By Alex Linder
[ The following is from a forum thread posting. ]
[opinion published in Pomona College’s The Student Life, Friday, December 11, 1987]
American Survival in a Benetton World
By Alex Linder
Upon this bank and shoal of time, America is in an enviable position. A steadily growing economy, a strong military, a free and productive society are all guarantees of good times to come. Nevertheless, there are trends, found throughout the West, that if left unchecked could result in a dark future.
As every IR student learns in the first few lectures, when it comes to calculating power, will is all important. A nation may have X missiles, Y tanks, and Z soldiers, but if will is lacking, the rest is insignificant.
Will is the intangible by which the physical components of power are multiplied; if absent the result is always zero. Think of the Vietnam War.
American will, although undiminished under Reagan, is in a long-term decline. Why? Because of our leadership. The sum effects of the media, the academics, and many of the politicians is negative, erosive, and destructive.
There are three types of American fools. Those who can’t see; those who won’t see; and those who see and accept. The media are the stupid and incompetent. The politicians are the willingly blind. The academics can’t infer their ways out of paper bags. A certain sector of each sees what’s going on and approves.
But what is being referred to? Well, primarily the communist threat — facilitated by a country made doubtful of itself, its capabilities, and its special purpose. In essence, America is the last, best hope.
We are the city on the hill. We are what the world has struggled to produce. Through millenium after millenium, men have fought, killed, raped, looted, plundered, tortured, terrorized, and spat on one another. But hey, that’s what being human is half about.
America is the original place where the evil effects of human nature have been well controlled. With our constitution we’ve reached the best trade-off between order and freedom the world has ever seen. We have the richest, strongest, freest country in the world.
In a word, we are the best country in the world. The only thing capable of stopping a world governmental organization capable of suppressing all but the smallest regional conflicts, and based on the principles of the U.S. constitution, is self-doubt. We must turn away from those who work to injure this American Achilles’ Heel.
Let’s consider a country where the evil effects of self-doubt are evident in the national psyche: West Germany. The legacy of Hitler is a confused land full of geistlos and angstvoll people who have no ability to tell right from wrong. West Germany is a country so mixed up and turned around as to make one despair for its future. What can we learn about ourselves from this country? Let’s listen to some of its students talk about the U.S. — friends of the writer.
First, there’s Christian. He says he doesn’t like it when Reagan says “God bless America” at the end of his speeches and all the listeners stand up and cheer. Then there’s Heide. You try to hide a smile as she lectures you on America’s imperialist history. Finally, there’s Inge. When you try to explain the tenets of Reaganism to her, she laughs at you in the softly condescending way you’d laugh at a toddler falling over while trying to walk.
“I feel much more threatened by the Americans than by the Russians,” she says. . . .a sorry state of affairs.
What threatens America today is our decline into moral relativism and intellectual squishiness brought about by liberal mountebankery, whose representatives strive to outdo one another in their put-downs of America.
There seem to be so few people around today who are willing to forthrightly assert the moral superiority of the American system of government.
What we are taught: We’re taught to think in shades of gray rather than in black and white. We’re warned that we perceive everything through our own cultural lens, thus implicitly negating our judgments.
Think of the term “ethnocentric.” This is a big word with many IR people. The word’s a sick joke. It’s a fancy word for letting the other guy walk all over you while you philosophically justify his actions. A common mistake is to overrate the importance of looking at issues from another nation’s perspective.
The problem is that where we do this we tend to forget that we have to represent our own interests. Do the Iranians or the Soviets think about our interests when we deal with them? Hell no. They figure out what they want and go after it.
Moral equivalency is perhaps the most widespread and certainly the most dangerous trend among the elite of America and the West. It is widespread in that the vast majority of Europeans and an increasingly large number of Americans see no moral difference between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. It is most dangerous because there is obviously no particular reason to feel an obligation to defend a certain country (America) if it’s no better than its chief adversary.
As evidence of the growth of this trend, mere anecdotes will have to suffice. The Europeans referred to previously are believers in the two-scorpions-in-a-bottle metaphor many Europeans like to use to describe the two superpowers. Polls have recently found that many view Gorbachev as more of a peacemaker than Reagan.
Perhaps better than anyone else, the murdered John Lennon represented the two-scorpions approach to world politics. “Imagine there’s no countries. . . . A brotherhood of man.” Similarly, you might be familiar with a song called the “Universal Soldier” which talks about young men of various denominations dying in various fights for various causes.
The point of this despicable tripe is that no idea or cause is morally distinguishable from any other since they all involve some amount of conflict and bloodshed; only the idealistic one-worlders remain uncorrupted visionaries. There’s “nothing to kill or die for” in John Lennon’s world.
It cannot be overemphasized that this is the type of thinking that can destroy America. John Lennon and his ilk see no moral difference between the Soviet Union and America; all they do is rise above to an invisible world where they are alone and perfect. Call it moral Swedishness.
Like the residents of that sorry country, Lennonists feel free to claim the moral perfection that is nothing more than the birthright of the impotent.
There is a sickly habit today of refusing to make distinctions. It’s the approach that makes English and Art History so meaningless compared to politics — there’s never any voting. There’s never the satisfaction of deciding something. I think this, you think that, she thinks the other. And this holds for whatever painting or book is examined.
The point is: if a book or painting can mean anything, then it means nothing. For some reason this sieve-mindedness is starting to slide over into politics. And that’s a bad sign.
Finally, the scary truth about our times is that we’re living in a Benetton world. Benetton’s advertising campaign is based on the approach that the world’s nations and peoples are one, big, undifferentiated mass. We can all — whether we’re Laura in Los Angeles, Mbutu in Kenya, or Fyodor in Leningrad — wear the same dopey, androgynous jumpsuits. Why? Because we’re all the same — our ethnicities, traditions, customs, beliefs are only so many stumbling blocks to be swept aside in the race to create the generic person.
But it ain’t so. America is not just another in an array of equally valid choices for societal organization. It’s the best. And the others aren’t different — they’re worse. That’s what I believe, and that’s what you ought to believe. And if enough of us continue to believe it (as we traditionally have) the future is ours.//