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Being America: Liberty, Commerce, and Violence in an American World
Being America: Liberty, Commerce, and Violence in an American World by Jedediah Purdy Knopf, 2003 320 pp.; $24 |
For many people, the sheer physical horror of what happened on September 11, 2001, was followed very quickly by a profound questioning of American identity and the nation's place in the world. Some Americans saw the attack as an apocalyptic warning to a nation that had become intolerably smug and self-satisfied, imposing its flawed vision on the planet through the process of globalization. Commenting on post-9/11 foreign policy, Jimmy Carter declared that "There is a sense that the United States has become too arrogant, too dominant, too self-centered, proud of our wealth, believing that we deserve to be the richest and most powerful and influential nation in the world." The fall of the Twin Towers might even presage the collapse of the empire, so that New York might before too long be one with Nineveh and Tyre.
Other observers, though, heard a different kind of wake-up call, a reminder that for all its flaws, America still represents a vast and noble vision that we should not be embarrassed to call the last, best hope of mankind. To take a potent material symbol, when the Towers fell, the New York City skyline was again dominated by the Empire State Building. The city thus looked much more like it had in the 1940s and 1950s, the era of the vast national effort to defeat monstrous tyranny abroad, while undertaking the moral revolution of civil rights at home. If our enemies wished to revive the spirit of this older Titan America, they may well have succeeded, but they assuredly will not savor the consequences. For a while, we Americans just forgot who we were, but now we've remembered. Or yet again, perhaps both these visions are equally true in some measure, and this ambiguity is a fundamental part of the basic American nature. Of course we contradict ourselves: we contain multitudes. Part of our biblical heritage is the sense that election is anything but an unmixed blessing. A chosen nation is held to higher standards, and is punished for its sins and arrogance, often by dreadful cataclysms; but the nation still remains chosen.
This sense of ambiguity, of the paradoxes of America and the American world, is central to Jedediah Purdy's Being America. The book is in large part a record of his travels and conversations in various nations—Egypt, Cambodia, China, Indonesia—in each of which he finds a deeply contradictory attitude to America and Americans, and to the processes of globalization for which they are largely responsible. Purdy himself often reflects this duality, noting on the same page that "Global capitalism is a triumph of freedom. … Global capitalism is an abomination of freedom." As he notes, the blessings of "American modernity" are very mixed, including as they do "constitutions, regular elections, free markets, shopping malls, mtv." Americans carry freedom to every corner of the world; Americans are the predatory spiders at the center of their global empire, their worldwide web of commercialism and militarism. Purdy is almost writing a meditation on the new American empire that some believe to be coming into existence, under a flag that offers stars to enlighten the nations, and stripes to correct them.
American power cannot fail to inspire both admiration and jealousy. The "dominant forces in the world" are "capitalism, democracy, nationalism, and America's prominence," and they all tend to "produce both liberty and violence." When John Walker Lindh reached his Taliban training camp in Afghanistan, his fellow mujaheddin were excited to find that he was American, and wanted to know just what part of the evil empire he hailed from. Even as the world is furiously adopting American styles and values, that same dissemination is producing a massive reaction in the form of anti-modernism and anti-Americanism, a package that is often associated with fundamentalist religion. To adapt the title of Benjamin Barber's study, the creation of McWorld necessarily incites Jihad.
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