Complicity

Anyone who comes in from the outside quickly learns that the people of the U$A are the most un/misinformed in the developed world, that the country is one where there is no public debate about any of the essential issues of our time. Capitalism versus socialism, productivism, consumerism, and imperialism—all are carefully erased, dispersed, always already irrelevant. And indeed, along with "the lies my teacher told me"¹ and a debased electoral system,² the media are certainly the most important vector of this unique combination of ignorance, prejudice, and helplessness.

But what else, one is tempted to ask, is new? So forgive me if I do not address questions of media studies, which anyway are not really in my ken. Instead, let me set forth briefly—and rather peremptorily, I am afraid—my objection to an assumption that seems to underlie all of these essays, one that sets the manipulators against the manipulated, the guilty ruling classes and their media flunkies against the innocent masses. Christopher Sharrett states this assumption thus: "Knowing the historical context of U.S. state operations is important to understanding how provoked or fabricated crises and a propaganda system that collaborates in this deception are necessary to gain public acceptance of policies that would otherwise be abhorrent."

Really? Abhorrent to all Americans? I wonder. This kind of rhetoric belongs to a stalwart left tradition that probably has a Greek name and that consists of feigning to believe that "the people," or "the workers," implicitly share the consciousness of a lucid vanguard (feminists have been guilty of the same oratorical sleight of hand). As such, of course, it is a touching stamp of authenticity: all of these authors are fighting to keep alive the materialist values of the Left, and I salute their efforts. However, this distant observer—and until recently regular visitor—suspects on the contrary that there is a deep tacit complicity between those directly responsible for U$ actions abroad, judged abhorrent indeed by most of the rest of the world, and the mindset of the vast majority of people living in "America," whose usurped denomination has always hinted at its hegemonic vocation.

That complicity has a name. Bush senior spelled it out when he defended the U$ refusal to adhere to the Kyoto protocol—meant to start containing the greenhouse effect—in the name of "the American way of life." This brazen contempt for the planet and the future of humanity failed to arouse substantial protest in the United States. Was it simply for lack of information? Or was it because the immense majority of the Bush family's compatriots—not just the alienated born-againers in the Bible Belt—are happy to benefit from that way of life . . . even its K-Mart tag ends? And because they have been trained to live in an eternal present. And I include most of the well-paid academics who constitute the backbone of the liberal and the Radical Left in the country. As Bush juniorand the rest of that gang know, if you are not going to reduce the consumption of gasoline, then you need new resources (hence the Alaska scandal, the campaign against Cesar Chavez, and the war to get Saddam's oil). And the electorate seems less and less disturbed about massacring a lot of gooks "out there," in that mostly fictional world that 80 percent of Americans have never visited.

Terry Eagleton suggests that the popularity in the United States of postmodernist ideology is a way of coping with a lived contradiction:

This doctrine . . . is currently being deployed by some to defend the American way of life. . . . In order to avoid the unwelcome conclusion that there is no rational justification for one's form of life, one must seek to disable the very idea of critique itself, branding it as necessarily "metaphysical," "transcendent," "absolute," or "foundational."³

The American way of life has many dimensions, most of them pernicious,⁴ but Bush père was referring in fact to that culture of consumption/ WASTE (the latter being the obliterated face of the American way of life) that along...