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American Dreams

Dreams of Empire

by Rod Amis

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Ever since President Theodore Roosevelt demonstrated the efficacy of "gunboat diplomacy" at the beginning of this century, part of the new American dream has been a dream of empire. Jean and Joe Sixpack don't give a rip about what is going on in bumfuck Egypt, perhaps, but the American "establishment" --- meaning the elite and powerful --- have had imperialism on their agenda, in often bald-faced ways, throughout this era. Certain pundit types hype this last century as "The American Century."

In films like "Patton," the audience approves his dramatized speech in Britain calling for an Anglo-American hegemony, and laugh and cheer when he suggests that America should "finish the job" by running tank divisions on to Moscow.

In veiled homilies in pious speeches, President after American President talks about spreading either "democracy" (as America understands it,) "human rights" (in the American model thereof, which means less rights for Catholics, Jews, homosexuals, darkies and gooks, but more rights for marauding white people) and "free trade" (which means opening your nation's markets and natural resources to American plunder and investment.)

Under each of these guises, we have attempted --- and been highly successful --- at being the dominant cultural imperialists in this century. And now, as the brothers would say, "It's getting good" to us. That's why many countries consider us The Great Satan, Babylon, the real Evil Empire.

With the end of the Cold War, America has learned that its new mercantilism, and its trade initiatives, have been the most successful of its three-pronged attack on the rest of the world, and so we are preaching the gospel of globalization.

But everyone isn't buying it.

As evidence, we should look no further the recent New York Timespiece on the latest development in the food wars in Europe, that place most likely to accept American direction, and which we expect to be most sympathetic to our goals.

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Roger Cohen writes in "Fearful Over the Future, Europe Seizes on Food:"

Fist raised, mustache bristling, Jos* Bov* looked defiant as he handed himself in to French police in the southern town of Montpelier a few days ago. "My struggle remains the same," this farmer declared to an appreciative crowd. "The battle against globalization and for the right of peoples to feed themselves as they choose."

A Parisian-turned-sheep-farmer who moved to southwest France 20 years ago Mr. Bov* emerged this month as a sort of Subcomandante Marcos of the French countryside, the leader of a self-styled, anti-imperialist revolt over food. His crime, committed on Aug. 12, was to lead the ransacking and demolition of a McDonald's restaurant nearing completion in the southwestern town of Millau.

It was only the most conspicuous of a rash of recent protests against McDonald's, targeted not so much for anything the company has done but as a symbol of the United States and of what Mr. Bov* has called "the multinationals of foul food." His efforts have struck a chord. French labor unions, ecologists, communists and farmers have joined to demand his immediate release, burying other differences in a shared politico-gastronomic outcry.

An army, Napoleon noted, marches on its stomach, and the European forces gathering this summer in protest against what is seen as American-led globalization have abruptly focused on food. Where it was once the deployment of American Pershing-2 missiles that caused alarm, it is now McDonald's, Coca-Cola, genetically modified American corn and American beef fattened with growth hormones that have Europeans up in arms.

"Behind all this lies a rejection of cultural and culinary dispossession," said Alain Duhamel, a French political analyst. "There is a certain allergy in Europe to the extent of American power accumulated since the cold war's end, and the most virulent expression of that allergy today seems to be food."

Confused, and slightly insulted, United States citizens look at such protests with disappointed eyes. America is, after all, by its own LOUDLY REPEATED proclamation, the greatest nation on Earth. Why shouldn't everyone want to be like us?Jean and Joe ask. If where they are living is so damned great, how come so many of them furrinners are always coming over here?

Maybe for the same reason your ancestors did, Bubie. The *only* people who can say that they didn't drop everything to rush to this part of North America are African-Americans. We were brought here by force. The rest of you came voluntarily, even eagerly, so I'd be a lot less critical of other people doing the same if I were you.

Meanwhile, while white Americans whose ancestors came over in 1635 get veneration because they were among the alleged "first" settlers, the ancestors of black Americans who came over in 1619 only recently (a mere thirty years) got to use public services like toilets and water fountains, and accomodations by the "hospitality" industry of this country.

Why shoud other countries *NOT* want to be like us, indeed.

Americans don't like having a history. We deny it all the time. It is peculiar trait of white Americans to deny how recently black slavery actually occurred. I recall sitting at the Tides restaurant in Bodega Bay, California, with a woman I knew and sharing with her the tales my grandmother would tell about her father killing dogs which were set upon when he ran from the plantation. The woman was awe-struck: "I never think of slavery as being that recent," she said. Yes, I had to remind her, slavery for my family was only three generations removed, a blink of the eye of History. There had not yet been 100 years of freedom in the entire history of my family, on my father's side.

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But, to get back to the American dream of empire, the power establishment, intellectual, military, political and corporate are now salivating over the prospect that the next century, as the hegemony of globalization actually takes hold, will be the true American century. The dominace of American technology, especially computer, communications, military and aerospace technologies, is at an all-time zenith. These technologies work hand-in-hand to pave the Appian Way of cultural dominance. Resistance is futile. Other cultures will be assimilated and languages other than English are dying by the score every year.

As with most dreams, this American dream of empire contains within itself the kernel of the American nightmare. The nightmare, of course, has to do with massive global resistance to our hegemony, and engendering such antipathy around the world that other nations and their people turn against us. Whether they would be justified in doing so, as certainly a French farmer, a German film producer, a Haitian bookseller, or Osama bin Ladin would argue, is beside the point for us Americans. In our dream, they should be grateful for being introduced to truth, justice and The American Way, not resentful about the loss of their backwards, insular, and --- yes, let's say it --- piss-poor little cultures.

They should be happy that we have foisted upon them, often using the instrumentality of financing from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund whose funds are 64% under American control, regimes which accept our "liberalization" policies --- thus making their nations safe for foreign (American corporate) investment because the chance of open political change is precluded. They should be grateful that we are building our factories or contracting their existing factories to provide them with a living wage with which to extract their natural resources --- which demand in our country so sorely requires. If, in the process, their countries look a bit more likes ours year-after-year, and their people think a bit more like us, abandoning their customs and traditions, what's the great loss?

It is the way of things. Didn't Darwin posit that by means of natural selection the fittest would predominate? While we certainly have no desire to teach evolution theory to our children, the fact of social Darwinism is certainly something the rest of the world could profit by learning, is it not?