Meget god artikkel fra The Guardian, med mange gode poenger, selv om
skribenten nok glorifiserer vårt hjemlige EU-monster og kommentaren om
Kosovo er best forbigått i stillhet.
Mvh,
Per
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The lesson from America is that Europe is our only hope:
The United States has become insufferable as it has grown all-powerful
By Polly Toynbee
The land of the free now wields an absolute power, free of responsibility,
such as the world has never known. The rest of the globe watches its
elections with renewed anguish as powerless spectators and demi-subjects.
The two conventions displayed all that is most repugnant and alien in a
political system corrupted beyond recognition in the democratic world.
The $100m campaigns lift off in an obscene haze of sanctimonious, lachrymose
religiosity, oozing family unction and lies. With 77 days to go and
contenders neck and neck in the polls, George W Bush says that Jesus is his
guiding influence, Al Gore and Joe Lieberman share a prayer with reporters
and both campaigns promise instant gratification and no sacrifice for
anything or anyone ever. Dishonest fantasy politics turn America into an
out-of-control, self-absorbed, infantilised monster.
The richer, stronger and more globally unaccountable America becomes, the
more self-centred its politics grows. The end of the cold war should have
brought great psychological dividends. Generous in global victory, free of
paranoia and with wealth beyond imagining, here at last was its chance to
become what it has always believed itself to be - the brave, the beautiful,
the free and so on.
The high-flown rhetoric of the conventions is echoed in every high school
valedictory speech, in every rotary and church, pledging allegiance to a
constitution that has lost any vision of society beyond the pursuit of
happiness. God's chosen people, uniquely blessed, nurture a self-image
almost as deranged in its profound self-delusion as the old Soviet Union.
The most advanced, knowledgeable, educated, psychoanalysed, therapised
nation on earth knows nothing of itself, irony-free and blind to the world
around it.
This is the indictment:
• Global warming: both poles are now melting and the process can never be
stopped or reversed without America. The US federal government report on
climate change itself predicted a 5-10C heat increase this century, with
attendant fires, droughts and floods. A quarter of the world's population
consumes 80% of its energy, most in the US. At Kyoto the US agreed to a very
modest 7% cut in emissions by 2010. Congress refused to ratify it and since
then America's emissions have increased by over 20%.
The Republicans deny the cause of global warming, Democrats say nothing of
cuts. As a result other countries are now sliding out of Kyoto promises,
finding loopholes. Why should politicians in France or Germany take huge
political pain in demanding cuts from their voters when the monster across
the Atlantic goes on guzzling? With global power should come global
responsibility to lead, but it doesn't.
• Defence: Congress's refusal to sign the comprehensive test ban treaty last
October virtually urges others to acquire their own weapons. The Bush camp
talks of tearing up the 1972 anti-ballistic missile treaty. Both parties are
committed to the insane national missile defence system, putting the US
under an umbrella protecting it from imaginary threats by "rogue" states
that might lob a missile across, presumably unafraid of retaliation. It will
end the old mutually assured destruction policy by which the world survived
the cold war. Costing $60bn, it works even less well than the smart bombs of
recent wars but still arouses fear and anger in China and Russia. Zbigniew
Brzezinski calls it the mentality of the "internationally gated community".
Such isolationism will make the US role as a good global police force less
likely: already political cowardice at losing any US soldier's life damaged
its moral credibility in a genuinely unself-interested intervention in
Kosovo.
• The third world: the US promised $600m towards the relief of third-world
debt, with 25 countries partly aided by the end of this year. Not a penny
has been paid because Congress refused. The rhetoric was good - a recent US
poll showed half the population thought the problem already solved - but
even Uganda, the exemplary "good" poor country, has still received nothing.
Following US parsimony, the EU and Japan have been dragging their heels too.
If the world's richest country, whose GNP has risen by a third in five
years, hasn't paid, why should anyone else? Then there are the world trade
negotiations, wrecked instead of saved by US political selfishness.
• Poverty: a nation that does next to nothing about its own poor is unlikely
to offer much to other countries. While US stock market values have
increased five-fold in a decade, with half of all shares owned by 1% of the
people, welfare has been cut to a five-year lifetime limit. With 40% of the
people not covered by medical insurance, Medicare for the elderly is being
cut by $115bn - and the Republicans promise far worse to come.
Virtually all the income gains of the last five years have been enjoyed by
the top 20% of the population. The real value of the minimum wage is still
below what it was in John F Kennedy's day, income distribution as unequal as
in the 1920s. (Bill Gates' wealth is equal to that of the entire bottom 40%
of the nation). The poor go to jail in a country that imprisons more than
any dictatorship - 5% of adult males are under "correction". Some 3,500
people await execution on death row; 580 have been executed since the
Supreme Court lifted its ban.
This is not the portrait of a civilised modern state. We are deceived by
history. We are deceived by the myriad rainbow wonders of America, this
mighty engine of invention and imagination, of creativity and enthusiasm
from sea to shining sea. Europeans visit New York, San Francisco or Cape
Cod, read the great American novelists and intellectuals, revel in America's
popular culture, films and art and admire the super-sophistication of its
academic discourse.
It's rather like visiting St Petersburg before the revolution, wondering at
the brilliance of Tolstoy, Pushkin, Chekhov, Dostoevsky or maybe Fabergé,
while trying to disregard the Tsar. The US constitution is kept on a mighty
altar and lowered into a bomb-proof shelter at night as if it were indeed
the guarantor of freedom: all it proves is that constitutions, freedoms of
speech or information are only a small part of a good society. (The Soviet
constitution was a pretty good document too.)
In elections there is always a better and worse. Bush is terrifying - in
hock to oil and arms, promising a $1.3 trillion tax cut to the exclusive
benefit of the top few. Gore is better. But whoever wins, America's dismal
failure to address the key questions with any realism must strengthen
European resolution on future unity. The life, views, values, ideas and
politics of any town or village anywhere in the EU feels much more like home
than any small town in middle America these days. The more we look at alien
America, the more European we feel and the stronger we need to become.
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