The barbarians are at the gates of the empire even as we speak.
http://www.newstatesman.co.uk/200012250006.htm
New Statesman (UK)
Let's boycott America
David Nicholson-Lord
Monday 25th December 2000
US democracy is flawed; its human rights record poor; its greed
threatens the planet. Is it time for the rest of us to act?
By David Nicholson-Lord
Whenever one gets unduly depressed about British politics, it is
always worth glancing across the Atlantic to see how bad things can
really get. Quite what was going through Tony Blair's mind last week
when he rang up to congratulate George W Bush on the latter's
much-disputed achievement of the presidency may not be known until he
writes his memoirs. But it is a fair guess that he had to swallow
hard before he picked up the phone. In Britain, Blair is routinely
berated by the right-wing press as a superficial lightweight, but, by
the side of George W, he is a towering intellectual giant. Sadly, by
the side of George W, a frightening number of people are.
What is to be done about the United States of America? Put another
way, how much of a jackass does a man have to be before he's stopped
from being president?
For a little over a month, from the inconclusive ending on election
night to the Supreme Court's narrow decision in favour of Bush, the
rest of us watched in disbelief as the nuts and bolts of American
democracy came apart before our eyes. One had known that the system
was gridlocked - awash with unreformed campaign finance, in thrall to
business lobbies and focus groups, obsessed with trivia, incapable of
generating an intelligent debate on serious issues: all this is the
stuff of conventional wisdom about US politics.
But what the daily news from Tallahassee revealed was that the
world's most technologically advanced nation can't even get its
voting machines to count accurately. And that counting by hand might
be unconstitutional - which is rather like outlawing running as a
sport because nowadays everyone drives. And that the entire chad
fiasco was just one of several ways in which the votes of many
Florida citizens (in particular, those likely to be at odds with the
state's Republican rulers) seemed to have been fixed and fiddled out
of existence.
In a country that regards itself as the exemplar of the free world,
this is strange stuff indeed. Whatever voting system you use, there
are certain basics that a modern democracy cannot do without. First,
universal suffrage must mean what it says; second, everyone with a
vote should be entitled to cast it and have it accurately counted;
and third, the person with the most votes should win. On all these
tests, American democracy failed. One might think it can't get much
worse than that, but it can and probably will.
This is because the almost certain conclusion of the whole
extraordinary saga will be - absolutely nothing. George W Bush will
proclaim, on numberless occasions, "God bless America", much nonsense
will be spouted about healing a dividing nation and the US will
settle down to a festive season of low-IQ Hollywood movies, in which
Americans in various guises routinely vanquish the rest of the
galaxy, with Floridian gerrymandering and dimpled chads a rapidly
fading memory. It is in the nature of gridlocked systems that they
cannot easily unjam themselves.
What does this mean for the rest of us? One of the less edifying
aspects of the Florida interregnum was the way the British news
media, notably the television bulletins, treated it as comic relief.
It was a reaction, one is tempted to remark, that revealed the
media's growing incapacity for joined-up thinking, because what
happened in Florida was absolutely no joke. It was the political
equivalent of exploratory surgery - the opening up of the body
politic to searching internal examination. Inside, disease was found
to be rampant. And if it is fair to call George W Bush the symptom of
that disease - certainly it produced him and he has profited from it
- we are all among the sufferers.
If you consider that alarmist, think back to the damage inflicted on
the planet by another "regular guy" who made it to the presidency
recently, on the strength largely of a telegenic manner and corporate
backing. Forget the forces of globalisation that so-called
Reaganomics helped unleash in the 1980s; remember only the wound
Ronald Reagan's views on family planning inflicted on US funding for
UN population policies and, by extension, the lives of millions of
people in the developing world.
Twenty years later, the global dimensions of the US presidency are
more pronounced, the issues more critical. Not only is Bush keen on
reinventing Reagan's Star Wars missile defence system, a move that at
its worst could kick-start a new cold war. It is also said that he
discounts global warming. And here we are on very dangerous territory
indeed.
Global warming may now be the single biggest factor shaping the
destiny of the planet. It straddles nations and national political
issues. It affects all of us - for many, it is an issue of survival.
This is partly because it undermines life-support systems, such as
food production and the availability of fresh water, and partly
because it is a potent generator of disasters - flood, drought, fire
and therefore famine. In the southern hemisphere, it promises to
extinguish entire, albeit small, island nations.
These facts have been known for many years, but this year they have
become far more widely known. And this knowing, and the emotions and
reactions it will trigger, may have great political significance.
Indeed, this is what happens in revolutions - more and more people
come to know and feel in a particular way until at some point a
critical mass or threshold is reached; some small event then sets off
an earthquake.
In the case of global warming, a developing world long fearful of the
effects of climate change made common cause with a Europe newly
sensitised to it by the worst floods in memory. The conjunction
occurred at the climate talks in The Hague last month, where American
culpability was widely proclaimed (4 per cent of the world's
population, but 26 per cent of its oil consumption), yet American
corruption proved inescapable. In effect, American democratic
gridlock - the impossibility of selling emissions cuts to an American
public addicted to carbon-rich lifestyles, American businesses that
supply those lifestyles and an American Congress financed by those
businesses - went global. The talks failed: it became everybody's
gridlock.
Under a Gore presidency, we might have hoped for progress on climate
change. Under Bush, we might as well forget it. However, we won't. We
will, almost certainly, get very angry. We will start to scrutinise
the US with a colder eye. And what we see won't please us - not one
little bit.
We may have already concluded, for example, that George W Bush is a
walking metaphor for the warping of American democracy. We may see,
in his resistance to the idea of global warming, something of the
insularity and greed of the American public. We may start to wonder
what, precisely, the US stands for. What good comes out of it? How
does it benefit the rest of the planet?
Such questions can yield surprising answers. Critics such as the
American academic Noam Chomsky have been asking them for decades. So
have many people, and nations, in the developing world. For them,
Uncle Sam symbolises colonialism and exploitation. We used to ask
these questions ourselves - Dickens, famously, visited the US and
found it an uncouth, unformed, childlike society where everyone spat
a lot, thought about little other than making money, yet had a
remarkably high opinion of themselves. But since the US, reluctantly
and belatedly, came to the aid of European democracies in two world
wars, the myth of the special relationship has been fashioned. We
hear Americans speak a version of English and believe it signifies a
shared experience. Our politicians have found it expedient to hang on
American coat tails - not least because Britain has become a
convenient landing-stage for US industry in its conquest of the
world's richest market, Europe.
The United States, in reality, is an immigrant culture with two of
the defining characteristics of such cultures: an overwhelming desire
to make good, economically; and a coarseness of public debate that
makes it easy prey to the marketing men, and to calculating
politicians masquerading as regular guys. It treats the rest of the
world as, variously, playground, plantation, storehouse and
sweatshop. It locks away and executes as many people as the most
unreconstructed autocracy: a disproportionate number of these victims
are black. It is addicted, fatally, to violence. It hasn't had a
decent president since Franklin D Roosevelt, regards "liberal" as a
term of abuse and managed to convert an elderly, indolent and
dim-witted film actor into, first, a state governor, then a president
and, finally, a kind of secular saint. It is an empire, but whereas
the Greeks gave us culture, the Romans law and the British, arguably,
a sense of fair play, history may well come to view the American
empire's defining triumph as the export of junk to the rest of the
world - from genetically modified food to burgers, bad films and
worse television. Not for nothing is American imperialism known as
Coca-Colonisation.
There are many good points to American culture. The issue is whether
the good outweighs the bad - and what answer the overwhelmingly
non-American majority of the world's population now gives when they
ask themselves this question.
It doesn't, for example, take much of a shift in perspective to see
US foreign policy, since the war, not as a defence of the "free"
world, but as oppressive and brutal and governed by economic
self-interest. Or to see the US today as an enemy of the planet - an
"evil empire", to borrow Ronald Reagan's phrase for the Soviet Union.
And in that sense, the past two months of the year 2000 may prove a
turning point - the moment when the scales fell from our eyes.
The question is - what can we do? We don't have votes in US
elections, even if they weren't rigged. We cannot, in Britain, expect
governments to act - British politicians, in the manner of client
states, have a doglike attachment to the special relationship. We do,
however, have a powerful economic weapon - our wallets, credit cards,
chequebooks, patronage, custom and compliance.
A consumer boycott of the US wouldn't be easy - its goods and
services and cultural effluvia have wormed their way into our lives.
But as the recent campaign against GM foods and Monsanto
demonstrated, it could be enormously effective; it would also be
peculiarly appropriate. If George W Bush is indeed a corporation
disguised as a human being, as the green campaigner and presidential
candidate Ralph Nader put it during the election campaign, then the
US is a corporation disguised as a nation state.
While governments, in between elections, can be hard nuts for
citizens to crack, corporations are easy - they hurt very quickly, in
that area Americans call the bottom line. For those who might jib at
such a display of overt anti-Americanism, there's a further powerful
argument in its favour. By boycotting America and its products, we
might start making Americans think - which at present they are not
showing much sign of doing. We might act as a catalyst to unjam their
own domestic gridlock.
We might, in other words, be doing the US a bigger favour than it
could ever imagine.
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NOTE: The British only gave the world Cricket, not "a sense of fair
play". The poms tend to get the two confused, but Cricket is still a
worthy contribution to world culture.
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