Step Across This Line (34 page)

MARCH 1999: GLOBALIZATION

A couple of years ago a British literary festival (at Hay-on-Wye) staged a public debate on the motion that “it is the duty of every European to resist American culture.” Along with two American journalists (one of whom was Sidney Blumenthal, now more famous as a Clinton aide and impeachment witness), I opposed the motion. I’m happy to report that we won, capturing roughly 60 percent of the audience’s vote. But it was an odd sort of victory. My American co-panelists were surprised by the strength of the audience’s anti-Americanism—after all, 40 percent of them had voted for the motion. Sidney, noting that “American culture” as represented by its armed forces had liberated Europe from Nazism not all that many years ago, was puzzled by the audience’s apparent lack of gratitude. And there was a residual feeling that the case for “resistance” was actually pretty strong.

Since that day, the debate about cultural globalization and its military-political sidekick, intervention, has continued to intensify, and anti-American sentiment is on the increase. In most people’s heads, globalization has come to mean the worldwide triumph of Nike, Gap, and MTV, the metamorphosis of Planet Earth into McWorld. Confusingly, we want these goods and services when we behave as consumers, but with our cultural hats on we have begun to deplore their omnipresence.

On the merits of intervention, even greater confusion reigns. We don’t seem to know if we want a world policeman or not. If the “international community,” which these days is little more than a euphemism for the United States, fails to intervene promptly in Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, it is excoriated for that failure. Elsewhere, it is criticized just as vehemently when it does intervene: when American bombs fall on Iraq, or when American agents assist in the capture of the PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan.

Clearly, those of us who shelter under the pax Americana are deeply ambivalent about it, and the United States will no doubt continue to be surprised by the level of the world’s ingratitude. The globalizing power of American culture is opposed by an improbable alliance that includes everyone from cultural-relativist liberals to hard-line fundamentalists, with all manner of pluralists and individualists, to say nothing of flag-waving nationalists and splintering sectarians, in between.

Much ecological concern is presently being expressed about the crisis in biodiversity, the possibility that a fifth or more of the earth’s species of living forms may soon become extinct. To some, globalization is an equivalent social catastrophe, with equally alarming implications for the survival of true cultural diversity, of the world’s precious localness: the Indianness of India, the Frenchness of France.

Amid this din of global defensiveness, little thought is given to some of the most important questions raised by a phenomenon that, like it or not, isn’t going away anytime soon. For instance: do cultures actually exist as separate, pure, defensible entities? Is not mélange, adulteration, impurity, pick ’n’ mix at the heart of the idea of the modern, and hasn’t it been that way for most of this all-shook-up century? Doesn’t the idea of pure cultures, in urgent need of being kept free from alien contamination, lead us inexorably toward apartheid, toward ethnic cleansing, toward the gas chamber? Or, to put it another way: are there other universals besides international conglomerates and the interests of super-powers? And if by chance there were a universal value that might, for the sake of argument, be called freedom, whose enemies—tyranny, bigotry, intolerance, fanaticism—were the enemies of us all; and if this “freedom” were discovered to exist in greater quantity in the countries of the West than anywhere else on earth; and if, in the world as it actually exists, rather than in some unattainable Utopia, the authority of the United States were the best current guarantor of that “freedom”; then might it not follow that to oppose the spread of American culture would be to take up arms against the wrong foe?

By agreeing what we are against, we discover what we are for. André Malraux believed that the third millennium must be the age of religion.
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I would say rather that it must be the age in which we finally grow out of our need for religion. But to cease to believe in our gods is not the same thing as commencing to believe in nothing. There are fundamental freedoms to fight for, and it will not do to doom to their fates the terrorized women of Afghanistan or of the circumcision-happy lands of Africa by calling their oppression their “culture.” And of course it is America’s duty not to abuse its pre-eminence, and our right to criticize such abuses when they happen—when, for example, innocent factories in Sudan are bombed, or Iraqi civilians pointlessly killed.
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But perhaps we, too, need to rethink our easy condemnations. Sneakers, burgers, blue jeans, and music videos aren’t the enemy. If the young people of Iran now insist on rock concerts, who are we to criticize their cultural contamination? Out there are real tyrants to defeat. Let’s keep our eyes on the prize.

APRIL 1999: ROCK MUSIC

I recently asked Vaclav Havel about his admiration for the American rock icon Lou Reed. He replied that it was impossible to overstate the importance of rock music for the Czech resistance during the years of darkness between the Prague Spring and the collapse of Communism. I was just relishing the mental image of the leaders of the Czech underground grooving to the sound of the Velvet Underground playing “Waiting for the Man,” “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” or “All Tomorrow’s Parties” when Havel added, with a straight face, “Why do you think we called it the Velvet Revolution?” I took this to be an instance of Havel’s deadpan humor, but it was a joke of the sort that reveals another, less literal truth; a generational truth, perhaps, because for popular music fans of a certain age the ideas of rock and revolution are inseparably linked. “You say you want a revolution,” John Lennon had sneered at us. “Well, you know, / We all want to change the world.” And indeed with the passage of the years I had come to think of this linkage as little more than youthful romanticism. So the discovery that a real revolution had been inspired by rock music’s glamorous snarl was pretty moving. It felt like a sort of validation.
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Because now that nobody smashes guitars or protests about much anymore, now that rock ’n’ roll is middle-aged and corporate and the turnover of the leading mega-groups exceeds that of small nation-states, now that it’s music for older people remembering their salad days while the kids listen to gangsta rap, trance music, and hip-hop, and Bob Dylan and Aretha Franklin get invited to sing at presidential inaugurals, it’s easy to forget the form’s oppositional origins, its anti-Establishment heyday. Yet rock ’n’ roll’s rough, confident spirit of rebellion may be one reason why this strange, simple, overwhelming noise conquered the world nearly half a century ago, crossing all frontiers and barriers of language and culture to become only the third globalized phenomenon in history after the two World Wars. It was the sound of liberation, and so it spoke to the free spirits of young people everywhere, and so also, of course, our mothers didn’t like it.

After she became aware of my fondness for Bill Haley, Elvis, and Jerry Lee Lewis, my own alarmed mother began eagerly to advocate the virtues of Pat Boone, a man who once sang a sentimental ballad addressed to a mule. But singing to mules wasn’t what I was after. I was trying to imitate the curl of Presley’s lips and the swoon-inducing rotation of his hips, and I suspect boys everywhere, from Siberia to Patagonia, were doing the same.

What sounded and felt to us like freedom looked to the adult world like bad behavior, and in a way both things are true. Pelvis-wiggling and guitar-smashing are indeed liberty’s childish fringe; but it’s also true, in all sorts of ways we have learned much more about as adults, that freedom is dangerous. Freedom, that ancient foot-tapping anarchy, the Dionysiac antithesis of Pat Boone: a higher and wilder virtue than good behavior and, for all its spirit of hairy late-night rebellion, far less likely than blind obedience and line-toeing convention to do serious damage. Better a few trashed hotel suites than a trashed world.

But there is that in us which doesn’t want to be free; which prefers discipline and acceptance and patriotic local tunes to the wild loose-haired love-music of the world. There is that in us which wishes simply to go along with the crowd, and to blame all naysayers and pelvis-wigglers for rocking our comfortable boat. “Don’t follow leaders,” Bob Dylan warned in “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “Watch the parking meters.” Yet we continue to want to be led, to follow petty warlords and murderous ayatollahs and nationalist brutes, or to suck our thumbs and listen quiescently to nanny states that insist they know what’s best for us. So tyrants abound from Bombay to Mumbai, and even those of us who are notionally free peoples are no longer, for the most part, very rock ’n’ roll.

The music of freedom frightens people and unleashes all manner of conservative defense mechanisms. As long as Orpheus could raise his voice in song, the Maenads could not kill him. Then they screamed, and their shrill cacophony drowned his music, and then their weapons found their mark, and he fell, and they tore him limb from limb.

Screaming against Orpheus, we too become capable of murder. The collapse of Communism, the destruction of the Iron Curtain and the Wall, was supposed to usher in a new era of liberty. Instead, the post–Cold War world, suddenly formless and full of possibility, scared many of us stiff. We retreated behind smaller iron curtains, built smaller stockades, imprisoned ourselves in narrower, ever more fanatical definitions of ourselves—religious, regional, ethnic—and readied ourselves for war.

Today, as the thunder of one such war drowns out the sweet singing of our better selves, I find myself nostalgic for the old spirit of independence and idealism that once, set infectiously to music, helped bring another war (in Vietnam) to an end. But at present the only music in the air is a dead march.

MAY 1999: MORON OF THE YEAR

In the battle for the hotly contested title of International Moron of the Year, two heavyweight contenders stand out. One is the Austrian writer Peter Handke, who has astonished even his most fervent admirers by his current series of impassioned apologias for the genocidal regime of Slobodan Milosevic; and who, during a recent visit to Belgrade, received the Order of the Serbian Knight for his propaganda services. Handke’s previous idiocies include the suggestion that Sarajevo’s Muslims regularly massacred themselves and then blamed the Serbs; and his denial of the genocide carried out by Serbs at Srebrenica. Now he likens the NATO aerial bombardment to the alien invasion in the movie
Mars Attacks!
and then, foolishly mixing his metaphors, compares the Serbs’ sufferings to the Holocaust.

His rival in folly is the movie star Charlton Heston. As president of the U.S. National Rifle Association, Heston made a response to the massacre of innocents recently perpetrated by young Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, that was a masterpiece of the moronic. Heston thinks America should arm its teachers; he seems to believe that schools would be safer if staff had the power to gun down the children in their charge. (Little Johnny reaches into a pocket for a pencil—and Blam! Blam! his geography teacher blows him away.)

I will not draw glib parallels between NATO’s aerial bombardments and the Colorado killings. No, the larger violence did not breed the lesser. Nor should too much be read into the accidental echo between Milosevic’s Hitlerian tendencies and the lethal celebration of Hitler’s birthday by the so-called Trench-coat Mafia; or the even more eerie assonance between the video-game mentality of the Colorado killers and the real-life aerial videos the NATO publicists show us every day.

In the matter of the war, let’s agree, too, that it’s okay to feel ambivalent about the confused, changing-policy-on-the-hoof manner of the NATO action. One minute we’re told Milosevic’s savage retaliatory assault on Kosovo couldn’t have been foreseen; the next minute we hear that it should have been. Or again: we’re not going to use ground troops. On second thought, maybe we are. And our war aims? Strictly limited; we seek only to create a safe haven to which the Kosovar refugees can return. No, no, we’re going to march into Belgrade and get Milosevic, we’re not making that old Saddam mistake again!

But objecting to vacillation and contradiction is not the same thing as Handke’s half-crazy, half-cynical fellow-traveling with evil. The moral justification for NATO’s intervention is the humanitarian disaster we see on TV every night. To blame NATO for the refugees’ plight is to absolve the Serb army of its crimes. It needs to be said again and again: the people to blame for death and terror are those who terrorize and kill.

And in the matter of the Colorado killings, let’s agree that guns aren’t the sole cause of the horror. The killers learned how to make pipe bombs on the Internet, and got their trench coats from
The Matrix,
and learned to put a low value on human life from—whom? Their parents? Marilyn Manson? The Goths? Which is not at all to adopt Mr. Heston’s unrepentant position. “This isn’t a gun issue,” he tells us. “It’s a child issue.” “Moses” Heston has new commandments to hand down these days: Thou shalt defend the right to bear arms in the teeth of all the evidence, and Thou shalt certainly not be blamed just because a few kids got iced.

Kosovo and Colorado do have something in common. They show that in our unstable world, incompatible versions of reality are clashing with one another, with murderous results. But we can still make moral judgments about the rival versions of the world that are at war. And the only civilized view of the Handke and Heston versions is that they are indefensible.

Never mind that Handke is co-writer of that great movie
Wings of Desire;
condemned as a “monster” by Alain Finkielkraut and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, by the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek and the Serbian novelist Bora Cosic, he deserves to be, as Susan Sontag pithily puts it, “finished.” (Intellectually, that is, not literally. In case anyone was wondering.) Never mind, either, that Heston, his face as subtly mobile as Mount Rushmore, has helped millions of moviegoers snatch a few hours of peaceful sleep in darkened cinemas. He deserves to be “finished,” too.

Who wins the prize? Peter Handke’s folly makes him complicit with evil on a grand scale, but fortunately he is almost entirely powerless. As America’s foremost gun lobbyist, however, Heston is doing his best to make sure that guns remain an integral part of the American household; and so, one day soon, somewhere in America, another young man will take up arms and begin to shoot his friends. So, by reason of his folly’s greater effectiveness, I hand Charlton Heston the palm. But the year’s not half done. Greater morons may yet step forward to challenge him. Watch this space.