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“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power
corrupts absolutely.”
- Lord Acton, in a letter to
Bishop Mandell Creighton, 1887
“Might is right.”
- Ragnar Redbeard, stating the
central tenet of the Church of Satan in the book of the same name,
1896
The United States of
America—currently the lone superpower on Earth possessing
economic, technological and military might incomparable to any
previous empire or state in all of history—is often demonized as a
cultural wasteland and as an exporter of gratuitous violence and
vapid materialism.
But that is utter hogwash. This
is the same culture that produced Gil-Scott Heron, Nina Simone,
Miles Davis, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Etta James, Sly and the
Family Stone, (early) Stevie Wonder and the Jackson Five; Iggy Pop,
Lou Reed and David Byrne; Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash;
Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein; Jack Kerouac and Edgar Allan Poe;
Martha Graham and Isadora Duncan; Frank Lloyd Wright and Ansel
Adams; Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein; Martin Scorsese and,
oh heck, let’s throw in Quentin Torentino as well, just to name a
few.
Sure, it also produced Britney
Spears, Michael Jackson, Paris Hilton and Anna Nicole Smith; Charles
Manson and David Koresh; the Ku Klux Klan and Timothy McVeigh;
Barbie and Ken; Pat Robertson and Howard Stern; Senator Joseph
McCarthy and President George Bush.
And true, the United States can
unilaterally invade and ruin countries such as Iraq with, at most or
if at all, a whimper of a protest from the United Nations (itself an
organization that simply enshrines post-colonial order with the
permanent members of Security Council). It shuns the Kyoto Protocol
on climate change while its industries produce much of the world’s
green house gasses. It selectively cites the Nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty against its rivals Iran and North Korea
while shielding allies such as India and Israel and hording nuclear
weapons itself. It claims to broker peace in the Middle East while
arming one side in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Its media determines what we see
and how we see the rest of the world. It’s only news if Americans
get hurt. It’s a movie worth watching only if the hero is a
Westerner even when it’s set in Africa, Middle East or Asia.
It’s still a white man’s burden and manifest destiny on the big
screen.
Its corporations inundate us with
its straight-to-video b-movies, trashy talk shows, supersized
burgers and so many other products that fill up our store shelves,
clog our arteries and clutter our heads. We are just a small nation
halfway around the world. It’s cultural surplus dumping on a
massive scale.
But like any culture, America has
its bad as well as its good. Americans are a lovable and admirable
people. If they weren’t such a superpower we’d like their
government a whole lot more. If it didn’t matter so much, then
their idiosyncrasies and hypocrisies wouldn’t be so threatening
and would simply amuse us. But the problem is that America is
dangerously overpowering. And it’s our fault.
No one said we should make our
culture so import-dependent. But we buy and so they sell. The caveat
is that the culture that we buy into is what influences what we
want.
No one said we should make their
celebrities our role models or even rely on their market for our
export economy or their military for our national defense.
It is silly that we try to find
“good Americans” and “bad Americans.” I find it laughable
that some Filipinos would cheer for Democrats and jeer against Bush
and his Republican party-mates or vice versa. They are all
Americans. Any good American will do what is in America’s best
interests and not the Philippines’. One cannot fault any of them
for not acting in our behalf in the same way one cannot expect a
merchant to do the bargaining for you; if he can sell to you what he
has for as much as he can then he will and he should. He has his own
family to feed; yours is not his concern. Caveat emptor.
All we can expect from the
Americans is for them to play the part of Americans. That’s a
given.
We can expect no better than
America to coddle convicted rapist US Marine Daniel Smith in its
embassy and to spurn the jurisdiction of the International Court of
Justice despite the continuing pattern of rape and homicide
perpetrated by US military servicemen in Iraq, Okinawa, South Korea
and other locations that endure their prolonged presence.
We would be fools to expect
America to side with us in any conflict, military or otherwise, with
China, as its economic growth depends on outsourcing to low-wage
factories in that communist/capitalist country and its investments
there dwarf those in our country.
We would be gullible to buy into
the United States’ slogans about spreading democracy and defending
human rights. Some of us are old enough to remember the American
support that the Marcos dictatorship enjoyed in return for
perpetuation of the US military bases as the regime blatantly
oppressed the people and plundered our wealth. Today, we see the US
allow atrocities to occur in Sudan while spending billions securing
oil-rich Iraq.
I envy America for how
aggressively it pursues its interests. They love their own, right or
wrong. If only our people showed as much loyalty and zeal for our
own.
As you can see, I’m not talking
about Americans at all. You can substitute any foreign power to play
their role. The question is, when will we play the part of
Filipinos? If not us, then who? We may not have superpowers, but we
have our part to play nonetheless.
E-mail Culture Vulture at
rome.jorge@ gmail.com or log on to blog.360.yahoo.com/hanepdesigns.
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