Amerika

The other day, I began reading Kafka's Amerika. I don't get nearly as much time to read as I'd like these days, so the odds are good that I'll be working my way through it for the next few weeks. I mention this solely so I can title this 'Amerika' rather than 'America' without appearing to draw some kind of sick parallel between the United States and Stalinism.

With that being said...

I've always had an uneasy relationship with the country of my birth. I'm not particularly patriotic; I thanked the Queen Mother when I graduated from the University of Iowa--none of the ISO members applauded--and I have a large Canadian flag hanging on my bedroom wall. I have, once or twice, claimed to be Canadian while abroad; but what self-respecting US citizen hasn't? Lots of times, I get the feeling that America doesn't necessarily like me much, and other times, I wonder if perhaps I don't much like it. This is one of the latter times.

This evening I was checking up on my favourite weblog, Teresa Nielsen Hayden's Making Light. There were two new postings, on the chaos in Baghdad and the burning of Iraq's National Library, and on how Donald Rumsfeld's war plan left US forces too weak to prevent this, and on how Rumsfeld might not want to prevent it in the first place: with essentially all the records destroyed, there's no evidence left to contradict the administration when it lies again about Iraq's supposed stockpile of biological and chemical weapons, and hints this elusive stockpile has been moved to Syria to give the US an excuse to ravage that nation next. It's...obscene. The US has just destroyed a civilisation, killed thousands of its people, burned its books, smashed its history, and thrown millions of lives into a terrifying lawless uncertainty. And why? What's it all for? Each reason the Bush junta offered the American people for this war was a lie. And they weren't even good lies. And it's not just me, in my radical leftist dream-land, saying so. My father, a habitual Republican and gun enthusiast, didn't buy the administration's case against Iraq for a second. Their claims were all so transparently false.

Yet somehow, on large segments of the population, they worked.

What's it all for?

Was it for oil? Was it to give the stock market a nudge? To keep Americans in such hysterical blindness that PATRIOT II can slip past them? To bring about a Pax Americana? Was it to give a bunch of old white rich men a chance to cock-slap the entire world?

These are not new thoughts. People were saying such things long before the war began, people who know vastly more than I do, and have vastly greater insight. If blogging is the future of journalism, then that future belongs entirely to those people, who can assimilate, research, analyse, and disseminate, who can keep alive news stories that might otherwise be squashed, and who can say all the things that Ari Fleischer doesn't think Americans should say in a time of eternal war.

There are a lot of these people.

Yet America still went to war. And 59% of Americans continue to believe that Saddam Hussein bears 'Some', 'Most', or 'All' of the responsibility for 11 September.

Which brings me to the matter I wanted to discuss to begin with. I'm not a journalist, and I'm politically naive; I have nothing to add on any of that that's worth adding. One of the few things I feel qualified to blog about is the very subjective experience of being an American right here and now. And it's a frightening experience. I live in Seattle, which is flamingly liberal, and a hotbed of anti-war sentiment. Ironically, the loudest pro-war clamourings I heard from a Seattlian came from Dan Savage, nationally-syndicated sex columnist, flaming homo, diehard liberal, and editor of the Seattle alternative weekly The Stranger. Though before the war began, even he had changed his mind, because of the sheer ineptitude of Bush's diplomatic lead-up. There were protest marches; lots of my fellow graduate students went, even some of our faculty. Even the mathematicians here are flaming liberals. If one is going to be an American right now, Seattle is one of the places in which one would be well-advised to do so. Yet Seattle, it seems, is not entirely representative. Not even slightly representative. And neither is New York, somehow, or San Francisco. No matter what we do, the Bush administration pays no attention, and God help us all, it's somehow swindled half the country--in places like Iowa, for example--into supporting it.

One feels, at times, a sense of futility. If one is me. America has become this vast, impersonal, capricious and hostile force, a Juggernaut steered by Bill O'Reilly bearing down upon me, something incomprehensible and pervasive and panic-inducing as Kafka's bureaucracies, and as arbitrary; and sometimes I'm afraid of what will happen next. I've even started reading the Globe and Mail on my Palm Pilot on the bus in the morning, so I can pretend for a few minutes I'm somewhere else, in this magical, idyllic land where the Liberals have just won in Quebec, and the Prime Minister is getting in some good golfing with Bill Clinton in the Dominican Republic, and where, sure, there's SARS, but to make up for it, there's lots of hockey, and films about curling...

Is this common, to feel anxious about and a bit threatened by being an American? Although I never voted for Bush or lent my support to any of his adventures, do I still share in some national, collective guilt? Does this feeling have a name? Are there support groups? Are there pills other people take for this? Is there a cure?

Possibly Howard Dean.

So that's it, then. That's essentially all I had to say. It's late now, so I'll go to sleep, and this panic attack will, with luck, have passed by morning. It isn't hopeless, after all. I'm too young to be that cynical. Terrible things have happened, and terrible things will soon follow, and North Korea may have ballistic missiles pointed at me, and Jeb Bush may be Dubya's chosen successor, but there are also a lot of angry Americans out there who aren't rolling over, and 2004 is not too terribly far off.

They say it's always darkest before the dawn...

But then, they also say you'll go blind, and we know what a winner that one was. We'll just have to wait and see.

'Time will tell. It always does.'

Posted by aloysius at April 17, 2003 02:40 AM |