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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Yes, they hate our power and envy our wealth and respect our ideals. But it's deeper -- and more personal -- than that.
Jul 23, 2002 | Sept. 11 forced Americans to engage in that most un-American of activities: thinking about the country they live in. Mass death and the prospect of a future changed permanently for the worse has a way of raising questions. Some of them were purely political: Were the attacks perpetrated by evil men whose only motive was to do evil, or did specific U.S. policies lead to the attack? Should we rethink our entire approach to foreign policy, or bring renewed fervor to it? But others were more general. What kind of country is America? What does it stand for? How does the rest of the world see it? Why would people hate it enough to deal it such a blow?
Today, almost a year after the attacks, whatever illumination those ruminations provided seems faint indeed, buried beneath a ton of stale emotions and accumulated banalities, the dreary aftermath of a rending event that has no resolution. For a moment, the terrible collapse of the towers seemed to promise, if not a reborn America -- those portentous claims that "nothing will ever be the same again" now seem vaguely embarrassing -- at least one that its citizens would see in a new, sharply defined light, the way a person diagnosed with cancer suddenly sees his life strange, whole and infinitely precious. For a few weeks, a visceral sense of unity, a forged purpose born of a shared wound, allowed all Americans, the secular and the devout, liberals and conservatives, the ironists on the coasts and the straight shooters in the heartland, to come together under a flag that for once meant the same thing to everyone. But that sense of purpose, that clarifying vision, is gone. One of the most difficult of the many painful lessons of tragedy is that even its gifts do not always stay.
Many of those who wrote about America in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11 fell into two predictable categories: the self-lacerating leftists and the breast-beating patriots. Those in the former camp displayed the virtues of sober reflection, but at times they seemed too worldly, too unsentimental, too quick to show off their cool awareness that much of the rest of the world has suffered far more than the United States ever has and that America has been directly or indirectly responsible for a great deal of that suffering. They were, of course, right, but their calculus lacked both empathy and a sense of historical proportion. Too much deference to history is vitiating: Not only does it leave one unable to strike out instinctively at danger, in the end it leaves one unable to feel anything at all. Patriotism has a tincture of sentimentality in it, but so do all feelings that have cooled into reflection, feelings that can support promises -- and these are the feelings that allow work to be done and civilization to be built.
By contrast, the patriots were full of laudable vigor, but they were often myopic in their own way, unable or unwilling to grasp that even the worst tragedies do not relieve one of the responsibility of thinking. All too often, they reacted with outrage to even modest suggestions that it might be wise to consider whether any American actions might have led to the attacks, and that a little reflection on our place in the world might be in order. At their best, the patriots recalled the passionate but woolly-headed Mitya in "The Brothers Karamazov"; at their worst, they came across as nativists wrapped in the red, white and blue of permanent outrage, bludgeoning those who did not share their relentless Americanism.
Between or beyond these two essentially political poles, the rest of us wandered uneasily, sensing that both visions contained elements of truth but that neither did justice to who we are or the place we live. The fallout of Sept. 11 brought no closure. America's retribution, the attack on the Taliban and al-Qaida, was both inevitable and necessary, the clearest manifestation of American power as self-defense since World War II, but it did not bring catharsis or clarify America's identity to its citizens. In fact, this is encouraging: Wars should not do those things, and the temptation to make them into metaphors must be resisted.
President Bush did not resist. He framed the attack as an attack of evildoers against the chosen people, an act of sheer perverse malice, like Satan striking out at the angels in Heaven -- an effusion of rhetoric as empty as a discontinued greeting card. It is true that Bush and his lieutenants have a responsibility to hunt down those responsible and prevent more such attacks, but they have gone much further. To a degree surprising only to those who thought Bush the younger might have a more nuanced view of the world and not be a cat's paw for the old Cold Warriors he is surrounded by, the Bush administration has used the purposely vague and open-ended "war on terrorism" to advance its ideological and political agenda and intimidate dissenting voices. For those Americans opposed to the administration's arrogant unilateralism and simplistic worldview, this failure to learn from a national tragedy is immensely disappointing, and the manipulation of that tragedy feels like a cynical defilement.
Perhaps irrationally, we wanted to come away from the tragedy of Sept. 11 with something beyond politics and righteousness, something closer to the sense of this vast reckless lovable coldblooded hard-working extravaganza of a country that can be found in the short obituaries for the World Trade Center victims in the New York Times or the poems of Whitman or the songs of Chuck Berry -- meaningless sharp truths illuminating the American night. We wanted some kind of conclusion with long enough arms to fold all of us in. We wanted something that would get the bad taste of soapbox moralizing out of our mouths and leave the dead in peace.
One way to make a start, in thinking about America, is to examine what people who are not from here think about her. There are times, perhaps, when the only way to find out who you are is to look at yourself through other eyes.
The spring issue of the quarterly literary journal Granta gives readers a chance to do just that. Titled "What We Think of America," it offers 24 short pieces by foreign writers (with the inexplicable inclusion of one writer from Hawaii), who deal with subjects ranging from a Lebanese woman's painful realization that the U.S. can be even more heartless than her native land, to a British writer's revelatory experience of the unique intensity of American literature, to the Hollywood censorship that led an Indian youth weary of truncated blouse-unbuttonings to prefer Russian films, to an Irishman's confession that America no longer seemed strange because his own country had become America. By turns intimate and broadly analytical, these pieces are idiosyncratic, penetrating and refreshingly free of Big Thoughts about Sept. 11. Above all, they evince (almost all of them, anyway) a generosity of spirit, a clear-eyed affection for America -- despite its flaws -- and Americans. Those of us who can no longer even hear the braying self-praise of our compatriots will find this collection both touching and enlightening.
That intelligent foreigners have such deep and positive feelings about America, that they are willing to go past the received notion of America as a naive, blundering or perhaps malevolent giant, may come as a surprise. Being kicked when you're down is a memorable experience, and certain pieces written after Sept. 11, as well as a steady flow of news stories along the lines of "Parisian intellectuals change mind after 24 hours, deny that vacuous Americans are worthy of empathy," confirmed for many that the foreign intelligentsia took a jaundiced view of America -- or actively despised her. The most notorious such piece, widely disseminated on the Internet, was by the Indian novelist Arundhati Roy. Titled "The Algebra of Infinite Justice," it danced around the notion that America deserved the attack for its foreign-policy sins, and concluded that there was little difference between Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush. "Both are dangerously armed -- one with the nuclear arsenal of the obscenely powerful, the other with the incandescent, destructive power of the utterly hopeless," Roy wrote. "The fireball and the ice pick. The bludgeon and the axe. The important thing to keep in mind is that neither is an acceptable alternative to the other."
This is not mature political thinking: It is name-calling, and it descends from a specious platform of perfect Third World rectitude. The limitations of Roy's analysis are revealed not by her unassailable assertion that America has committed sins, but her monolithic insistence that all of America's foreign-policy interventions are pernicious and all of them can be explained by the basest and most self-interested of motivations. This argument is so selective and tendentious that it betrays what one suspects is an underlying hostility that precedes political analysis, a hostility created by the mere fact of America's global preeminence.
Of all the fears Americans have about what others think about us, probably the deepest -- and the one we can do least about -- is that they hate us simply because of how much power we have. But on this subject, as so many others, many of the authors in "What We Think About America" hold surprising views. One of the revelations of this collection is that although foreigners are aware of America's power and influence, and of course of its shortcomings, they are far more aware of its complexity, its strengths, its paradoxes than we think. They are also closer to us, more attuned to the American sensibility than is generally believed. This awareness, and closeness, leads the writers not just to reject or slavishly imitate the "dominant power," but to engage with it in much more interesting ways.
