To whom...,
Anticipating the shrieks about American hooliganism, I will define my terms and lend insight into the American psyche for our foreign comrades. The America my father grew up in did violence because it hated people. It hated the Axis, the Communists, and anybody associated with them. Newt Gingrich represented that America and he represented its expiration.
Ultimately, however, Americans do not hate people for who they are, for their ethnicity or their history. We don't even hate Mexicans, really, and we definitely hate them more than anybody. Despite the fact that America is such a violent country, Americans don't really do violence because of hate - certainly not the kind of hate that inspires Kosovo or Rwanda. Americans do violence for three essential reasons. In this we are almost perfectly represented by the gangsters we put on the movie screens. We do violence first and foremost for money. If people get in the way of American business interests, they can expect to get hurt. Second, and I really should put it third, we do violence when we feel insulted. Americans have nothing against Cubans. We like Cubans. Cuba made the mistake of insulting us, however, and that cannot happen without our punishing it. Third, and this informs nearly all our non-economic adventurism in the last 20 years, America does violence because we enjoy doing it. We go to war because it's entertaining. We're sadists and violence-lovers who like war the same way we like football and professional wrestling.
You may not believe that we bear so little malice as I say but consider how quickly we forgive people. You'll find a perfect example of this at the end of the American Civil War when the Union troops saluted the rebel General Lee as he surrendered. Any remaining animosity from that war, which was one of the bloodiest wars that America ever fought, is simply a fabrication. We went on and got back to business. Consider how fast America forgave the Chinese for their Communist ways. We went from rampant McCarthyism to sucking up to Beijing in a couple decades, and they're still commies. We never really hated the Russians. The Japanese we only resented because they seemed ungrateful, and that never stopped us from buying their products. Most American kids probably have no idea we even fought a war against Germans, why would we? We have completely separated the concepts of Germany and Nazism in our minds. We don't even hate the Vietnamese, we never really did. We just got angry at them because they were playing the game for keeps and we were just screwing around and got hurt.
American jingoism is not jingoism but egotism. We think we're more important than everybody else not because of who they are but who they aren't - us. Not only that, we know we have no culture and that we are rednecks compared with all the decent and sophisticated countries but we just don't care. Americans are completely self-involved and simply have no time for other people, but we do not hate them. Americans absolutely hate other Americans more than they hate anybody else, it's not even a close contest. We KNOW that other Americans are to blame for our problems because there is nobody else, so far as we're concerned.
The only hate Americans consistently show - and consistently deny - is class hatred. We hate people who offend the class system that we pretend doesn't exist. Anti-black hatred is not directed at African-ness but at class. Americans must believe that those who are at the bottom of the economic system are there because they are bad people. That is essential to the American fantasy-world. Threaten that illusion and you will find yourself in trouble. The one thing our "classless" society hates is people who point out its inequalities. We will even, as has been reported on this list recently, go to the bizarre extent of trying to prove that our inequality is not inequality or lacks the true nature of inequality, in the face of incontrovertible facts.
Still, coming as I do from such a deluded and sadistic society, I will put my people up against Balkan haters and call those haters hooligans. If Americans kill for money, pride and pleasure at least we kill for cause, however petty. We don't kill because of some imaginary bullshit. If Americans were pressed on all sides by nations as strong as we, it might be different, but we aren't. Even if it is that happy accident of isolation (and prosperity) that means we not only don't *hate* an Albanian for Albanianism or a Serb for Serbianism but we don't even recognize or care about the difference between the two, I'll take it. Sick as America is there is something about it that allows Albanians and Serbs, Singhalese and Tamils, and all the other warring people to come here and forget about their differences. Maybe it's just living in a land where nobody gives a good goddamn about anybody but themselves. I don't know. I will admit that the proposition America might be the most morally developed nation frightens me awfully. Still, the fact remains that we are blundering into Kosovo exactly because we don't understand what the people are on about over there. Serb and Albanian snipers will kill American troops (should we send them there) and we still won't understand why. We just have no concept of what inspires people to act as these Balkan people do. To the extent that I do, I am ready to condemn their violence, even in the face of ours, and call them hooligans.
peace