Comment Archive:

Monday 1st May 2006

America

usa flag picture When I was a kid there was something enchanting and magical about the idea of America. It seemed a place where anything was possible and where any dream could be realized - all you had to do was get there. Compared to the sombre charcoal grey of British life in the seventies and early eighties America seemed unnaturally bright and golden, full of huge wide open spaces, clean vistas and visual spectacles at every intersection. My humdrum existence in Leamington Spa felt like an injustice. Why couldn’t I have been born in America where by default I would have been bronzed and well muscled with a huge car and a glamorous girlfriend as standard? Life was so unfair.

David Hasselhoff picture Of course, at the time, my knowledge of the United States was gleaned solely from the glut of crime fighting shows that infested terrestrial TV during this period - The A Team, Charlie’s Angels, Knight Rider, Airwolf, Starsky And Hutch, Cagney And Lacey - the list is endless and to continue it would serve no other purpose than to propel your already wandering attention along the sweet smelling hedgerows of your own memory lane. So stuff that. Now immersed in the weary cynicism of my mid thirties I can clearly see how these shows - as innocuous and harmlessly inane as they appeared to be on the surface - were in fact nothing but deceitful propaganda; a nasty bit of brain washing at worst and a clever bit of product placement at best. America being the product.

Amercian Babe picture I’m embarrassed to admit that even in my late teens a friend and I briefly entertained the idea - the biggest cliché of them all - of embarking on a road trip across the good old glorious United States Of America. Our objectives were simple. Armed with a camper van of Roseanne Barr proportions and our irresistible English accents we would cruise across America’s sun drenched highways and have golden haired, beach tanned, firm breasted beauty queens throwing themselves at us just to hear the weird way we said the word "tomato". We’d have got our end away in every major city and would have left a hundred English scions in our wake to further diversify and expand the American gene pool. The dour reality that every American "babe" would have dismissed us as pasty faced, under developed British geeks was never permitted to hit our testosterone fuelled fantasies even for a minute. Thankfully we were spared the spectacle of our dreams crashing and burning before our very eyes by the fact that we (a) couldn’t raise enough cash to go and (b) were too complacent with our own middle class existence in the UK to even bother doing any research on the subject. Why should we? We already knew all there was to know about America from their television shows, right?

That’s how insidious and effective the American selling machine used to be.

The A Team picture So where and when did it all go wrong? Even American’s themselves are scratching their heads in confusion at the way they and their country are now reviled by the majority of the world’s inhabitants. And that isn’t an exaggeration either. America is now widely held up as an archetypal example of arrogance and corruption, greed, oppression, war mongering and wanton destructiveness. So much for the Land of the Free. Even now corpulent office workers in downtown Brooklyn and slackers in Buttville Seattle are waving hamburger and coke loaded fists at their Playstations and crying out "hey, but we’re the good guys remember?" as terrorists from every country America has ever interfered with (just try counting them) plot yet another appalling outrage to bring America to its knees. The fact that America will hit the big red button way before it even thinks about its knees is a reality that should terrify all of us.

The trouble with any form of propaganda is that it can only work in the short term. Propaganda and longevity don’t mix. The longer you try and perpetuate a falsehood the more thin and ineffective the surface of it becomes. Quite simply, America, the world got wise. It got sussed. It got street for the want of a better expression. Truth can never be completely suppressed. Every time America carried out one of its many international security missions "for the good of the world" small rumours escaped the suffocating blanket of the American sensors. Rumours that hinted at bloody American atrocities. Rumours that speculated on there being more sinister reasons for American intervention in the political development of other sovereign countries and states.

Rumours need very little tinder to ignite huge forest fires...

The Twin Towers picture September 11th brought the fire home to the American mainland in a big way. September 11th was as appalling and dreadful an act of terrorism as there ever has been. This fact is unequivocal. But September 11th does not and will not ever justify American’s ruthless and bullying overseas/global policy. It certainly did not justify the wholesale destruction and dismantling of Iraq that we now see playing out before our very eyes every night on the news channels.

It’s tempting to see September 11th as the start of America’s "Global War On Terror". Certainly the Bush administration would like you to see it that way but look at it in a wider global context and it takes on a very different cast. For a starting point let’s simply remove the words "On Terror" from the above statement. It’s basic I know but indulge me. We get "America’s Global War". This is a far more accurate epithet to describe what has been and is still occurring. And this war has been raging for decades and decades. September 11th was the appalling response of countries that have suffered beneath the boot heels of America’s Global War for the duration of these decades. It wasn’t the start of the war just a highly visible counter attack. And naturally during war time countries use such tragedies to their own ends: hence the hugely effective American propaganda campaign that pushed the west into invading Afghanistan - a country already so shattered by years of war that it has almost lost the ability to define itself without the presence of war - and into launching a war on Iraq to hunt for the spurious weapons of mass destruction. Oh, and remove a Government that was problematic to America’s future world interests at the same time, let’s not forget that little golden nugget.

It’s a shocking reality to get to grips with - that, actually, it wasn’t the terrorists who started the war. America did. Every Government removed, every secret arms deal negotiated, every military coup that America funded and encouraged, every freedom fighter/terrorist that America helped train, every ideology different from America’s own that America suppressed and destroyed - for the good of the world - started this war.

George Dubya Bush picture The question is: why is America so intent on being at war with the world? Political gain? Economic gain? A perverse lust for death and destruction? My money’s on a simple endeavour to grab what remains of the world’s dwindling resources. There isn’t enough to go around folks. It’s every one for himself and America wants to be the king of the heap. And that is the real ethos behind the glitzy façade of the American Dream. Everybody that gets in America’s way needs to be pushed aside or paid off. It doesn’t take a mastermind to figure out how the UK has been neutralized, does it? With such tactics inevitably becoming more and more transparent as the earth’s natural resources diminish and the fight for them heats up is it any wonder that America’s unpopularity is growing? People are becoming increasingly frightened and desperate. People are feeling a need to grasp and stockpile the earth’s last few resources while they still have the opportunity to do so. As far as America is concerned, all’s fair in love and war. And we’d all do the same, right?

Look at it this way: using recent world events as an example, if Iraq’s major resource was rice as opposed to oil would America have even considered wasting one man, one dollar or even one hour of its time on enforcing a government change there?

Do I hear three jeers for The A Team?