The Ugly Un-American: The American Rorschach Test
Posted by Ray Church on 04.28.2007
It's been a year here at 411 for Ray Church, so he celebrates with a one off return to his long meandering columns through a topic that caught his imagination: How America sees itself in the rest of the world. As well as this week's Shut the Hell Up Award.
Well, it's the 29th and that makes this exactly one year since my first column was posted here at 411Politics. Instead of a fond look back on the year that was (well, there is some of that at the end), I'm instead taking a longer look at one of those philosophical ideas that struck me while reading about the Virginia Tech Massacre at newsweek.
Virginia Tech
After a week of reflecting on the tragedy at Virginia Tech and the coverage thereof, I've slowly realized that all of the commentary and criticism has nothing to do with the shooter and everything to do with the commentator.
I'm not talking about our wise old men here at 411, I'm referring to the talking heads out there in the blogosphere and National news. Basically the commentaries said little about shooting and everything abut the pre-occupations of the speaker.
Take Limbaugh, suddenly declaring that "this guy's a liberal". He took a couple of moments from the video the shooter sent to CBS and matched them up with his own talking points.
The same can be said for all manner of the debates since: it's about gun control; it could have been avoided if a few of the guys in class had a gun of their own; it was about health care and the mentally ill; it was about video games; it was about religion; it was about racial integration; it was about racism; it was about immigration, or foreigners, or lax student visa standards… it was about any of the thousands of little things that everyone has been picking up as evidence and holding under a microscope to explain how it happened.
Hell, it would have been about the music he listened to as well, if it wasn't for the fact that the only music that was mentioned in the whole piece was from one of the most singularly inoffensive rock bands in the world of music today, Collective Soul. (That's not a comment on the quality of their music, but a band fronted by the son of a Christian Minister is hardly a Marilyn Manson).
A perfect example was the whole mess about the name Ismael Ax, or Ax Ismail, or any other number of variations on the name he reportedly tattooed on his arm that led the blogosphere into overdrive. "What was the significance of this name?" we asked, as if real life were as tightly written as an episode of CSI, giving us clues along the way to help us unravel the mystery.
And so we searched through literature to find a poem by Drum Hadley called "Ishmael's Ax", or to the Old Testament to say that it sounds like "Ishmael", the eldest son of Abraham, which lead some to speculate about God commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son (it was Isaac, not Ishmael he was ordered to sacrifice, by the way). And then there were those who suddenly experts on Islam and stated he must be a Muslim because in Islam it Ishmael, not Isaac, who was supposed to be sacrificed.
To me, it always sounded like a create-a-wrestler name for a wrestling game, but then I write a politics column for a wrestling website, so I know what that says about me.
There is a level of insanity in trying to find sense in a senseless massacre. Witnesses described Cho as empty. They described the blank expression in his eyes. That, perhaps, is the best metaphor for the debate. On a blank canvas, people tend to project their own inherent beliefs.
One need only look at the myths perpetrated after the Columbine Massacre to see how these tragedies act as an ink blot test. People claimed that they listened to Marilyn Manson, that they were part of the Trench Coat Mafia, that they targeted African Americans, that they targeted jocks, that they were closeted homosexuals, that one girl was killed because she acknowledged she was a Christian. All of these proved false when the final investigation came down, but people were intent to learn something, so they learned what they wanted to learn.
Seung-Hui Cho was nothing and nobody. He was the projection of what people already believed. The 32 people he killed were real people. They are the real story.
In the next few weeks, all of the debates will slip from our lips and into the unconscious, where they will remain as myths used to justify our world views. The gun control debate will raise its head for a few seconds and then dissipate when people realize the stalemate that the founders of the Constitution created with their badly worded second amendment. The debate over mental health may linger on, but it too will fade after some minor tinkering.
And the shooting at Virginia Tech will live on as myths reinforcing mutually exclusive world views. The Conservatives will remain convinced that he is the inevitable result of multi-culturalism, immigration and liberal social values. The Liberals will remain convinced he was a result of social stratification, the hypocrisy of Christian "moral values" and gun culture. Others will remain convinced he was the result of violent video games and his love for WWE Wrestling.
And America will grow ever more divided.
The American Rorschach Test
It's strange how these columns gel together sometimes. After writing my response to the Virginia Tech Massacre, I did two things. I started reading "Why Do People Hate America?" by Ziauddin Sardar and Marreyn Wyn Davies, and I watched the Democratic Presidential Debate on MSNBC.
I realized that the same reaction people had to the Virginia Tech massacre was the same reaction they take to the rest of the world. The rest of the world is a Rorschach test for America. Their views on the rest of the world tell you more about the United States than the rest of the world.
The debate was filled with examples, and let me start off by saying that the debate was not a debate at all. The debate was, to all intents and purposes, a chance for Democratic Nominees to test drive their sound-bites. There was little challenging other people's ideas, little cross examination of facts, and when there was it came from the likes of Kucinich and Gravel who have nothing to lose. This was, perhaps by design, a joint advertisement for the Democratic nominees.
Democratic ideas, although less blatant than the Republican Party, is filled with just as many Americano-Centric ideas as their less nuanced opponents. The language is still the language of the insider looking out.
Take this piece from Hillary Clinton early in the debate.
This is not America's war to win or lose. We have given the Iraqi people the chance to have freedom, to have their own country. It is up to them to decide whether they're going to take that chance...
Get past the idea that this is not America's war for a second and look at the rest of that sentence. Despite the fact that she thinks the war was wrong, and that she later says she was misled by the evidence, she somehow seems to think that America has given the Iraqi's something. America is the benevolent Santa Claus that goes around giving freedom to people.
People in a war zone do not have freedom, and they do not have the choice of freedom. For Clinton to assume that America has given Iraq anything at all is ridiculous from the outset, but she doubles down on it…
and it is past time for them to demonstrate that they are willing to make the sacrifice, the compromise that is necessary to put together a unified government and provide security and stability without our young men and women in the middle of their sectarian civil war
Who… the hell… are "they"?
Who is she talking about? She talks about Iraq as if they are one singular group of people when America has demolished the thin veneer that held the various groups together. She acts as if America has kindly given them a gift.
Now, this viewpoint is not unilateral for all Democrats, but it did run through the debate. The number of times a question about Iraq started with a comment about "our troops" and "our men and women in harms way" underscores this point. They don't mention the number of Iraqi's who are still dying; they mention the far smaller number of Americans who are dying.
It builds on the idea that America is "the leader of the free world", and I can't help but think of the situation Kursk disaster, when a Russian nuclear submarine sank and the Russian Government refused to ask for help in its retrieval. Their own ego as a nation refused to let them acknowledge that this was a situation beyond their control.
Iraq is beyond America's control, but very few people will acknowledge this. Dennis Kucinich, for example, is alone in suggesting that the US goes to the UN to ask for help. Many others mention "international engagement", but the word UN doesn't exist in the politician's dictionary. Its hard enough to get American's talking about Syria and Iran, let alone the rest of the world, because to do so you would have to acknowledge that America screwed up. America's ego cannot be placated enough to acknowledge that.
So let me get back to this "leader of the free world" moniker. How long will it take America to realize that it is not leading? It never has. We'll wear Nikes, listen to My Chemical Romance and watch WWE, but we didn't follow you into this war, and we haven't for some time now. We'll do it when we think its right, but the days of the first Iraq war, when everyone snapped to attention when George H. W. Bush snapped his fingers, are over.
And before that war we certainly weren't all happy soldiers, either.
The bigger idea here is that America talks down to the rest of the world. We have no idea what freedom is, even though many of us live in countries with significantly greater freedoms than America does. Ask people in Norway about "civil liberties", or people in Belgium about poverty. Ask other countries about Universal Healthcare for Children, or Capital Punishment or Unions. America's dogmatic addiction to the free-market is not the norm. Workers in Chinese Wal-Marts have union rights unheard of by their American counterparts.
And then we get the double standards of America. It rails against China's control over its economy, yet it subsidises its industries. It talks about the need global justice, yet it routinely flouts international law. It talks about the horrors of tyrants, yet it imprisons more people both inside and outside of its country than any other country in the world.
Only the second tier Democratic Candidates are willing to voice it. To be a politician in America, you have to wave the flag and curse the flag burners. You have to be intensely patriotic, whether your country deserves it or not.
Where are we, the rest of the world? Where are we in your equation? Where is our voice in the dialogue?
The Religious Right may live in fear of the "One World Government", refusing to engage the rest of the world in the United Nations out of fear of Satan taking control, but let's face facts: there already is a One World Government. America is making choices for the rest of the world and we have no voice in the debate.
I'm not saying this is the New World Order Pat Robertson rails against. It is wrong because power is unbalanced, not because of some interpretation of a dream one of Christ's followers had. I'm saying America has to engage with the rest of the world, and it has to engage as our equal, not our superior.
Until this is done, there will always be people who hate America.
The Never Ending Struggle with Staying Original
I got mail this week, and boy did it make me feel sheepish…
Why did you do pretty much a straight up copy of Bill Maher's late night wrap up from his show to your blog?
Was it purposeful, and you just forgot to credit him?
Please tell me it wasn't just outright copy with your name on it.
Erik
Ouch, what a great way to lose a reader. Accusations of plagiarism are never fun, but looking back on the column it was a valid accusation. If you haven't read my last column, do it. Erik's comments are about my piece about Monica Goodling, and if you watched Bill Maher you would notice similarities.
No, the similarities weren't intentional. I had seen the Maher piece, and I had also read a dozen or so pieces on the web, most notably an article on Salon.com that I believe Maher got his information. I read them, took them in and proceeded to write something I thought was original, but sounded suspiciously like Maher. Subconsciously I had taken his points to heart, but it wasn't my intention to copy outright.
So there I was, feeling sheepish, when I saw this:
Yup, while I plagiarized Maher, so did John Stewart, another of my heroes. I may be a cheat, but by God I cheat like the best of them.
Thanks to Erik for keeping me honest. I hope this is more original for your liking.
I Wish I Had Said That
By God this is obscure.
John J. Hamre is the President and CEO of CSIS, The Center for Strategic and International Studies. A bipartisan think tank, it's not the sort of place I would normally stumble upon.
It so happened, however, I was trying to find the source of a one liner, and as best as I can tell it came from this man, John J. Hamre. When describing the American approach to intelligence gathering, he had this to say…
(By piling up the data) we're adding more hay to the stack"
This was reinvented the other day in an Intelligence Squared debate, where Nadine Strossen launched it this way:
It's like trying to find a needle in a haystack by adding more hay
Great language, but an even greater point. The US had all the data it needed to prevent 9/11, it just didn't have a way to connect the dots. The US is adding more dots…
Shut the Hell Up Award
So many Democrats, so little time. There's something about booing the champ that unleashes the underdog in me, so here's a first to a guy I don't truly think deserves it, but in the spirit of our column today, he makes a good target.
This president may occupy the White House, but for the last six years the position of leader of the free world has remained open.
No, the President of America is not the Leader of the Free World, but it never has been. Sorry to prick your ego, Barack Obama. I like you. I think you're a great guy, and possibly a good president.
But ditch the jingoism. Drop the sound-bite "We're Number One" and actually do something to make America a better country.
Church Pimps Church
I know this is where I normally send shout outs to the other great writers here at 411, and they all did a great job this week, but I thought I would use the opportunity to look back on my year here at 411. Here are some of the columns I was most proud of:
My second column, God and American Politics was one I was intensely proud of. It has been a pleasant surprise to see many of the issues I spoke of change over the year. A great many religious leaders in America have expanded their horizons, tackling issues like climate change and poverty.
Perhaps my longest column came two weeks later with The Politics of Words, and if I could just get Ray Robinson to stop using the word "Liberal" like it's the "n" word I might feel like I've achieved something.
The most fun I had writing a column was How to Be a Political Pundit, and while some of the humour was surreal, then topic is still poignant.
You can catch last years Year in Quotation Marks, although I did misattribute a quote to Sean Hannity that was instead by Sterling Burnett.
More recently you can look at Morons and Oxymorons. If you scratch the surface of Team B you will find some incredible failures that mirror the Iraq situation poignantly.
And, of course, check out all our other writers here at 411.
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