Tom Engelhardt - The United States of Fear

I was living in denial then about the nature of our government, our military, and our country, but it was an understandable state. After all, we—the sixties generation—grew up so much closer to a tale of American democracy and responsive government. We had faith, however unexamined, that the government should hear us, that if we raised our voices loudly enough, our leaders would listen. We had, in other words, a powerful, deeply ingrained sense of agency, now absent in this country.

That, I suspect, is why we took to the streets in protest—not just because we despaired of American war policy, which we did, but because under that despair we still held on tightly to a hope, which the next decades would strip from our world and later generations. And we had hopeful models as well. The great civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was still a force to be reckoned with—and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., the riots of 1968, the shock of American troops occupying American inner cities, as yet had no reality for us.

Even in protest, there was a sense of… well, the only word I can think of is “abundance.” At the time, everything seemed abundant. President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program was expansively under way in the midst of war—and even guns and butter seemed (for a while) a plausible enough combination for a country like ours. The Peace Corps, that creation of the Kennedy presidency—which my future wife joined in 1964—was still new and it, too, encapsulated that sense of American abundance and the hubris that went with it. It was based, after all, on the idea that you could take a bunch of American kids, just out of college, with no particular skills, and ship them off with minimal training to needy nations around the world to improve life, all as part of a great Cold War publicity face-off with the Soviet Union. And those kids, who turned out in droves to experience something bigger and better than themselves, did often enough find ingenious ways to offer limited amounts of help. The Peace Corps was but one small measure of a pervasive sense—about to be shattered—of our country’s status as the globe’s preeminent can-do nation. There was nothing we couldn’t do. (Hadn’t we, after all, singlehandedly rebuilt devastated Europe and Japan after World War II?)

Then, of course, there was “the war.” Vietnam, that is. It was the oozing oil spill of that moment, regularly referred to as “an American tragedy,” never a Vietnamese one. The tragic aspect of it, above all, seemed to be that victory would not come, that, as Henry Kissinger would later put it, speaking of Communist North Vietnam, “I can’t believe a fourth-rate power doesn’t have a breaking point.” The very idea of defeat—hardly mentionable in those years but ever-present—was corrosive to what, in a book of mine, I once called America’s “victory culture.” Because the Vietnamese refused to give way in that “meat grinder” of a war in which millions of them and tens of thousands of American soldiers would die, doubt oozed into the crevices of American life, and began to eat away at confidence.

Even the nightmare of war, however, had a positive side—and you can thank the draft for that. The United States then had a civilian, rather than a professional (verging on mercenary) army. It was, in a sense, still faintly in the tradition of the “people’s armies” that began with the French Revolution’s levée en masse . For young men nationwide and those who knew them, the draft—the possibility that you, or your son, husband, lover, friend, might actually end up fighting America’s misbegotten war in Southeast Asia—ensured, strangely enough, a deeper connection both to war and country, something now absent in most people’s lives.

With rare exceptions, we live today unconnected to the wars our government has been fighting for the past decade. As a result, most of us also live in a state of denial about the damage our country is doing to itself and others in distant lands. That kind of denial is a luxury in a country now known far less for its affluence and still squandering what wealth it has on wars and armaments. Today, it’s guns, not butter, and that fateful choice, regularly renewed, seems totally divorced from our lives, though we will, in the end, pay a price for it.

Who can deny that our world is in trouble? Or that our troubles, like our wars, have a momentum of their own against which we generally no longer raise our voices in protest? That we have, in a sense, been disarmed as citizens?

If, however, we are caught in a system, so are our leaders. In recent years, we’ve had two presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. In most obvious ways—style, thinking, personality, sensibility, impulses—they couldn’t be more different, as have been the ways they have approached problems. One was a true believer in the glories of American military and executive power, the other is a manager of a declining power and what passes for a political “pragmatist” in our world. Yet, more times than is faintly comfortable, the two of them have ended up in approximately the same policy places—whether on the abridgement of liberties, the expansion of the secret activities of military special operations forces across the Greater Middle East, the CIA drone war in the Pakistani borderlands and elsewhere, our expanding wars, Pentagon budgets, offshore oil drilling and nuclear power, or other policies that matter in our lives.

This should be more startling than it evidently is for most Americans. If the policies of these two disparate figures often have a Tweedledum-and-Tweedledee-ish look to them, then what we face is not specific party politics or individual style, but a system with its own steamroller force, and its own set of narrow, repetitive “solutions” to our problems. We also face an increasingly militarized, privatized government, its wheels greased by the funds of giant corporations, that now regularly seems to go about the business of creating new Katrinas.

Compared to the long-gone world I graduated into, the world of today’s graduates seems to me little short of dystopian, even if, on the surface, it still has something of the look of American abundance. If nothing changes in this equation, our collective experience, as far as I can tell, will be of less available, less decent jobs and of less wealth less well distributed, as well as of a federal government that has everything to do with giant corporations, their lobbyists and publicists, and the military-industrial complex—and little to do with the needs of most people.

Our lives are also encased in what I would call a grid of exterminationism. It was in my youth, of course, that the world became exterminable, thanks to nuclear weapons. Today—with other threats, especially global warming and resource scarcity, joining those doomsday weapons in what feels like a fatal brew—how could the young not feel despair, whether fully recognized or not? How could they not have the urge to avoid looking toward the horizon, toward a future too grim to think about? If you can’t imagine a future, however, you probably can’t form a movement to change anything.

In short, it seems we are living in our nation’s fifty-first state, a state of American denial, in a land that is being hollowed out. As we now know, America’s aging infrastructure is quite literally hollowing out, as well as springing leaks, and not just a mile under the waters of the Gulf of Mexico either. The hollowing out, however, goes deeper—right down to the feeling that, with disaster in the air, little can be done and nothing reversed. The can-do nation of my youth has given way to a can’t-do nation with a busted government.

When the first deep-water oil spill happened in Santa Barbara, California, in 1969, Americans were shocked and there were actual protests. In the streets. Shock, that is, was followed by the urge to act. But more recently, as parts of the Gulf of Mexico were being turned into a dead sea, there may have been shock and even complaint, but there was next to no protest. One Associated Press headline from May 29, 2010, captured the moment perfectly: “A Nation Mesmerized: Can BP Plug the Gulf Gusher?” Mesmerized is a good word for it. The whole world is watching—and nothing more.