I read Malam Kabiru Yusuf’s Their dream; Our Nightmare and Mohammed Haruna’s Now that Arafat is gone… (Trust Nov. 8 and 17 respectively). Then just recently (Nov 27) Aisha Umar Yusuf came up with “A Tokyo Rose Through and Through.”These were some of the most interesting pieces I have read in a long time about America and her policies abroad. I was particularly taken by the pungent and unpatronizing cadence of their presentation and especially the stem and resolute tone of voice that ended Kabiru Yusufs piece: “America has made its choice; in the same spirit of God-given freedom, we (the rest of the world) too will make ours.”
I share Kabiru Yusuf s opinion about the so called American dream and the inherent self-serving contradictions and in fact some of the morally debauched paradoxes that continue to dog the heels of this rampaging Super Power on its haughty march to an Empire State. But if it is any consolation to those who care, the words of James Brice in “Modern Democracies” cannot be any more apt: “Men” he wrote “stood on the edge of stupendous changes and had not a glimpse of even the outlines of those changes, not discerning the causes that were already in embryo beneath their feet, like seeds hidden under the snow of winter, which will shoot up under the April sunlight”
The seed of the withering of the American dream may not have been sown as recently as with the misadventure in Iraq; nor as farther back as with the so called attack of September 11; nor even with the election of Bush ala Florida. The seed had been sown as far back as when America willingly offered to play the proverbial ‘tail ‘that is now proudly wagged by the greedy dog of the Jewish enterprise. In fact what we are witnessing today has gone past the budding stage of the growth of that ‘seed’. The “election” of Bush ala Florida, the “holocaust” of September 11, the misadventure in Iraq and the re election of Bush ala Ohio, by the Americans, in utter disdain of global opinion are all but blooming plumages of the foliage stage of the growth of that seed’.
From Babylonia to almighty Rome, down to once Great Britain, the world has witnessed the rise and fall of empires. None of these endured because none was just and fair. And today, like Louis Farrakhan once said, America is fast becoming our modem day Babylon and if it continues on that path it will not require a soothsayer to discern that it cannot long endure. The scriptures are explicit about these issues: no nation can long endure that prides itself upon the creation of mischief in the land. Aisha Yusuf has excellently captured America’s thirst for blood especially in the Middle East. She has grimly etched the pathetic picture of a warmongering nation, one so compulsive in the habit that it even stage manages acts to justify war.
American writer John Fitzgerald’s fictional character Gatsby in the novel “The Great Gatsbv”, critics say represents “the irony of American history as well as the corruption of its dream”. As an upwardly mobile socialite of his hedonistic days with an inherently contradictory sense of mission, Gatsby ‘represents America’s historical sense of mission and early dream of a great and powerful commonwealth’; but his death also typifies the decline of a national dream. R. W.B Lewis in his critique of the novel wrote that “what at a particular point in the history of the Americans began as a valuable corrective to the claims of innocence declined into a cult of original sin”.
Sept. 11 (I am not one with Aisha that it was stage managed) is a significant historical parenthesis in the story of the dreamland called America. In fact America may be missing James Brice’s “glimpses and outlines of stupendous changes” in the global scheme of things. At a time when she was just proudly sealing the proportion of “absolute” defense; claiming to have attained adversarial irreproachability, just then a new kind of ‘enemy’ emerged on Sept. 11 right inside the bowel of the rampaging monster, hitting it so hard and from such a delicate soft underbelly, that even as the world commiserated with America yet the world could not ignore the fact that, at last, a prodigal off-key note has finally jarred the hymn of America’s technological pride and arrogance.
Pride, they say, goeth before a fall. The cup of America’s pride is getting fuller and fuller. Listen to Bush after September 11: “Either you’ are with us or you are with the terrorists”. What crest pride arrogance! You cannot even be with neither? And again: “We are in a fight for our principles.” But what principles! Stoking the world’s halcyon furnace with the gunpowder of mischief? Else what? And what if the rest of the world doesn’t share in those principles? The rest of the world cannot all be wrong in the face of a forthright America! When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor during the World war, President F. D. Roosevelt’s speech to Congress justifying the existence of a state of war between America and Japan, drew its moral strength from the fact of Japan’s attack being “unprovoked”. Hence America, had the duty to use what he described as her “righteous might” to respond to Japan’s casus belli. In fact to underscore the gravity of the Japanese attack, Roosevelt described the date (Dec 7, 1941) as one “which will live in infamy”. But how will innocent Iraqis describe the “unprovoked” attack on their country by the might of ‘righteous America’; “a year which will live in infamy?” or what?
Shortly after September 11, the only Woman lawmaker who voted against the bill authorizing the use of force had numerous threats of death hauled at her. And Nancy Gibbs wrote something to the effect that “when dissent is made to seem unpatriotic, a little silver of democracy is dying.” No Gibbs! It is not just a little silver of democracy that is dying. The whole damn diamond is gone! America is no longer any different from the communist Russia of old. Like Aisha wrote she is fast becoming a closed society reminiscent only of George Orwell’s book “1984.” The Patriot Act which Mohammed Haruna rightly lampooned in his piece, is another nodal growth on the stalk of the foliage in the life of the seed of the withering of the American dream.
In the coverage of the Bush war in Iraq leading to the last Presidential election, we saw a guilely compromised American media proudly “embedded” with the aggressor and throwing ethics to the dogs. Those once Vice President Spiro Agnew’s “nattering nabobs of negativism” (namely the anti government American media) suddenly became Choristers and Court jesters of the Bush Administration. Facts were no longer sacred. Reporters and editors became killer surgeons, slashing and stitching stories to fit Uncle Sam’s demented mind set. Imagine war correspondents reporting in the first person plural pronoun “we,” “us” and “our”. An embedded Christiana Amanpoor of CNN was shamelessly saying “I asked one of OUR commanders in Iraq what will be OUR next line of action!” Sickening! A mock-heroic war reporting, you might say, where soldiers had guns and so called “embedded” reporters held an even mightier weapon (the pen), pelting poor innocent and defenseless Iraqis with molten letters! shameless taron dangi!
America cannot lay claim anymore to that “Practical Passion” of Woodrow Wilson’s description ‘’for social justice and for altruistic equity in settling the genuine differences of men.” Talking about social justice and equity U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy warns America: We abandon those ideals if in the name of homeland security, we embrace measures such as military tribunals, detention without legal counsel... (and) whole sale invasion of privacy”.
Like Kabiru Yusuf, I was a beneficiary of the International Visitor Program (IVP) to the United States in 1998. And in 2001 I was an official visitor to Washington. After going round about 10 states; visiting The Capitol and Pentagon; after witnessing the Mid Term Elections and after socializing with a cross section of Americans through two Halloween periods, I came away with the same impressions that Kabiru Yusuf so eloquently narrated in his piece.
Here was the America, the so called land of opportunity, providing so called “equal chances” for people to be un equal; here was the America, the ceaseless dream land; their America; the ‘boiling pot’; a nation ‘under God’ and a nation ‘trusting in God’; that brutal, partial ‘God’ of America’s self serving perception ‘who’ arm twists the ‘gods’ of other nations solely for the benefit of the Americans.
Here were the Americans to most of whom an act of bully abroad by their home government is only a subject of comic laugh line at the dinner table; here was the America, absolutist in moral claim yet debouched in the act of it; here was the America, abroad an excellent sing song bird of racial equality, at home the worst practitioner of it; here was the America, in claim a globally thinking people, in reality a locally acting and grossly mal informed people; here was the America of Author Naomi Klein’s rebuke, which raises multinationals who ‘Jar from leveling the global playing field with jobs and technology for all, are in the process of mining the planet’s poorest back country”. Here was the America, a nation largely driven by the corporate interests of mega institutions; corporations who’s definition of morality is accountability to their shareholders; here was the America of the ‘permanence of interest’ fame, whose chosen friends are ‘good’ even if they are ‘bad’ to the rest of the world and whose sworn enemies are bad even if they are good to the rest of the world. Need I say more?
The idea underlying the Roman Empire according to historians was the conquest of power and the exploitation of other nations for the benefit of Rome. “To promote better living for Romans, no violence was bad enough; /110 injustice too base. The famous Roman justice was justice for the Romans alone”.
It took the Roman Empire nearly 1,000 years to grow to its full geographical extent and its political maturity; but its downfall was effected during one single century and the fall was so through and through that “nothing of it remained but works of literature and architecture”. The future of no nation is sacrosanct from the cruel verdict of history!
Mohammed Adamu contributed this piece from Abuja.
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