AMERICA
I was asked by the publisher to write something on United States of America. The premise is that is a place of contradictions, power that defines the destiny of the world past 100 years in good and bad. And that exactly what it is.
There’s a history of Anti- Americanism since it’s beginnings starting with the European colonial powers, England being defied in a gruesome war of independence, later war with France in Quebec and Spain over Cuba, Philippines. Mexico being totally humiliated by loosing Texas, California. and having American troops marching into Mexico City. From the beginning the Monroe doctrine was designed to keep European powers from Western hemisphere and that didn’t endire Americans to the European ruling elites (image of ugly and crass American). US was claiming it was keeping away bad colonials. As for Asia, commodore Perry by sailing his battleship into Tokyo harbor opened Japan to outside world and trade, US took Philippines from Spain. In North Africa the birth of American navy happened by chasing Arab pirates of the coast of Morocco. Basically America was fully engaged from the begiginings in the world’s affairs. In Latin America marines were engaged in over 5000 interventions, like in Nicaragua, Salvador, Porto Rico, Dominican Republic, building and controlling Panama Canal. And all of this only in 19 century and first years of 20th.
America it’s a warrior nation and very successful at it. It did win couple of good ones, luckily for us. It’s a nation in a permanent state of war. It is also a nation in war with itself, starting with its original sin when declaration of independence was written about equality of man that didn’t include African Americans and that instituanilezed slavery. That is a crucial element in understanding America, from this many crucial things emanate; from horrific Civil war, Crow laws in the South with segregation, violence and lynching of blacks and to great things, like the American democratic and progressive traditions being generated around this conflict that influenced the world. The struggle for Civil liberties and Martin Luther King helped other oppressed minorities to fight for their own rights and slowly trough legal process started achieving them; women’s, gay’s & transgender, Latino’s and other minorities rights, etc. This conflict and the tensions generated by it is central to great American art, like Jazz, Pop and Rap, entertainment in large including Hollywood, literature and is defining visual arts since Abstract Expressionism till today. One side of the coin has a lot blood on it, including oppressive global economical system shaped and enforced by US, the other has opposite value, power that exported liberating modernizing ideas of individualizzem, struggle for civil rights for oppressed, gender & race studies, arts & entertainment and technology that is constantly trasphorming lives, including the way this article is written and transferred and printed. So you can dive into the bad and ugly or good (as a great Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western movie was called, but in different order:” Good bad and ugly”) and liberating at your pleasure. It’s plenty to explore and see on each end and the grays in between. It’s up to you to individualize your take on America and all are pretty much correct and wrong at the same time. Maybe this schizoprechnic reality makes people around the worlds so passionate and Anti Americanism virulent and deadly as it’s support that can also turn bloody. The main misunderstanding for people looking at the US from outside is the simplification of decision-making process and the acting upon the world by the States. It’s seen as a monolithically as a single entity or mind injecting itself and enforcing it’s will upon the world. Like recent war interventions in Persian Gulf, Bosnia, Serbia & Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan and so called permanent war on terror. That misunderstanding makes things simple and especially appealing for vision of the world that is run by conspiracies. But because, as I previously mention, of America’s war with itself as a constant process, that is absolutely wrong. It’s internal debate is messy, chaotic, and because of it’s original sin and constant interspection that it created, it is democratic, laud and incomprehensive. This doesn’t mean that decisions made are good, they can be very lousy, sometimes can be the right ones. Good example of this in foreign affairs was the debate around intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo. Well, that fact doesn’t make much difference to a family that was being wipeout by a bomb, dropped by mistake, but maybe it does to a girl being able to go to school and maybe take a little more control over her life and body. Well, as a friend of mine put it with irony, American soldier as gallant protector of Afghan women in the discussion we had abut NATO living or staying in Afghanistan. Take your pick. Dammed if you don’t do it {Rwanda, Sarajevo…), dammed if you do it (Sadam, Taliban…). The burden of the White man as the British colonials put it, so called taking responsibility for the “primitive” natives as excuse for squeeze and economical exploitation. One thing, to be literal, is that US is no more a White nation, is as close to what there is of a global society, unlike Europe that so much of it’s life and unease is derived from blood and soil. In next decade or sooner European stock will be minority and here is where the vitality of American culture kicks in, it’s multiculturalism. (No mistake, this is not easy internal process, with a lot of ugliness, specially now with a hysteria, pressure and violence on illegal and legal immigrants. Hopefully in the end it will move in the right direction, soul of the country depends on it, not unlike Civil liberties struggle in the 60’s).
There is a tendency in our human nature that power vacuum is always filled. One contended is the West with its internal long process in philosophy of liberating individual from simple mindedness of religious oppression of Christianity and dialectics & humanism becoming part of thinking process and after the horrors of producing 2 WW while dividing the colonial wealth, producing the worst genocides since Lucy, devising the most lethal forms of annihilation, exploding nuclear bombs on cities and immersing in perversion of exploitations (Conrad’s the heart of darkness), there was some sort of exploration of it’s bad consciousness and a guilt trip, that instutinalized itself among others in formation of EU and its laws and in it's almost impossible birocracy. The other force there is to fill the vacuum of power right now is the newly refreshed, after the latest economical collapse produced by US’s Wall St., victorious Chinese model (Singapore, original South Korean, Saudi, Dubai etc.) of economical progress (Rupert Murdoch loves it as do other corporations that go along with and enforce Chinese government repression of free speech and dissent) granted by dictatorship, wanting to recapture the felling of its own rightful place of national grandeur, inflaming nationalism to replace the youthful Tien=namen Sq. desire for democracy, after historical humiliation inflicted by the West, which is basically what is the premise of fascism. So once again it’s simplicity of good or bad option or something in-between. Obviously something in-between a 3 way is more preferable, because if there is time for a process to produce something as a more inclusive, economically just and humane way of the world affairs that is the choice the right one, but is there time and process in place to produce that or there’s no time and the choice is the US & West chaotic democracy or part of it or so called Chinese model that with time will merge with transnational corporations, that are finding its control of people and work force very appealing to maximize their profits and democratic process of debate and fights for workers rights and unions a nuisance, sort of what happened in Germany when the money class put Hitler in power to stop the liberating social movements in Weimar republic. This is happening on global scale. It’s pretty scary where things are moving to, specially amplified by climate change and scarcity of resources. Is the current enormous capacity of US war machine good or bad?
So, take your pick.
As our glorious poet France Preseren put it “ shoes be only judged by Kopitar” or something like that, meaning that a sate burocrat shouldn’t judge poetry, so me as a Visual Artist writing sort of a foreign affairs paper is not appropriate, but as to [Adetti di lavoro) as is called in Italian, visual art professionals know, that politics is integrated as a main element in art. Basically as Beuys told us that everybody is an artist & can use art as a tool for political transformation and Warhol that everybody is a star for 15 minutes maybe Kopitar today could have something valid to say about Presern poems. Democratization of expression and culture that happened trough ideas and works of art since beginning of modernism and amplified by new technology we are immersed in right now, has big part of American DNA in it. There’s also NYC, the actual space where the global exchange, literally from person to person, artist to artist takes place. It’s a magical place. Influence of American visual artists from Rothko, Pollock, to Jasper Jones, Rauschenberg, Cage, Warhol to Basquat, Haring, Koons, merging high with low, pop culture with highly conceptual work, sort of good and bad and ugly, that alchemy of this transformation to ever more democratization of creative power did happened in the US and in its imperfection did maybe unleashed and empowered individuals all over (It also produced a shift in geography of established Visual Arts that previously was exclusively domain of European and American artists, now contemporary art market includes global production). This is sort of unintended byproduct of American dominance and globalization it unleashed, power to project information. Like Hip Hop expression of Black urban America, it’s genesis in that original American sin, merged with Dance Hall from poor country of Jamaica and now trough the power of American commercial media morphed in becoming language of protest of the poorest and dispossessed from all over. So that creative empowerment of every women, man & child coming from the arts will hopefully provide that 3 way between Good, Bad &Ugly.
Well, it’s wishful thinking.
Emil Memon NYC,September 2010
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