Newsweek’s Evan Thomas and Andrew Romero add to the mag’s cover story on the new Oliver Stone flick with a brief history of the American myth:
In America, the underlying faith is that in a truly free and democratic society, every man and woman has the potential to realize greatness, that freedom and openness liberate and ennoble ordinary citizens to do extraordinary things. The Triumph of the Common Man is a myth deeply rooted in American culture, and unlike some popular myths, it is true enough. Tom Hanks may have played a fictional character in “Saving Private Ryan”—the small-town American called to arms—but World War II was won by a million citizen soldiers very much like him.
There is, unfortunately, another, less admirable myth that Americans concoct to explain crises and disasters. It is rooted in the paranoid streak that runs through pop culture, the conspiracy theories that blame some sinister (and usually make-believe) Other for whatever went wrong. In 1950, many frightened Americans wanted to know: how could Russia have gotten the bomb so soon after America won World War II? There must be traitors among us! railed Sen. Joe McCarthy and other conspiracists, as they tore up the country looking for communists under every bed.
The authors argue that, if even Oliver Stone can choose the former instead of the latter to define September 11th, the event is something fundamentally different to American history. I, for one, am a little weary at analogies connecting the event to Pearl Harbor or anything of the like: the non-state element of the attack makes this something fundamentally different. I will say, for the era in which we now live, 9/11 has come to summarize both the hopes and fears of the Information Age: the inevitable conflicts between liberty and security, the empowerment of the individual to be used to lift up or to cut down and the ideological battles raging in the hearts of many for centuries.
I’ve been reading George Crile’s “Charlie Wilson’s War”, a fantastic book about how a congressman essentially forced funding down the CIA’s throat in the 80’s to aid the mujahideen in Afganistan against the Soviets. Besides being a future project for both Tom Hanks and Aaron Sorkin, the book is quite relevant to the modern foreign policy enviornment for obvious reasons.
Crile quotes several members of “the most successful modern jihad” who argue, almost in identical rhetoric, that Allah is the only superpower. This was clearly the force which unified Muslims against the Soviet invasion as the trespass of a country which believed itself a superpower onto the real superpower - that is, God. This, I believe, is now the force which unites the militant sect of Islam against the percieved invasion of the superpower United States.
We have begun, in the 21st century, to preface the term “superpower” in many ways - military, economic, intellectual and cultural. If these are all the marks of a superpower, than any superpower can act with these powers in benevolent or malevolent ways. I do not believe that America’s cultural or economic power has been abused more often than it has not - in fact, I often argue that America should more agressively spread its culture and intellectual shibboleths in order to compete with our enemy. Islamofascism, however, thinks that the Secular Superpower is imposing a culture of decadence and disobedience on a world which ought refuse to accept it.
Each side, therefore, claims to be a superpower and claims their opponent ought not be.
Our very own Nuremberg Rally, the America Supports You Freedom Walk, (taking place on Sunday) is all about freedom–if you pre-register for it by today.
According to Campus Progress, if you show up on Sunday without being registered, well, then you lose your freedom to be in public because you didn’t register.
Leave it to President Bush to blame Carter, Reagan, and Clinton for 9/11 and other acts of terrorism against the United States and our interests. Whoever is writing these speeches is doing a terrible, terrible hack job. During his first term, a lot of his speeches weren’t necessarily hack jobs, they were just full of good-sounding lies. Now its just illogical bullshit and that ellicits a terribly dramatic reaction–at least to those who fall for it. For people like me, it only infuriates me and makes me want to vomit.
Excuse me while I go hurl and then head off to class.
