Each day I
watch the TV news images of American soldiers on the streets of Baghdad and
wonder if the same images are shown in the United States. If they are shown, I
wonder why the people do not rise up in revolt. Each day I feel a deep sympathy
for the infinite loneliness of the American soldier in Iraq.
The soldier
in dust-colored camouflage uniform and helmet, his bullet-proof vest (not
really bullet- proof and certainly not bomb-proof, as I see each day: five of
them died yesterday in Baghdad alone), brandishing his automatic weapon,
standing alone at a Baghdad checkpoint, an empty look on his face (though he is
terrified and wonders how he got into this chaos), surrounded by a world he
does not understand, by people speaking a language he does not understand, in
the middle of a war he does not understand, this bewildered American seems to
be the loneliest man in the world.
Because I
am an American, I watch this soldier sadly. I think that there stands the
emblem of America�s isolation in the world. And I think also that something
is dreadfully wrong in a country that still has a supply of volunteers to go to
the deserts to kill strangers with super weapons and drop firebombs on cities
from invisible planes in the stratosphere . . . and with a 10 percent chance of
being killed themselves for the worst possible reasons.
Beyond
politics, beyond the questions of war and peace, I wonder about Americans in
general, so lonely in the universe. A whole people feeling the loneliness you
feel behind locked doors. Behind walls. A kind of vacancy. What is it that
other people have and we Americans do not? Or what do Americans have that
others do not? Why are Americans different? I do not believe it was always that
way. But it is today. And it is a mystery.
Recently I
began asking friends in Italy where I have lived for over three decades those
questions. Italians say that Americans are spoiled; they have it too good; they
haven�t suffered enough. Europeans often think of Americans as children,
difficult children, with a childlike air of impregnability about them, whom
real life has not yet touched.
But there
is no clear answer. Europeans do not understand my questions. I think my questions
are not clear. Few Europeans admit that they consider Americans fundamentally
different from other human beings. Few admit to anti-Americanism. For most
people in the world we all belong to the same species. We are all just men. We
all must aspire to feeling a oneness with the world.
Still, old
friends in Europe occasionally ask me what I as an American think about one
thing or another. They ask because they see how different things are in
America. What do I think about ordinary things like national health services
and pension plans, about unemployment compensation and welfare, about electoral
systems and democracy? How is it possible, some ask, that America�s powerful
presidents are elected by a minority? Very often they ask about the death penalty,
non-existent in Europe. Today in these times, the most frequent questions
concern war.
Now, some
Americans might believe my answers to such questions are obvious: that of
course I as a progressive favor a national health service for America, pension
plans, unemployment compensation, welfare, immigrants, a multiparty political
system, democracy, oppose capital punishment and reject war.
Still, that
is not my point, either. I believe Europeans really want to ask what is wrong
with America. Not wrong in the ethical sense of right and wrong. But wrong as
in astray, as in to go wrong, But they do not know how to frame the question.
They too speak of the differences of the nation of America but I believe that
without realizing it they too want to know why Americans as individuals are
different from other peoples.
What is
missing in Americans? For example, what do Mexican people have that Americans
lack?
When I
settled in Europe in the sixties, Americans were still broadly well received
throughout the continent; America still had a lot of credit for its help in
World War II and for the Marshall Plan, although already then admiration was
mixed with envy and resentment at American success and arrogance. Here I should
say straight away that Americans were then well received except by part of the
skeptical European Left that, as it turned out, was right in its suspicions.
The
pre-Vietnam years were still good years for Americans. America was leading the
�free world� alliance against the Soviet Union: Moscow�s quashing of the
Hungarian revolution in 1956 and the Prague rebellion in 1968 covered America�s
spreading dark spots in matters like Watergate, the crushing of democracy in
Latin America and the growing involvement in Vietnam. The existence of the �evil�
Soviet Union and the Cold War gave America�s rulers a free hand as it did for
another two decades.
Though as a
rule most governments lie to the governed, it was precisely the great Cold War
lie that poisoned America and Americans. For it was a lie. In the name of
anti-Communism, everything was permitted. Everything was justified in the same
way everything is permitted today in the name of anti-terrorism. America was
good. God was on America�s side. Few Americans doubted. My generation hardly
even considered the question of right or wrong, of good or evil. Everything was
clear: Communism and the Soviet Union were evil; America was blessed by God.
The most
virulent anti-Communist propaganda filled the eighties: nuclear warfare scares,
statistics and testimony showing that Communism�s conquest of the world was
imminent; Soviet military-economic power was a terrible thing. What a surprise
then for the Soviet experts that at the end of that same decade the Berlin Wall
fell and overnight the whole shebang collapsed. It was a paper tiger.
Yet, by
then more Europeans had begun doubting the state of American democracy. The
category of skeptics broadened. Vietnam and American support of dictatorships
from Chile to Nicaragua, from Iran to the Philippines, eroded doubts among many
Europeans in whose minds America was now becoming the �empire of evil.� In
America, dissident voices were labeled anti-American, Communist traitors -- and
today, terrorists.
In Europe
today, it is no longer a question of what reactionary Washington labels the
European Left�s �visceral anti-Americanism.� The sad reality is that antipathy
to this America has infected many if not most Europeans.� Now it has
become a question of right and wrong, of good and evil.
Though most
Americans believe in the myth of their democracy, European polls show an
America far down the list of developed democracies. The criteria have to do
with electoral systems (no one understands the American system!), political
representation, the distribution of real powers, etc. For example, surprise,
surprise, Germany�s democratic parliamentary system stands at the top of many
lists.
Some
Americans reductively think anti-Americanism is a question of hate and envy of
America. But it is not true. It is my experience and the opinion of Italians,
or French, or Dutch, or Germans, or Danes, that the quality of life in Europe
is simply much higher than in America perennially preoccupied with comfort and
ease. This is not to say that Europeans are not greedy and avaricious for creature
comforts. On the contrary. They are. Yet, because of social correctors within
the market economy, because of the social state, the poor in Europe are less
poor than in America. Can any sane person believe Europe is craving for fast
food joints and endless shopping malls and national flags and advertising
banners waving everywhere and God on the lips of its fundamentalist leaders? Is
this the progress America wants to export and go to war for?
The truth
is Europeans see America as the land where the rich get richer and the poor get
poorer. They see a government that does little for its citizens in a land where
the word social is taboo. And God has nothing to do with it.
Nor is it
true, as many Americans might like to think, that Europeans want to be like
them. Italian emigration to the USA? No more! Many Italians visit America or go
to shop there -- everything costs less with European currency since the dollar
has been artificially devalued in order to make Europe pay for the war in Iraq.
But today I know no Italian who would like to live in America. But I know many
Americans who would like to live in Italy. Though it is true that a tiny
minority of Europeans still hold to America and imitate it, they are not the
best of Europeans.
Perhaps
never before have the differences between Americans and Europeans been greater.
But why? What is it? Who is at fault? Why this gulf?
Politics
and economics and peace and war apart, I believe it is a question of Americans�
uncertain place in the human race. When I write here Americans, I admit
I have in mind white conservative Americans of European heritage of the great
American heartland. And also those who spend so much time speaking of tolerance
and trying to decide which politically correct label to attach to Blacks and
Indians and Latinos -- as if �African American� and �Indigenous American� and
�Hispanic American� made things right. It is my experience that the majority of
these Americans are not on the same wavelength as other people in the world.
Oh, the accused
will gasp and say how na�ve! How anti-American! How narrow-minded! How
prejudiced! The fact remains that as human beings Latin Americans are on the
same wavelength as other people in the world. Russians are. Arabs are. Asians
are. Most black Americans and Latinos and Indians are.
So why not most white Americans? Many will be surprised --
though they shouldn�t be -- to hear that they are regarded in some of Europe in
the same way they are among the ghettos of blacks and browns in LA or Miami or
New York City.
And their government is largely at fault.
Their government, their society, and their lonely culture.
American
tourists today cut pitiful figures traipsing curiously around Europe, seeing
only quaintness and cuteness and condescendingly trying to imitate. They make
countless digital snapshots but never quite get the real picture. As if living
a year in a Tuscan village were bridging the gap. The local people will drink
wine with you. They will reach out to you. They will try to love you. They want
to be able to feel the real you. To feel that you are like them.
But, I
fear, they will never understand you or even grasp why you are there. For
Americans are a people of many emotions and sensations but embarrassed
by feelings.
Even more.
Such false relationships are symbolic of the more profound differences, the
chasm separating Americans from the rest of the world. How, the European
wonders, can a citizen of the leading power of the civilized world support the
death penalty? Just think about that one point for a moment. How can you
explain legalized state murder to a person who considers it barbarous?
Or, the
average European wonders, how can a majority of voters in the land of freedom
support a system dedicated to crushing freedom? How can citizens of the land of
democracy vote for a government that sponsors dictatorships around the world
and calls them democracy? How can a democratic nation exist in a political
system of two parties, which though they have different points of departure and
programs, in power are so similar as to form a one-party system? How can a
people ready to go to war to export democracy sacrifice its own democracy in
the process?
The mystery
is why a majority of Americans who bother to vote sustain a government that
fears and hates democracy and its own Constitution as ours does? Why are
Americans as chained to their leaders as convicts are chained to their guards?
And why do they tolerate a government that needs a wall around America?
Which leads
inevitably to the danger of the gradual but inevitable degeneration of an
enduring ideology based on anti-Communism, anti-Socialism, anti-terrorism, all
of course with God�s special blessing and protection, straight into Fascism.
One could
think that Americans are retiring from the world. That they have forgotten the
rest of the human species. That they no longer even have the same weaknesses
and strengths of other people. That they stand outside even themselves.
Outside, and alone.
People from
the prison of the former Soviet Union were once like that -- when they were let
out they saw the rest of the world with astonished eyes.
I have not
answered my question. I still do not know if I have posed the question
correctly. We Americans want brief and concise answers to clear questions.
Maybe that in itself is part of my point.
I feel ill
at ease writing this. I am uncertain. I am sad. I am not objective. But life is
not objective. Life is not accommodation. Life is not concise. Human life
cannot be reduced to a few precise sentences. Life is not a short short story.
Life is past, present and future.
Yet,
Americans are different. In a negative sense. My gut feeling is that it is due
to a lack of real connections with the rest. No wonder the national paranoia.
No wonder America�s sense of loneliness.
Hopefully,
Americans will begin to search for their lost kinship with the rest. For it
will always be true as the English poet John Donne wrote, �No man is an island,
apart from the main.�
Gaither
Stewart grew up in Asheville, North Carolina. After studies at the University
of California at Berkeley and other American universities, he settled first in
Germany, then in Italy. Following a career in journalism as Italian
correspondent for the Rotterdam daily newspaper Algemeen Dagblad and
contributor to the press in several European countries, he began writing
fiction full-time five years ago. Since then he has authored three novels and
two short-story collections. He has resided in Italy, Germany, The Netherlands,
France, Russia and Mexico. Today he lives with his wife, Milena, in the hills
of north Rome.