In her last post, Jo mentioned the connection between our real and virtual worlds, and specifically Linden dollars. On a related note, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the virtual community known as Second Life suffered a pecuniary--both real and virtual--loss, as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's commercially-run island was "bombed."
My first thought was to ask "why?" Why would someone attack a virtual island? Indeed, why do we have virtual islands in the first place? What do we get from them? Why do people go there? What does this all mean? Of what relation are the virtual and the real? To what degree are they overlapping? I once heard Deepak Chopra say on TV that we don't experience reality, but only our perceptions of it--but if that's true, does it follow that there's there no difference between the virtual and the real? Is the real collapsing into the virtual? Or vice versa?
I don't have answers to these questions. In fact, I'm not even sure I'm asking the right questions. All I'm sure of is that ABC is out some (real) money.
In other news: one of the first things I learned about in American Studies was the trope of American exceptionalism, which is, roughly speaking, a fixation on what makes America not just unique but superior. At its worst, American exceptionalism is an ideology of national and racial self-aggrandizement that was (and still is) used to justify all sorts of horrible treatment of people deemed inferior. I was reminded of this as I came across a most remarkable piece of American exceptionalism in yesterday's Washington Post. Under the hopeful title U.S., Iran Open Dialogue On Iraq, we have this statement from "U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan C. Crocker":
"This is about actions, not just principles, and I laid out to the Iranians direct, specific concerns about their behavior in Iraq and their support for militias that are fighting Iraqi and coalition forces," he said. Crocker said he did not present a dossier of evidence, but he impressed upon his Iranian counterpart that the United States was "looking for results" and wanted "a change in Iranian behavior."The first question one might ask about this exchange is perhaps the most obvious: why is there a US Ambassador to Iraq? The US is, after all, occupying Iraq, while Iraq's "government" apparently does not even control Baghdad, much less the country. As for the charge that Iran is supporting the insurgency, as Juan Cole has repeatedly and convincingly explained on his excellent blog, that's highly unlikely. The reason is simple: Iran is a Shia Muslim country that supports the current Shia Iraqi government. The insurgency is based in the Sunni areas of Iraq, and includes some of Iran's enemies, among them Sunni groups (like al-Qaida, which finally found space to operate in Iraq after the US invasion created a power vacuum), and members of Baath Party. This would be the same Baath Party that controlled Iraq during its war with Iran. Indeed, the US not only supported Iraq during its war with Iran, but also quashed Iran's complaint to the UN that Iraq was using banned chemical weapons. So, Iran clearly has no desire to fund the insurgents, and no need to fund the Shias in Iraq, some of whom control militias powerful enough that their death squads have been able to murder Sunnis with impunity.
Crocker's comments, while ridiculous, point to an important aspect of our government's position regarding Iran: it's basically an essentialist position, one in which Iran is essentially and inherently evil--it is, after all, a member of George W. Bush's "Axis of Evil"--and the US is inherently and exceptionally good. That's why, in this view, the US has the right to label entire nations "evil." That's why it has the right to attack and occupy Iraq, and then repeatedly, and without apparent irony, accuse Iran of meddling in Iraq's internal affairs.
I suspect members of the Bush Administration are not so blinkered that they can't see the inconsistency of their position. But the fact that they keep repeating it indicates that they think it'll still play well with Americans, that they can invoke American exceptionalism to obscure the illogic of their foreign policy. It could be, of course, that referring to the Bush Administration's ideology as exceptionalism is to overstate the case; it could be merely bluster. But either way, it's reiterating a long history of saying "you have to do what we say because we're us and you're not."
It's worth noting that our government's contradictory behavior--on the one hand insisting that Iran is intractably evil, and on the other engaging in dialogue with it--is itself probably a result of a simple-minded approach rooted in the notion of America as a mythic force of, as George W. Bush often says, "freedom and democracy." Having thoroughly bad-mouthed Iran, anything less than continued brinksmanship will be seen as backing down in the face of evil. But Iraq is a mess, and the US needs all the help it can get. And so the tough-guy talk continues, even while dialogue finally begins.
It's also worth noting that the American Studies Association in 2006 called for "the end of the war and the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq." When I first read this resolution, I have to admit I was a bit surprised that an academic organization would take such a position on a political issue. I'm not sure, in retrospect, why I was surprised. But whatever the reason, it's clear to me now that the ASA's opposition to the war is not an ideological position, but an academic one. Just as geological evidence leads geologists to support evolution and not creationism, so too historical and cultural evidence leads Americanists to oppose the war. I have no doubt that there's much disagreement about the war among American Studies students and faculty, but on the whole, I can't find fault with the ASA's opposition to the war. Indeed, most Americans would now seem to agree with that position.
No comments:
Post a Comment