War Culture
Currently teaching a seminar in Europe, I’m reminded once again just how isolating it can be to live inside the US, breathing the anesthetizing air of privilege and walking the treacherous terrain of denial. Wherever I go, discovering that I’m an American, folks strike a kind of pitying stance, assuming that as an American, educated in American schools, I will have no facility with language (and likely a relatively weak grasp of English), a badly distorted and in large parts vacant sense of history, and zero geographic literacy—quick! Draw a free-hand sketch of Iraq or Afghanistan! Find Palestine on a blank map of the world! Name every country with a US military base inside its sovereign territory!
Thankfully, people have an almost universal capacity to make a hard distinction between the American people and the US government. Bus drivers, bakers, waitresses are as kind and generous and hospitable as they can possibly be, but spend an extra minute or two, and each will explain in no uncertain terms the contempt they share for US policy in the world. It’s a wake-up, and that’s why I think we all need to get out more, to scrape some of the scales off our vision and to see the US through other eyes.
Don’t get me wrong: there’s much to love and to cherish in America, starting with the land itself and its wild and unruly people, our dizzying diversity, our restless traditions of migration and our admirable history of resistance and rebellion and disobedience, our vast creativity and large imaginative spaces, our overall queerness. Admit