citizens of the United States; they are not “neighbors”; they are part of the nation, just as equal as any other members of the union. “Our neighbors” are Mexico and Canada. In a previous blog, I said that American ethnocentrism was not just a national siege mentality against a hostile outer world but was reflective of a strong regional disparity in the U. S., where even various parts of the U. S. A. were like foreign and strange territory to those who do not live in them. So much for democratic national solidarity. Poor Louisiana; poor Alabama. It is Katrina redux.

Today, Carl-Henric Svanberg, the president of British Petroleum (they would like to be known as BP in order to take on a greater world-wide glamour, and in order to attract more stockholders) said that he wanted to help the “small people” of the Louisiana and Alabama coast. The Huffington Post (huffing as usual) and other media latched on to this mistake. Tonight, on the PBS Newshour, Mr. Dudley, a clever spokesperson for BP, excused the Swedish president of BP, claiming that his president speaks English as a second language, and that he meant “small business people” not lesser people. Carl-Henric Svanberg almost certainly learned English as a young boy. He likely knows how to speak and write the English language better than most Americans. So, you may be assured, you can keep the “small people” reference in your mind for what was meant – people poorer, weaker, and more impotent than Mr. Svanberg and his capitalist executive colleagues.

Language means something. Who among us has not said something truly destructive to those we love, and we know that what we said had some kind of truth to it even though we immediately want to disown that truth. The President of the U. S. (who almost certainly has not even thought of “neighbors” as a mistake) has just made one of those irretrievable mistakes. Mr. Svanberg has more graphically made the mistake. And, what are the messages? First, it is still a world of “them” and “us.” In the U. S., it is a matter of “I’m all right, Jack.” In the larger capitalist world, it is a matter of large capital versus, well, everyone else, and everyone else, in the end, loses. In both cases, the real substance of “democracy” loses.

There is a tragedy beyond this. As everyone speaks the language of human-being superiority, animals throughout the northern Gulf of Mexico are in truly mortal danger. A new genocide, of sorts, is being played out. We will not lament, and shed our false tears, until someone like David Attenborough comes along ten years from now and documents the whole thing. By then, it will just be sentimentality. And, while you are at it, you might shed a false tear for democracy as well.

The (Im)perfect Storm

"Flash in the Pan" is the archaic phrase that comes most to my mind when I consider the history of the American republic and its latter-day, very short-lived empire. As an American historian, I have sometimes questioned my choice to teach and do research in the subject of American history. After all, many of the so-called "founders" of the nation thought they had failed at conception. And, the America that properly emerged victorious and confident after World War II did not last for more than a brief moment. Cold War insecurity led to dominance over mainly second and third-world nations (e.g., Vietnam) who in turn became surrogate client states that prove the adage: "the tail that wags the dog." Now the great nation -- and it was a great nation -- slips away with little effort to preserve itself as a nation, let alone as a nation with pretensions to lead the world in public morality and goodness.

Three elements have converged to guarantee the rack-and-ruin of the U. S.A. They have combined to form a "perfect storm" from which Americans and, alas, perhaps the rest of us, cannot easily escape. Only one of these elements can claim any pretense to virtue.

1. Libertarianism -- The American ideal of "liberty," born in the colonial period and brought forward in the American Revolution was truly revolutionary for its age. Without going through a discourse on the history of liberty in the last two hundred odd years, let's just say that it was a grand idea. But at least in the last thirty years that idea has suffered from distention. It has become a coarse and grotesque corruption of itself. Liberty has now become libertarianism. "Leave me alone, I want to be completely free!" In other words, I have no obligations other than to myself. Government is not just a necessary evil (as many in the 18th century would admit) but a complete evil. Regulations of any sort (other than traffic regulations) are anathema to being American, or so these ill-educated, myopic ethnocentrists contend.

2. The Public Interest -- No one in the U.S.A. dares any longer to argue that there is a "public interest" to be considered and protected. The U.S. Supreme Court proved recently in the Citizens United case that even "THEY" no longer identify a "public interest." No appeals to the needs of society or the needs of the nation, let alone the needs of the world and humanity, have any cache with Americans. There is "my" interest and nothing else.

3. Ethnocentrism -- Americans are a self-referential people. They look in the mirror and gage the rest of the world by what they see. Many of them may be"tourists" but most of them are not travelers. A small and significant number of Americans understand the "outer world" or what most Americans call the "overseas" world (even "overseas" when they are talking about Canada and Mexico). But that minority does not count at all in terms of developing a national consciousness. Instead, most Americans are ignorant of the rest of the world or fearful of the rest of the world. All but the traveling minority are scornful of the rest of the world. But it is worse than that. Most observers and commentators on the American nation (well, most since Alexis de Toqueville) assume there is a spirit of national unity in the U.S. There was, but it has largely disappeared. Americans see themselves as Virginians or Californians more than they see themselves as Americans. Few yet see themselves as "citizens of the world," as Thomas Paine declared himself to be. (Paine made a big mistake in that. Although he was an American citizen, and obviously did much to further the success of the American revolution, George Washington -- yeh, the big guy himself -- refused to retrieve Paine from a French prison during the French Revolution because, in Washington's opinion, Paine had relinquished his American citizenship by going to France and becoming a representative in their National Convention. Washington's refusal to save Paine was a harbinger of all things to come in American ethnocentrism). Narrow-minded, parochial, ignorant of and fearful of the rest of the world, Americans have imprisoned themselves in their own country.

So, what does this have to do with a perfect storm? Well, it helps to explain a lot about the tepid, almost ho-hum, attitude of Americans to the Katrina disaster and now to the Gulf of Mexico oil surge disaster. If we all want to just be ourselves, and if we have never heard of the idea of a public interest, and if everyone who lives outside our region is considered an outlander, then how can there be any response? Katrina and the oil disaster (which will probably be far, far worse than even the most negative experts claim) are just chapters in many "perfect storms" to come. The Americans have no means at their disposal to deal with any of them. Libertarianism is their individual refusal of responsibility. A lack of a sense of a public interest means that no agencies, government or otherwise, can intervene in disaster unless they do so completely on their own, without public support. Ethnocentrism leads to a sense that disaster can never touch "my" region or my home; no hurricanes or tornadoes or earthquakes will deprive me of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

There are reformists impulses in American society, and many Americans would like to change many things. But the prospects for this happening in the foreseeable future are dim.