

I can’t say these are changes I’ve
welcomed. The America I left in 1958 was
a divided country, as it remains. It was
just as parochial then as it is today, seeing everything and every other nation
through the prism of its exceptionalism.
America is good, therefore what it does is good. It dismays me when Australia uncritically adopts this attitude, even when it’s
argued to be in its interest. It dismays
me further to see Australians act like the worst of Americans, claiming that
‘god’s own country’ is their own, making a fetish, say, of Kokoda or Gallipoli
or Australia Day. Our economic policies
have been shaped by American ones, and the last thirty years have seen as a
consequence alarming rates of inequality.
But back in 2008 when Obama was
running for president, and four years later when he was trying to get re-elected, I was moved
to tears by sights on my tv screen of that other America – the one that’s
perpetually screwed by those in power but still finds a way to fight back. Those
people lining the streets in support of him fairly melted my heart. This was the America I recognised, though,
sadly, the one rarely emulated. America
of the crumpled face and cheap-food body.
Not the slickly landscaped exteriors seen
at the party conventions, or in most of the sitcoms, or sashaying along the
red-carpeted gauntlet on the way to the Oscars. Not the hate-filled faces of the Tea
Party. But Walt Whitman’s people, and Carl Sandberg’s, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s. Braver than we know.
All through the 1960s, America
exploded. I watched in wonderment from
afar, with a dollop of self-pity I admit, for missing out. Kennedy was president and friends from my high
school went on the freedom rides. It
seemed like the country I left was changing without me and, briefly, perhaps it
was. Then came the assassinations,
Nixon’s election, Watergate, bankrupted cities, the usual quotient of murders,
America being the endlessly violent place it is. But there were good things too – the end of
school segregation, civil rights legislation, Roe v. Wade, the swell of protest
against the war in Vietnam .
Soon enough Australia had its
protests too. The Anti-Vietnam
Moratorium and Women’s Liberation swept through the capital cities. The Whitlam government was elected and then,
by comparison, America seemed the backward country. Gough had gone to China and, in office,
ended conscription, pulled us out of Vietnam, opened the case for equal pay. The country embarked on another era of social
reform, for which it was rightly known, and part of it was acting independently
from America. After which the government was quickly
dispatched. (Conspiracy theory, we were
told at the time, but what was the CIA about if not conspiracy?) After that trauma Australian governments of every
stripe have been willingly supine. But what have they got us into?
The crux of the matter is that there’s been scarcely been a time when
America hasn’t been at war. All through
its history, from the War of Independence to the Spanish-American one at the
end of the 19th century, and in the 20th it was the world
wars, but also more local ones, playing one dictator off against another,
dropping bombs, selling arms to everyone, friends and enemies, all in the name
of freedom and democracy. There have
been periods of isolationism but they haven’t lasted long. Often war has been waged against its own
citizens, whether it’s been the crackdown on Wobblies and anarchists or Cold War
executions, or incarceration in Guantanamo during this generation’s War on
Terror. Of course there have been
resisters, many of whom have met with untimely, violent deaths, in spite of their
own campaigns of peaceful disobedience.
Some of these have been
whistleblowers, heroes our leaders – Australian and American - are only too
quick to brand as criminals, even when what they make public are government actions
wholly antithetical to the interests of their citizens, not to mention Vietnamese, Iraqi or Afghani ones. Men like Daniel Ellsberg, and today, Bradley
Manning and Edward Snowden.
What courageous people, to take on the might of
governments. They, it must be said,
are what I do miss about America. Next time: Shulamith Firestone.
As I just commented on facebook, a terrific post, Sara. And my question about why Americans are parochial really does puzzle me. I felt it very much when I was staying there, and what I thought of as parochialism didn't seem to have much to do with intelligence or being well-informed.
ReplyDeleteTried replying on the iPhone, but failed twice. My supposedly deathless words just disappeared! I was trying to say that even Canada and Mexico, right on the US borders, don't really cut it, and both got screwed with the so-called North American Free Trade Agreement. But Americans hardly ever see this, or care. So it's hard for Americans to come to grips with the way they're often seen by others. They like being the centre of the universe but not the critiques.
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