Irony in the Age of Empire: Comic Perspectives on Democracy and Freedom

One Laughter against Hubris: A Preemptive Strike

[ ∞∫ ] o n e Laughter against Hubris a preemptive strike Tragic Beginnings For twelve years, the United States had stood alone and uncontested as the sole world superpower. Then came the terror of September 11, the crumbling World Trade towers, the damaged face of the Pentagon, and thousands dead. The deaths and destruction prompted much speculation on the reasons for anti-American sentiments and on how the United States might exert its power with a sense of cosmopolitan responsibility. The terror also brought about widespread sympathy for the United States. When French president Jacques Chirac proclaimed that ‘‘we are all Americans now,’’ there was a real chance for the United States to exercise global leadership and to lay the groundwork for world peace. But then something went wrong. Instead of seeking world peace, the United States announced a thinly veiled and highly risky strategy for global domination. We were to be engaged in a war against terrorism without definition or end. With plans to invade Iraq, the United States lost the sympathy it had gained from the attack, and France joined with Germany to lead world opinion in the United Nations against American aggression. ‘‘When l a u g h t e r a g a i n s t h u b r i s [ ∞Ω ] France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, and Germany doesn’t want to go to war, you know something is wrong,’’ philosopher-at-large Chris Rock quipped and for good reason.1 To be sure, the U.S. has a sporadic history of imperialist invasion, but the post-9/11 agenda shifted that imperialism into high gear. The anger unleashed in the 9/11 attacks surprised Americans, who were for the most part genuinely unaware of our long history of imperialist invasion and the hostility that cultural and economic domination, let alone the presence of U.S. troops, can generate abroad. Mainstream historians have preferred to portray the United States as a passive defender of democracy, not as an active imperialist power. Those historians who portray the United States as an active empire typically insist that this imperial role is for the good. Prominent historian John Lewis Gaddis, for example, claims that the politics of the cold war required that the United States assert its power as ‘‘a new kind of empire—a democratic empire.’’2 Only a few historians have seen through such claims of American innocence as one more romance with American exceptionalism. And yet extensive empirical research demonstrates fairly clearly that, in the words of historian Marilyn Young, ‘‘US. foreign policy aims first and foremost for a ‘world safe and assessable for the American economic system’ ’’ (GP, 279). The United States rarely advances pro-democracy programs, and only then when the costs are perceived to be slight. The typical consequence of American imperialism is to subjugate foreign people, viewed as racially or culturally inferior, and to drain their resources. Even the high moral rhetoric commonly used to defend an American empire is hardly exceptional . The French and the British empires also claimed to bestow the rule of law and democracy on inferior populations. Regardless of the rhetoric, imperialism’s strategies are sadly the same: to tear down and replace preexisting socioeconomic structures with hitherto unknown systems of dependency. Whatever we might think about the historical likelihood of a moral empire, the ironies that characterized the surge of patriotism following the 9/11 attack are telling. Stunned by terror in the homeland, citizens who had enjoyed, somewhat cynically perhaps, the stock market bubble of the ’90s asked what they might give back to a nation in need. In the mood of shock and mourning that followed the terror, these citizens seemed poised to break out of the exaggerated schedules of work and consumption that had shaped the years before. President Bush, claiming to be, if not our popularly elected leader, at least our ‘‘moral leader,’’ did not call out to us to respond to the crisis with a republican ethic of sacrifice. We were not asked for the sake of the nation to ration, buy savings bonds, or trade in i r o n y i n t h e a g e o f e m p i r e [ ≤≠ ] the keys to our SUVs for some hybrid model. On the contrary, we were asked to spend, and spend lavishly, as though our lives would depend upon...