Exploring the roots of America's spreading culture of violence

While Central Europeans have experienced their share of organized political violence in this century, it is the United States that the world points its finger at when it comes to naming a culture of violence.

There are complicated reason--a tradition of frontier lawlessness (lax gun control laws have accorded the Colt revolver the status of "the Great Equalizer"), as well as deepening and widening disparities between the very rich and the very poor.

But that is not the fundamental reason. For that, we must go back to the founding of the country. Speeches of "liberty and justice for all," often heard at Independence Day gatherings, contradict two facts about U.S. history: The country was founded alongside the extermination or removal of the indigenous Indian tribes to make way for the white European's manifest destiny. And second, the plantation economy was built on black slave labor.

In Freudian terms, the American superego and id have never been integrated. Our official rhetoric says we're in Eden, but our dominant behavior is that of following El Dorado, the city of gold. Our superego (Eden) has always been out of sync with our ids (El Dorado).

That is why Americans puzzle their friends and foes alike. Sometimes we are the most idealistic people on earth (such as Peace Corps volunteers); sometimes we're the grossest oppressors around (creating and protecting Central American banana republics).

The real violence infecting the United States is this vacillation between being maniacally idealistic and, in a natural reaction, uncritically materialistic.

The real problem is that the vast majority of Americans are oblivious to this character flaw. They believe they are the greatest nation on Earth. The so-called American Dream tries to legitimize this defect by saying "anyone can grow up to be president."

Tell that to the Americans that are not of European descent. Indeed, tell it to most working stiffs. The first six U.S. presidents were either Virginian aristocrats or New England bourgeoisie.

Why, you naturally ask, are Americans so oblivious of their history? The easy answer is that the gap between what we say we are and how we actually behave is very, very interesting. It took secular saints like Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, Eugene Victor Debs and Paul Robeson to face the gap between the official and real versions of U.S. history.

And look what happened to the last two. Debs, the founder of the American Railway Union in the 1890's, ran for president on the Socialist ticket in 1916 and 1920 from the federal prison in Atlanta, Georgia--for opposing Woodrow Wilson's contradictory military policies.

And the great entertainer Paul Robeson had his passport revoked in 1950 because he refused to join the Cold War chorus. He died in 1976, a broken man, his international career wrecked by McCarthyite toadies.

I'd bet my pension with confidence that not one in a thousand--make that one in 100,000--has ever heard of either of these last two heroic true Americans.

And it's worse when it comes to our great writers. I used to tell my American literature students to take the Walt test. Ask the first 50 people you meet on the street who Walt Whitman was.

Unless you stumble upon an English teachers' convention, you'll get zero recognition. Ask the same 50 who Walt Disney was and you'll score 100 percent. Q.E.D. Except for a thin veneer of the Ivy-League elite, Americans are wholly unconnected with their heritage.

The "American Dream" is just the latest lie that began when the first New Englanders actually thought God had saved an "empty" continent for them: A people chosen to be a "City on the Hill," setting a good example for the rest of the world. That morphed into manifest destiny--the idea that it was God's will for white Europeans to expand form sea to shining sea--until we had the Indians safely tucked away on reservations. Then the "American Dream"--the term was invented during the Depression--extended the lie of equality and liberty.

Incidentally, the violence of U.S. police forces (for example the 19 bullets undercover police officers put through the body of an unarmed man in the foyer of his Bronx apartment) is based on fear of the ghettos, which are dominated by ethnic minorities.

It is also my hunch that the National Rifle Association's campaign against gun control has a covert agenda. They fear an imminent race war--and want to be prepared to fend off angry minorities.

Thus the U.S. will remain violent to its inhabitants and to its putative friends (the war in Kosovo was based on the assumption that U.S. ground troops' lives were somehow more sacrosanct than those of Serbs and Albanians).

So is the U.S. hopeless? Of course not. All Americans have to do is grow up and join the human race. History is not a Super Bowl playoff.

Americans must begin by possessing their real heroes--Whitman and Lincoln and Debs and Robeson, to name just a few. Of course, it will be difficult to shuck bad habits. Growing up has never been easy.

That process, if we and the world are lucky, will begin in the schools and libraries of the country. Not on the Internet or on Cape Canaveral. In our churches, not in the casinos. You get the idea.

from The Prague Post, September 22, 1999