From the earliest records of human history, warfare has been both an organizing force and a prime source of political motivation. Countless battles have been fought in the course of colonizing the planet. Hundreds of millions of individual lives have been expended. As one study has shown, there have only been 268 years free of war in the last 3,421 years. The experience has created a legacy of military confrontation that many people consider immutable. Since preparations for war and the occasional conduct of it have been central preoccupations for virtually all the major states throughout their existence, it is widely assumed that the pattern is rooted in human nature and that it will endure indefinitely. Because our knowledge of human nature is scanty at best, people tend to project onto human beings the characteristics they want them to have, which means that those who want to believe in the idea of human goodness can find support in the way they think about Bush’s personal background and outlook. What emerges is a fierce patriotism long associated with Christian evangelical notions of “good” and “evil.” Bush’s war openly remains a cosmic battle between nothing less than the transcendent forces of good and evil. Therefore, the United States possesses not only the right but the obligation to remake the world in its own image—a sentiment reflected in the president’s bizarre contention (in early 2003) that it would be immoral for the United States not to attack Iraq.
American nationalism has always been informed by a messianic belief in the national destiny merged with notions of historical progress. As both the ends and means of war become sacred, enemies are readily demonized while mass killing is all too often turned into a heroic obligation. Our war on terrorism, before it is anything else, is thus an imagined conflict, taking place primarily in a mythic realm beyond history. Such a battle is necessarily unlimited and open-ended, and so justifies radical actions—the abandonment, for example, of established notions of civic justice at home and of traditional alliances abroad. Militarism as a tool of global power ultimately leads to a jettisoning of fixed and universal values, the corruption of human purpose, the degradation of those who embrace it, and finally of social disintegration. While claiming to advance the cause of freedom throughout the world, the political practices of the Bush administration are nothing less than a war of freedom and democracy.
A cosmic moral-religious battle justifies, equally, risks of world-historic proportioned disaster, since the ultimate outcome of such a conflict is to be measured not by actual consequences on this earth but by the earth-transcending will of God. Most of what we know of the rest of the world and what they know of us comes from the media. In the 2002 elections, viewers in the top 75 television markets in America saw four times more paid political advertising than broadcast news stories about politics. The brittleness of much of our public discourse and the tendency to read discrete problems as evidence of vast social pathologies are only two symptoms of our anxiety. The press is the people’s intelligence service. Its reports guide voters’ decisions in any democracy. When the media fails, is duped, tricked, used, played, or beguiled, more than just the media loses.
In some profound way we have become divided and confused about the basic constitution of our civic life. While many citizens prosper, others doubt the promise, even the justice of our own country. Candidates no longer have to negotiate their positions with a real public; dialogue is no longer necessary with the public beyond the focus group chamber. The rules of honorable engagement in political warfare—that is, truthful claims, reliance on facts, and a recognition that ultimately, regardless of political affiliation, the common good is our goal—have vanished and will not return again until enough of the populace demand them back (or a daring politician gets some publicity for reinventing them). Congress reflects the disengagement of the ordinary citizen. Without such consensus we are left with a shrugging acceptance of freedom as the choice between Burger King and McDonald’s and democracy as something professionals take part in while the people shop. Sure, Democrats win now and again. Few had investigated the half-truths of the Right and the Left or made a comprehensive attempt to set the record straight. There is seldom a mandate for any substantive reform, nor can there be so long as all the parties and candidates rely on millions of dollars in advertising to convince voters they are committed to, say, protecting the environment. Washington is the source of skepticism, not the cure. To expect the federal government to solve current widespread doubts about American society and our experiment with liberty may do things that marginally reinforce civic virtue. While Congress has earned the low regard in which it is held, those very citizens (ourselves) who allow its members to preen and bluster instead of honestly addressing problems are to blame. We must look elsewhere for moral and civic reconstruction.
We live in a world full of fear, people are afraid of the dark, people are afraid of losing their jobs, people are afraid of acting. And sometimes our differences run so deep, it seems we share a continent, but not a country. We find ourselves in a circumstance similar to that of our forebears, though what threatens us does not come from across an ocean but from within ourselves. Rather than reinventing government, we should concentrate on reinventing the American people. Though individualistic self-interest and consumer desires are core parts of who we are and nothing to be ashamed about, they are not all of who we are. We believe that some things are too vulnerable, precious, or important to exploit for profit. Private firms and engaged citizens redefine their relationships with government in a different way, working through the processes of the American republic. Americans should consider how to do it—organizing their government in a different way. The United States finds itself caught up in a clash within a civilization. It is up to us—the voters and the thus the popular commissioners of politics—to revolutionize political practices that threaten the future of liberty. Now is the time for that reflection and reevaluation.
Whatever our current crises, we are not meeting them with our deepest spiritual and moral insights. It is already very hard to remember that, only a generation ago, there were a number of Americans, of significant character and talent, who believed that our society was not merely doomed but undeserving of survival, and to whom every one of its institutions seemed not just unworthy of preservation but crying out to be exterminated. Note that “against” is one of a few words—like “cleave,” another—that can mean both itself and its opposite. It flirts with paradox. To cleave is to split or sever; but to cleave is also to cling to, or remain faithful. As with “against.” To be against means to be opposed: resistant or defiant. It also means next to: beside or near. The founders were willing to risk that a people given control over its own destiny would respond to the challenge. It’s time we lose our fear and develop the capacity to unite, to organize, and to recover our faith in ourselves and in others. Unless we wish to become a new kind of society under a different form of government, we must return to that basic faith—the faith that millions of free individuals working together in a free society creates the only unity finally worthy of us as Americans.
This is a work of collage. Eighty-five sentences from fifteen sources were copied by typewriter, carefully cut into strips, and scrambled to thoroughly remove them from context. These were rearranged to create an essay. Only books were used, most of which were checked out from the Columbus Metropolitan Library exclusively for this purpose.
Like this essay, most of the sources of information used in news media and political campaigns are carefully hidden. Those running our government are working with the corporations that own the media and machinery of war instead of working for the citizens that elected them, tightly controlling what and how much information is dispensed about their activities. We must do more than carefully read the news given to us. We must reject outright those who dispense it, those who control it, and the system of political parties and industry that robs us of our republic and our citizenship. Before any vote or stone is cast we must be reliably informed.
A note on copyright and plagiarism: Claude Levi-Strauss wrote, “The engineer questions the universe, while the bricoleur addresses himself to a collection of oddments left over from the human endeavors, that is, only a sub-set of the culture,” to which Jaques Derrida responded, “If one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing one’s concepts from the text of heritage that is more or less coherent or ruined, it must be said that every discourse is bricolage…the odds are that the engineer is a myth produced by the bricoleur.”
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© 2006 Damion Armentrout. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.