The Rhetorical Dialectics of Citizenship, Deception, Violence, and Empire

The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum. By James W. Cook. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001; pp xv + 314. $45 cloth; $19.95 paper.

The Body Politic: Foundings, Citizenship, and Difference in the American Political Imagination. By Catherine A. Holland. New York: Routledge, 2001; pp xxxii + 196. $85 cloth; $24.95 paper.

The Humblest May Stand Forth: Rhetoric, Empowerment, and Abolition. By Jacqueline Bacon. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002; pp xiv + 291. $39.95 cloth.

Making Patriots. By Walter Berns. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001; pp xiv + 150. $20 cloth.

The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. By Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker. Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 2000; pp 433. $18 paper.

The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum's America. By Benjamin Reiss. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001; pp x + 267. $29.95 cloth.

The horrors of 9/11 forced Americans to confront one of the unsettling results of our international economic, military, and cultural dominance: that those who live in the shadow of Empire, whether poverty-stricken vagabonds or jet-setting Third World oil barons, harbor a mighty loathing of the nation they perceive as exploiting their indigenous resources, hampering their local aspirations to power, and trampling their cultural specificity. Regardless of whether Al-Qaeda and its associated murderers struck out of hatred for the broad principles of modern secular democracy (the root of the "clash of civilizations" view favored by many on the Right) or out of resentment for specific results of U.S. global dominance (the root of the "blowback" view favored by many on the Left), it seems clear that as U.S. influence has extended to the farthest corners of the earth, so we—like the Roman, Greek, Spanish, Dutch, French, British, Japanese, and German empires before ours—have become inextricably interwoven in a labyrinth of indigenous economic, political, cultural, and increasingly military struggles. Such entanglements are one of the many unavoidable costs of internationalism. Blaming the existence of these struggles on the United States is as silly as expecting it to withdraw from them; rather, the pragmatist confronts the reality of U.S. Empire with the hope of expanding democratic practices, reducing violence and injustice, and ultimately producing a vocabulary capable of persuading anyone who will listen that there can be no peace without justice, no democracy without equality, and no freedom without meaningful civic engagement of all segments of society. The fate of democracy both at home and abroad is therefore an inherently rhetorical question of how to articulate these values in morally persuasive terms.

Whether one sees the global expansion of U.S. power as part of the noble advance of Western values, or as part of the ever-encroaching slur of global capitalism, or, as I do, as a phenomenon so complicated that no overarching narrative can make sense of it, the fact remains that much of the world sees U.S. international power in distressed if not downright disgusted terms. The pressing question, then, is not so much what we Americans think our government and investment portfolios are doing as what our international neighbors think they are doing. The post-9/11 battle for international legitimacy therefore raises the rhetorical question of how to explain U.S. actions to an international community increasingly dubious about a broad array of economic, cultural, and military developments that for better or worse are being loosely lumped together by much of the world as part of some ominous U.S. agenda. While many if not most Americans seem uninterested in such questions, the rest of the world is asking with increasing dismay why the United States supports dictatorships in Pakistan, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and Colombia? Why is it fighting a war in the name of democracy while destroying free speech at home? Why does its hunting Taliban...