Global American: The Devastation of Language Under the Dictatorship of the Public Realm

At the bottom was the shit face grunt, at the top a Command trinity: a blue-eyed, hero-faced general (Westmoreland), a geriatrics-emergency ambassador [Averil Harriman] and a hale, heartless CIA performer. (Robert “Blowtorch” Komer, chief of COORDS, spook anagram for Other War, pacification, another word for war. If William Blake had “reported” to him that he’d seen angels in the trees, Komer would have tried to talk him out of it. Failing there, he’d have ordered defoliation.

—Michael Herr (1977)

You are quite right: I changed my mind and do no longer speak of “radical evil.” It is a long time since we last met, or we would perhaps have spoken about the subject before . . . . It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never “radical,” that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimensions. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface. It is “thought-defying,” as I said, because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its “banality.” Only the good has depth and can be radical.

—Hannah Arendt (1963)

If public life has reached a state in which thought is being turned inescapably into a commodity and language into celebration of the commodity, the attempt to trace the sources of this degradation must refuse obedience to the current linguistic and intellectual demands before it is rendered entirely futile by the consequence of those demands for world history.

—Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1944)

One

As oppositional intellectuals have claimed from the days of the beginning of the George W. Bush presidency—and, with the deepening of the quagmire in Iraq, the general American public has increasingly come to agree—this Republican administration, more than any other administration in the history of the U.S. is one that has played havoc with the constitutional checks and balances in its arrogant and self-righteous effort to wrest the power to govern from the U.S. Congress in behalf of conducting a global war against the Islamic world which it strategically has called a “global war on terror.” Long before its invasion of Iraq, this Republican president and his neoconservative intellectual deputies, aided and abetted by the fervor of the Evangelical Christian racist right, had produced an imperial scenario the end of which was, from the beginning, the “Pax Americana,” the imposition of “peace” by violence—and American style democracies—in those areas of the world, most notably, the Middle East—that constitute obstacles to America’s global hegemony. In the process—and taking strategic advantage of the “terrorist” attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11 by al-Qaeda—this regime, armed by policy experts who represent the complex dynamics of globalization in terms of the capitalist “deregulation” of the national economy (the free market)¹ and supported by the obsequious media, announced its policy of preemptive wars on “rogues states” and then invaded Afghanistan and, on the false pretext that Saddam Hussein was producing weapons of mass destruction, Iraq: a “global war on terror,” that is, which has no borders and no foreseeable end. It thus established a global geopolitical crisis situation that has rendered “homeland security” a major—and abiding—ideological priority. As a result of this strategic representation of the global occasion, the Bush presidency has tacitly established a permanent state of exception that has justified a unilateral policing of the world of nations, the torture of suspected terrorists in defiance of international law, and produced the “Patriot Act,” a climate of governmental secrecy, a national judicial system that is intent on annulling dissent, a timidity on the part of the Democratic Party in the face of the administration’s imperial foreign policies: a political system, that is to say, the logic of which, if not (yet) the actual practice, is unambiguously totalitarian.

This argument against the Bush administration and...