07feb2002(late): The most dangerous
result of 911 is the way it's polarised the opinions of US citizens.
The US has been the world's only superpower for over half a century
now, able to nuke or rebuke any other nation without fear of retribution
for decades. (Let's face it, that whole Soviet thing was a house of cards.
Look at the economics.) The flipside is that very few US citizens ever bothered
doing much with it; the USA is an insular country and a parochial people,
mostly happy with their way of life and not too interested in intruding
on anyone else's. But now the Americans have changed; 3,000
cold dead hearts under WTC Plaza opened their eyes. And in one of those
over-simplified dualities preached by their leaders and media (usually in
rhyming alliterations) they've fallen into two groups. In their own slang,
one group deals and one group freaks. On one side , there are
those who've woken up to the dogmatic evils nurtured by fundamentalism of
any hue. And who want desperately to make the world safe for those who wish
no harm to others, wherever they may be. These are the Good Americans: willing
to see the world in a context broader than they've perhaps previously understood,
and trying hard to learn more about how they fit into it. And
on the other side, there are those who don't want to deal with it. Who'd
rather the rest of the world just went away and left the US to use their
territory as landfill. This group wants to reserve freedom and democracy
for itself, seeing them as American rights, not human rights, and damn anyone
who doesn't whistle the Star-Spangled Banner with his grande latte.
The second group, unfortunately, have always been more obvious
to anyone outside the US's borders. He's the guy in tartan shorts loudly
demanding hash browns at a Paris cafe. He's the guy who wrote a recent letter
to New Scientist magazine beginning
'You ignorant, ungrateful Eurotrash...'. (Apparently indignant at the suggestion
Europeans might be concerned about where shot-down missiles from the rogue
states might fall.) These folks wrote the textbooks that have WWII beginning
with Pearl Harbour. They scratched out the Kyoto accord on the basis it'd
annoy W's oil buddies. It's this second group that seems to be gaining the
upper hand in the USA today. Of the whole 278m of them, I estimate
about 85m are dealing and 193m are freaking. And I'm not going
to justify my own views with some academic excuse about everything being
relative; that'd excuse the al-Qaeda folk. No, I fully believe Western democracy
is superior to Islamic dogma. Some values are simply better than others,
the same way some food has greater nutritional value. But
if someone like me thinks this way - feels deeply uncomfortable with
the US's stance, disagreeing with many of its journalists and thinkers to
a startling degree ... when I've spent so much time in the USA, adore so
many of its people, admire their compassion and generosity, their optimism,
their outlook on life and work ... well, then the USA has problems. And
working them through is going to take more than the deliberate interfacing
of $2m missiles and $10 tents.
