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All
That We Can Be
January
7, 2004
By The Plaid Adder
 I'd
like to begin the new year by thanking Dick Cheney for his
wonderful Christmas card. It was so thoughtful of him, especially
since I never got around to sending mine this year.
It's true that I didn't actually receive a card from
Cheney, but I'm sure that must have been an oversight. Anyway,
why do I need the actual card cluttering up my mantel when
I can find lengthy descriptions and dissections of it here,
here,
and here.
What bothered people was not the nice cosy domestic image
on the front, but the message inside:
"And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His
notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His
aid?"
What's startling about this, as all the articles I pointed
out mention, is the use of "the E-word." After all, Bush has
spent a fair amount of time explicitly denying that his doctrine
of "preventive war" is an attempt at "empire-building." It
could be that this card simply represents a little "message
confusion" in the upper echelons, much the way we spent a
couple weeks not too long ago scratching our heads as Bush
went blithely on repeating the lie about Iraq being linked
to 9/11 after his handlers had decided to drop it.
Perhaps Cheney didn't get the memo about pretending that
the Iraq war has nothing to do with imperialism. Or perhaps
he is just so used to thinking of the United States as an
empire that he forgot it might surprise people to see him
calling it that in his Christmas card. Or perhaps he was assuming
that the people he sent his Christmas card to wouldn't leak
its contents to the press, and he was hoping to enjoy a little
private chortling with him and a few hundred thousand of his
closest friends. Maybe he signed them all with a little personal
message along those lines, something like, "Shhhh! Don't tell
anyone till we're ready to reveal ourselves to the Jedi! Moohoohahaha!
Love, Dick."
Or perhaps Cheney is neither insane nor stupid, and he chose
that text as a way to get Americans ready to acknowledge,
embrace, and accept America as an empire. Because once that
happens, doing it Dick's way will no longer have to involve
a costly and time-consuming PR machine kept up and running
24 hours a day trying to dress naked imperialism up as something
Americans are more comfortable with. They've been doing pretty
well with media manipulation so far, but lately some cracks
have begun to appear in the facade, and in the end it will
probably be pretty obvious to everyone what's really going
on. The smart move would not be to count on achieving and
maintaining Stalin-style total media control; what with the
Internet, that's a lot less easy than it used to be. The smart
move would be to use American broadcast journalism, the mainstream
print media, and whatever else they have at hand to prepare
Americans for the inevitable day when it is no longer possible
to pretend that we are anything other than an empire.
After all, Cheney's Christmas card doesn't say, "Happy holidays!
For Christmas this year I built you all this really neat empire.
Hope you like it!" The text is lifted from a speech Benjamin
Franklin gave at the Constitutional Convention moving that
"henceforth, prayers imploring the assistance of heaven, and
its blessing on our deliberations, be held in this assembly
every morning before we proceed to business." The card points
out that the idea of America as an empire is not something
Cheney made up; it was bestowed on us by one of our most revered
Founding Fathers at the moment of our democracy's birth. So
how can we argue with that? It's easy enough to cast Cheney
as a bloodsucking rapacious imperial profiteer - in fact,
he looks exactly like what Central Casting would send you
if you called up and ordered a bloodsucking rapacious imperial
profiteer - but Benjamin Franklin? Surely he represents all
that is good and true about the American tradition. If he
was all right with the idea of America as an empire... if
an empire was what the founders really thought they were building...
then an empire is what we oughta be!
I have seen some columnists scrambling to account for Franklin's
use of the E-word, which appears to be so violently opposed
to the way we are used to thinking of the Founding Fathers'
conception of what the United States would be. It is true
that words change their meaning over time and we should not
anachronistically assume that Franklin meant it the same way
that Cheney did. Nevertheless, it is also true that the idea
of empire substantially predates the formation of this country,
and that we also cannot assume that Franklin did not have
some of those earlier empires in mind when he made that speech.
In my humble opinion, this quotation simply makes evident
a tension that has always been built into American history
between democratic ideals and the ugly realities that constantly
threaten them.
Let us remember that the drafting of both the Declaration
of Independence and the Constitution involved negotiations
between those who saw slavery as an evil related to the tyranny
they were resisting, and those who insisted on preserving
the institution of slavery as part of the new republic. For
a while, the minds of most Americans remained sufficiently
elastic to encompass the idea of a republic established on
the principle of liberty and justice for all systematically
depriving a significant number of its inhabitants of liberty,
justice, life, the pursuit of happiness, and just about everything
else. But before the Constitution was a hundred years old,
the strain had started to become too great; and when it came
time to decide whether we were going to be a nation of masters
and slaves or a nation of equals, we had to fight a civil
war to work it out. But the tension visible in that Franklin
quotation goes back farther than the introduction of slavery
to America.
When I was in fourth grade, we learned a horrible song called
"Fifty Nifty United States" thanks to which I can still name
all fifty states in alphabetical order. (Don't test me on
this. By the time I get to Oregon you'll be begging me to
stop.) The opening line goes, "Fifty nifty united states from
thirteen original co-lo-niiiiies..." I sang it, of course,
without an idea in my head of what a "colony" really was,
just as we learned about the "colonial" period in American
history without too much exploration of what that term meant,
and I wandered past "colonial" style houses every day on my
way back and forth to school without wondering how they came
to be called that.
If we have largely forgotten or ignored the fact that our
democracy began as a colonial enterprise, it's not because
the evidence has disappeared. Rather, we have incorporated
it into our national mythology, retelling the story to make
it better for us. Current popular knowledge of the histories
of the Plymouth and Jamestown colonies is basically limited
in each case to stories in which the English colonists collaborate,
cooperate, and bond with the Native Americans - Thanksgiving
in Plymouth, the Pocahontas/ John Smith romance for Jamestown
- instead of obliterating them, which is what ultimately happened.
We have buried the story of what happened to the indigneous
inhabitants of the land on which this country was built as
deep as it will go; but it isn't really dead. Consequently
we find ourselves driven back to the grave to pile new layers
of mythology on top of it, from Dances With Wolves to Pocahontas.
But no matter how fast we tell these stories, the fact remains
that the United States of America emerged out of a scramble
for territory in which the major European powers - at the
time, England, France, and Spain - competed to see whose empire
would grow the fastest and last the longest.
Now of course we have been used to getting around all this
by thinking of the American revolution as the point at which
those thirteen colonies stopped being part of an empire and
became the kernel of a new democracy. But the reality is that
nothing that happened at the Constitutional Convention changed
the basic relationship that imperialism had established between
the English colonists and the indigenous peoples they were
displacing. Everyone in the assembly Franklin was addressing
when he gave that speech would have realized - if the question
ever arose - that they could not afford to do so. They would
already have known that the survival of their new country
would depend on the ability to expand into new territories,
displacing new indigenous peoples as they appropriated the
land and resources they had formerly been using. The "empire"
that Franklin foresaw arising - with God's help - was the
one that eventually stretched westward across the continent.
If we don't think of the continental united states as an
"empire," that's only because our forefathers were so successful
at displacing the other European colonial powers (France and
Spain) and exterminating or containing the Native American
peoples who stood in our way that nobody has the power to
remind us of it. The imperial strain of American history shows
a little more clearly in our history of offshore expansion;
the history of how Hawaii became one of those "fifty nifty
United States" is painful to read, as is the story of the
Spanish-American War, a turn-of-the-century exercise in cynical
empire-building that produced, among other things, Mark Twain's
masterpiece of disillusionment, The War Prayer.
So. Looking back at American history from this angle, it
appears that Cheney's Christmas card was only stating the
obvious. We started out as an empire, we have always been
an empire, and in 2004 we can look forward to becoming an
even bigger empire. How can we argue with that?
Well, I'll argue with anything. Yes, we raised the structure
of our democracy on the foundations of an empire; and yes,
at certain times in American history, the mismatch between
these two structures becomes so obvious and severe that the
whole thing looks like it's about to crumble. But an empire
is not all we've ever been. There are also times in
American history when those democratic ideals written into
the Constitution become something more than a fig leaf; when
a real commitment to the idea of equality and justice for
all has been allowed to threaten the basic presumption of
entitlement on which America was founded. Because those ideals
have never been perfectly embodied in our actual government,
that doesn't mean that they're not real, or that they don't
matter. But if we want them to be real, if we want
them to matter, we cannot indulge our imperial strain to the
point where it wipes out everything else. Empire has always
been part of what we are. But it does not have to be
all that we can be.
And this brings me back to 2004 and Cheney's Christmas card.
If his use of the E-word shocks and appalls today in a way
that it didn't shock and appall when Franklin used it in 1787,
it's because our own government is displaying the greed, brutality,
and sheer self-destructive powerhunger that characterize imperialism
more clearly than it ever has in our lifetimes. They are gorging
the empire to the point where it will eventually absorb and
annihilate the democracy. And although Cheney and his gang
must take responsibility for that, it must also in part be
attributed to the fact that there is currently no other legitimate
world power capable of stopping us, or even encouraging prudent
restraint. We are not just an empire right now; we
are the empire. That wasn't good for the British; it
wasn't good for the Romans; and it's not going to be good
for us.
Left to themselves - especially under the kind of ruthless,
imprudent leadership we are enjoying right now - empires expand
until they are no longer sustainable. It's not encouraging
to reflect that for a long time Afghanistan has been where
empires go to die. The British empire found its limits there;
so did the Soviets'. We may not have found our limits yet;
but if we let Cheney and his friends keep doing what they're
doing, we'll find them eventually. And after the rise, comes
the fall.
Cheney isn't thinking about the fall, of course. Every empire
believes that it will be the one to break the trend and last
forever, just as every empire's citizens find ways of believing
that their empire isn't really an empire at all. For
the British, the lie of choice was the one Kipling set to
verse in The White Man's Burden: that they didn't want
all these colonial possessions, it was simply their duty
to conquer the world in order to civilize it. Our lie, for
a long time, has been the idea that we are bringing democracy
to the places we conquer; now, we are supplementing it with
a new lie, which is that the more we invade, the safer we
will become. Well, we're still at orange alert even with Saddam
in the can; and I'll tell you what, as long as we're The Empire,
we're never going back to green. Nobody has ever loved The
Empire. And if we want to be safe, we're going to have to
work out a way to be something else.
The Plaid Adder's demented ravings have been delighting
an equally demented online audience since 1996. More of the
same can be found at the Adder's
Lair. Happy new year, everyone.
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