A frightening picture of American superiority
by Saima Alvi
06 February 2003 08:14 UTC

A frightening picture of American superiority

Even a fictional character seen as so left-wing that he is unelectable spouts a chilling foreign policy

Johann Hari

05 February 2003

It isn't easy for those of us in Britain to try to understand what has been happening to the American psyche over these past few surreal years. From the presidential election where the guy with half a million fewer votes ended up in the White House, to 11 September, where in one morning more people died as a result of terrorism than in Northern Ireland for the past 30 years, to the current progress towards war on Saddam Hussein: it is hard to make sense, even as a regular visitor, of what is going on there.

Yet two small but revealing weathervanes return to our television screens in the next week. The West Wing and 24 both launch new seasons, and they tell us a great deal about our Stateside cousins.

The West Wing has been derided in the States as preposterously liberal; it is often referred to as "the left wing". It follows the presidency of Jeb Bartlett, a former governor of New Hampshire and the most left-leaning president since Kennedy (or even Roosevelt).

On domestic policy, it is impossible for lefties like me not to be stirred to tears by the show, as Bartlett and the crew of saints who man his West Wing stand up to Christian fundamentalists, protect social security, fight child poverty and fend off the incursions of the US's especially rabid right-wing.

The extent to which this White House is so completely different to Bush's – which has just delivered a massive tax cut, 45 per cent of which goes to the richest 1 per cent of US citizens – is underlined by the fact that Bartlett's Republican opponent for the presidency is so obviously based on Dubya. He is a dumb, folksy southern governor who is told by Bartlett, "I don't mind that you don't know much, but you've turned knowing nothing into a kind of Zen thing." One of the most depressing experiences in life is getting to the end of an episode of the show feeling a warm glow, and then realising that George Junior is still sitting in the real Oval Office.

Yet look at what has happened to The West Wing's depiction of US foreign policy. Even a fictional character who is seen as so left-wing that he is unelectable spouts a chilling, implicitly racist foreign policy. In the last episode of the third series, Barlett has to authorise the assassination of a pro-terrorist figure in an Arab government. He agonises for days, and then, when he is finally called upon to give the order, he asks gravely, "But doesn't this make us just like all the other nations?"

The fact that even a sophisticated, liberal American audience can hear this without either gasping or bursting into laughter is a sign of how blinkered Americans still are about their foreign policy legacy. Bartlett is meant to be a Nobel-prize winning economist. He would know that the US intervened in Iran in 1953 to overthrow the democratically elected, popular and reformist leader Mohammed Mossadeq and install the undemocratic and unpopular Shah, Reza Pahlavi. This set in train events that led to the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini. He would know that the US intervened in Chile in 1973 to overthrow the democratically elected Salvador Allende and install the fascist Augusto Pinochet. He would know about Vietnam, for God's sake. He would know that the US to this day gives free rein to Ariel Sharon to murder Palestinian civilians.

The mindset which unconsciously informs Bartlett's actions, just as much as the current administration's, is what Edward Said has identified as "American fundamentalism": the equation of what is good for America axiomatically with what is good for the world. It is captured in a line from the musical Miss Saigon, which is meant to be ironic but which I have heard applauded by US audiences post-11 September: "But I'm an American/ I can't do wrong." It is the implicit belief that the US – because its collective identity is based on universal values embodied in the Constitution, not any concept of race or inherent belonging – will always act morally in its external affairs.

The West Wing shows the worrying extent to which American imperialism is based not only on a genuine desire to help other countries (and, yes, many decent Americans do actually believe this, and they are sometimes right; they are not all isolationist hicks) but also on a sense of essential superiority.

In an episode called "A Proportional Response", Bartlett finds out that his personal physician, amongst others, has been murdered on a trip to the Middle East. His security chiefs recommend "a proportionate response" to the American deaths, but Bartlett shouts that he wants "a disproportionate response". He explains, "Under the Roman empire, a Roman citizen could go anywhere he wanted in the world, because all over the world people knew that if they touched a citizen of Rome, the wrath of the entire Empire would rain down upon them. That is how Americans should feel."

So he decides, basically, to bomb the hell out of the Middle East, until he is finally talked round. Remember: this mindset is prevalent even in the Democratic Party.

Both The West Wing and 24 also reveal a view of US politics so naļve and romantic that it is scarcely a development on Frank Capra's Mr Smith Goes to Washington. David Palmer, the Democratic senator who is running for President in the first series of 24 (he has been elected in time for the second series), is also a Bartlett-like saint.

He is amazed when the people who bankrolled his campaign want something back from him, just as Bartlett decides, absurdly, that he cannot adopt a certain policy simply on the grounds that it would benefit a campaign contributor! The implication is that the problem with US politics is merely that its politicians have shown insufficient moral rectitude, and that if they were simply good men like Palmer and Bartlett (both of whom eschew spin-doctors, who are depicted as sleazy and evil), the problems would disappear.

In fact, US politics is, as the brave Republican senator John McCain has argued for years, systematically corrupt. Bill Clinton complained in 1995, justly, that he had to spend so much time raising money for his next presidential bid that neither he nor Al Gore had any time to actually do any governing. McCain has just piloted reforms into US law that limit the power of big money; its role in determining the US policy agenda is still breathtaking. Nobody even seems surprised any more when their President tours the country and addresses not crowds of citizens but only fund-raising meetings with massive entrance fees. It is unsurprising that politicians who owe their position to millionaires and who speak almost exclusively to millionaires end up governing in the interests of millionaires.

This does not mean that we must adopt a knee-jerk position in opposition to everything the US does. Many writers – from John Pilger, who recently described the US as akin to the Third Reich, to Harold Pinter, who says Blair acted in Kosovo because "he loves to drop a few bombs, it gives him, I think, great excitement" – have adopted the inverse of American fundamentalism. They see everything that the US does as simply evil, and therefore ignore, for example, the fact that the Iraqi people loathe Saddam Hussein and desperately want the US's help in liberating them from this tyrant. Even when I support the US – as I will in the coming months over Iraq – it doesn't mean that I am so naļve or credulous that I think the US is perfect or even especially good. Even if Bartlett were President, it would still be a deeply flawed and frightening country.

johann@johannhari.com

http://argument.independent.co.uk/regular_columnists/johann_hari/story.jsp?story=375609