America Is the Greatest... Schizophrenic Mind

By Barak Doto

Americans love to talk about how great America is. I heard someone on TV last night saying how "The people were talking and they showed up to vote. That's what makes America so great." Is it just me, or has America actually gone a bit loopy? Am I supposed to sit here and pat myself on the back for having been born in a country that apparently thinks that people in other countries don't talk or vote?

The polls say that the country feels the Iraq war was a mistake and is spiraling downward. And yet, the polls also show that people feel Bush is doing a good job at fighting terrorism. I thought Bush's Iraq catastrophe was his fight against terrorism. What the hell is going on here?

Bush's largest state approval ratings came from states that have the highest enrollment in the army due to unemployment and lack of proper education. Am I seeing this correctly?

I'm looking at the electoral graphs and I'm thinking: Is this the Civil War all over again? The South-vs.-the North? Am I expected to believe that there is an ideological rift cleaving the country into two diametrically opposed halves?

Absolutely not.

People kid themselves into thinking that there are these two sides to America and they have been fighting it out for centuries. Americans like to think that there is an actual "opposition" to so-called mainstream ideology. But what people seem to not realize (and this debacle of an election shows this) is that Americans aren't as polarized as they would like to believe. In fact, it's just the opposite. Americans are all (and pardon the generalization here) victims? co-producers? enablers? of a system infected with lethargy as a direct result of America's obsession with excess.

Looking at the electoral graphs you might think just the opposite: Americans are divided. But what are they divided about? Apparently they are not divided on the conflicts between Israel and Palestine. Apparently they are not divided on gays having the right to marry. Apparently they are not divided on sending more troops to Iraq. Apparently they are not divided on another rich white guy being elected into office. The fact that the Democrats and Republicans had no visible competition proves that the country is in full support of all those mindsets.

So why do even critical people still actually think that America is so great? What is it? OUR BELLY FULL BUT WE’RE HUNGRY? I JUST ATE. One of the differences between the current opposition within the US and the opposition during Apartheid in South Africa is that in America (and not to be reductive) the oppressed run on excess (physical, visual, or mental) and in South Africa the oppressed were/are a population of lack. And these differences completely affect the character of the opposition.

The reason a person can look at the suppression of American dissent and feel, It’s OK, at least we’re not Saudi Arabia, is that American power need not necessarily use guns and missiles to silence its own populace. America silences its own dissent through lethargy. This is very different from an administration (and I mean this in the real way: the larger elite enforcement) that overtly curbs the ability for its people to speak or walk without the fore-grounded fear of being “snatched up.”

One must understand that America is not a country whose activist population acts out of survival. People do very interesting things when they need to survive. You’d know if a person was on the brink of extinction. The average American (dissenter or not), on the contrary, is walking around as if they just finished Christmas dinner. Imagine, you have just eaten the biggest meal in your life and all you want to do is pass out in front of the TV. Ring a bell? Americans are constantly full. And that’s the infrastructure’s weapon of mass destruction. If you keep the public full, you keep them inactive. Which is why even the opposition doesn’t respond to oppression the way we are used to seeing in other countries when oppressive regimes take power. And when it does happen, it simply “disappears.” People say, Why aren’t Americans fighting back? And we are. 20,000 here. 50,000 there.

But what people abroad want to know is, Why aren’t you REALLY fighting back. And here’s why. The genius of American oppression is that dissent has been made into a leisure activity. (The exception proves the rule when most of my more “active” activist friends have actually had to consciously “become poor” in order to induce a hungry belly. Imagine that!?) But this is nothing new for Americans. The Weatherman Underground during the 1960s also induced poverty; opting out of the middle class. And what says leisure like a Mai Tai on the beach? The summer of ‘68! (Ever wonder why it was the “summer” of ‘68? As the American Indian activist Ward Churchill will not so gently inform you, because when the summer was over, the Berkeley fall semester was just getting started. The masses simply went “back to school.” You weren’t expected to actually drop out of Berkeley were you?)

Or, look at it a different way. Where else is it a privilege to NOT own a TV? Where else is it a privilege to NOT stuff your face at an “All You Can Eat” buffet? Where else is it a privilege to NOT drive to work, but to ride a bike? This is not a population that experiences an institutionalized segregation of people based on race, gender, and sexuality (though I know this is at least the underlining policy). This is a population that when there was institutionalized racism, the majority was (fortunately for them) not directly affected.

This is a population brainwashed to think on a very full stomach, with weekdays and weekends to spend lounging around with your friends at the anti-Bush rally, that “At least it’s not Saudi Arabia.” That is the mindset and that is the problem.

Barak is a graduate of Naropa University's MFA Writing & Poetics program. He is also co-founder of MAN with Patrick Scanlon, a small press specializing in the publication of experimental poetry, fiction, and all around lifestyle. Barak has a book of hybrid poetics and critique coming out on SubDay Press in early 2005. In 2001, he released a book of collaborative poetry and criticism with Patrick Scanlon titled Target: USOFA&. Works by Barak have been published in Nerve Lantern: Annual Axiom of Performance Literature, El Pouvre Mouse, Three Therefore Two, Bombay Gin, and Specimens. He is a founding member of SPRCSS, and IoSono. He is a high school teacher, construction worker, and a dervish with the Nur Ashki Jerrahi sufi order. He divides his time between the US and South Africa (his wife's homeland). He is also aware that writing your own bio with the pronoun "he" is both eerie and oneristic.