Boycotts and bad acts
Print
Share
Email to a friend
Add This
Article Rating
All the war-related jabbering about boycotts that has been going around since the United Nations declined to endorse our invasion of Iraq has caused me to think about how America is perceived -- and how it perceives itself.
I grew up during the height of the Cold War, with civil defense drills as a part of my elementary school day, so I'm quite familiar with the concept of Us against a dangerous and implacable Them.
The danger was even more personally drawn in my Catholic school since They were atheists and We were followers of the one true God.
Of course, the danger was painted a little more starkly in those days. Should the two sides ever come to battle, we all knew, the whole of Earth would be wiped out in a cascade of nuclear explosions. Whatever was left wouldn't be worth having, and as Nikita Khrushchev famously said, "The living would envy the dead."
Yet we managed to get through those 40 years without boycotting caviar, vodka or Russian dressing. Nor did we feel the need to rename a particularly distasteful tradition involving firearms as "freedom roulette."
Boycotting products wasn't a big concept with the Russians either -- the exact opposite, in fact. They went crazy for American goods, despite only having access to them on the black market.
They'd pay the equivalent of $1,000 for Levis -- used Levis -- and a couple of hundred dollars for rock 'n roll records from America, even though the regime banned that kind of music from the stores and the airwaves.
Combine that with the triumphal themes of Hollywood movies -- which they knew a good bit about even under the heel of censorship and before the advent of home video -- and you can see America was its own best advertisement to the world.
Being the biggest and most successful democracy in the world was good for our street credibility too, despite a few toe-stubbings in places like Cuba, Central America and Vietnam.
There's still a lot of goodwill reflected from our past accomplishments that continues to work for us today, despite our recent trend away from playing well with other countries in the diplomatic realm.
But a funny thing has happened to America. While we continue to seem larger than life to outsiders, here at home our collective self-image seems to be shrinking.
After years of exporting rebellious rock 'n roll to the rest of the world, we are suddenly offended when singers like Natalie Maines and Eddie Vedder rebel against authority.
We've built up the most intimidating military power in the world -- at a cost equal to the defense expenditures of every other country in the world combined -- and we use it to pick a fight with a country the world has spent the past 12 years disarming.
We allow ourselves to think this is all to protect the freedoms we've established for ourselves over 225 years, not noticing the same government that's prosecuting this war has given us the PATRIOT Act, which allows wiretaps and surveillance of American citizens without probable cause.
Don't mind if this president compiles a dossier of all your phone calls, library and Internet transactions, book purchases, even letters to the editor? You might care if the next one does.
Think that's just a passing phase? There's already a draft version of PATRIOT 2 floating around Washington, despite the denials of the same people who pushed for the first one.
If passed, it will legalize spying on religious and political organizations, put an end to those inconvenient search warrants, and give the government the opportunity to revoke the citizenship of native-born Americans if they're charged with any infraction the government deems terrorism-related.
Many believe we need the war and the encroachments on our rights because of 9/11. That's kind of sad, that a country that has survived the Civil War, the Depression and World War II can be made to forget most of what made it great by one audacious act that lasted less than a morning.
Franklin Roosevelt, who was president during those last two periods of history, is best known for saying, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."
Seventy years later, the way America is acting in the world is sending a different message:
The only thing we have is fear.
