An interesting thing happened in the weeks immediately following the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001.
At a moment when this nation was more united in solemnity and sorrow than any time in more than 50 years, when much of the world rallied to the support of the innocent, when hundreds of thousands of Americans stepped forward to send money, materials, and labour to New York City, the president of the United States asked us to do less for each other.
When calls came forward for a concerted public effort to confront the causes of the bullying reputation the United States has throughout the world, President George W. Bush responded by hiring an incompetent public relations professional to construct and manage images.
When confronted by a clear link between our addiction to the massive consumption of fossil fuels and our vulnerability, the White House protested that we need not disrupt this blessed element of our way of life.
When it grew clear that fighting both the actors and the ideologies that bore responsibility for the attacks would cost billions of dollars and span decades of focused, creative operations, the president said we should celebrate our meagre tax cuts and keep on spending ourselves into debt.
At no time did the president ask for the American people to make sacrifices for our collective security. At no time did he concede that we would have to change our habits to leave a lighter footprint on the earth. At no time did he appear to learn from the attacks that we are not as special and disconnected from the rest of the world as we had always assumed.
In other words, no matter what we would do next, no matter how many dollars and lives it would cost, few Americans (save those brave and generous few who have committed themselves to serving in the military) would have to change anything material about the ways we went about our business.
Few of us have to act responsibly. Few of us have to pay for the changes we demanded in the world. Few of us feel particularly invested in the results or connected with the consequences of our actions. We just sit back and watch slivers of our influence flit across our alarmingly large television screens.
As our soldiers die in Iraq and hired agents do unknowable things in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Philippines, we Americans go about our daily lives at a safe distance. Our leaders have divorced themselves from accountability via obfuscation, misdirection, and prevarication. It is as if we affect the world with a huge remote control device.
This column is called remote control because it best captures the loose, unacknowledged, one-way connections that the United States and its people have with the world.
Republicans, Democrats, immigrants, natives, consumers, workers, and producers all share this irresponsible relationship with the world. This is not a new phenomenon. Its been the case since about 1898, when the United States first assumed a major yet distant role in the workings of the world beyond its shores.
A remote control changes something far away, yet disengages the actor from the action itself. In this sense, both military power (hard power) and cultural influence (soft power) may operate remotely. The domestic effects, in the short term, can be buffered. But the long-term blowback may be fierce.
I first considered the metaphor of remote control during the 1991 Gulf war, when we learned it was possible to cheer a brief military triumph with few American casualties as if it were some massive, national effort. My peers celebrated as if the Dallas Cowboys had won the Superbowl. But the extent of our contributions to the effort was the constant manipulation of remote control devices and massive consumption of news.
It came back to me in 1999 when President Bill Clinton decided he had to act to stop the slaughter in Kosovo, yet pledged not to commit ground forces to the effort. The bombing of Kosovo (what Michael Ignatieff called virtual war), while justified, was irresponsible. The invasion of Iraq, in contrast, is unjustified, yet more responsible, if only because we risk American casualties.
There are many other examples of remote control operating in the world today:
- Forbidden by law and convention from torturing suspects, the United States outsources this practice to brutal allies like Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia.
- Americans revel in their role as champions of free markets, yet choose to ignore the violence that state-influenced artificially low prices (agriculture) and artificially high prices (pharmaceuticals) do to the developing world.
- Through multilateral treaties and organizations, the United States alters agricultural practices and fiscal and monetary policies around the world.
- The voracious demand we have for cheap consumer goods and strong narcotics drives up the supply of both, generating horrendous externalities: crime, corruption, terrorism, pollution, child labour, and slavery.
Acknowledging our connections, assuming our responsibilities, will not be easy. Regardless of which party triumphs in November, American culture will not squelch its remote attitude toward the rest of the world any time soon. Democracy, for all its virtues, does not inherently favour long-term, collective thinking. And America is, after all, too big, busy, and diverse to focus its attention on things that threaten to bring us down.
