Graduating the Rest of Us, ‘09
By Tom Engelhardt
Graduates of the Bush years, initiates of the Obama era, if you think
of a commencement address as a kind of sermon, then every sermon needs
its text. Here's the one I've chosen for today, suitably obscure and
yet somehow ringing:
"The idea that somehow counterterrorism is a homeland
security issue doesn't make sense when you recognize the fact that
terror around the world doesn't recognize borders. There is no
right-hand, left-hand anymore."
That's taken directly from the new national security bible of Obama
National Security Advisor (and ex-Marine General) James Jones. He said
it last week at a press briefing. The occasion
was the integration of a Bush-era creation, the Homeland Security
Council -- which, if you're like me, you had never heard of until it
lost its independence -- into the National Security Council, which
Jones runs, a move that probably represents yet another consolidation
of power inside a historically ever more imperial White House.
After four years in this college, I assume you are students of the word
and like all biblical texts, this one must be interpreted. It must be read.
So let's start by thinking of it this way: If we are, in some sense,
defined by our enemies, then consider this description of terrorism --
even though most acts of terror are undoubtedly committed by
locally-minded individuals -- as something like a shadow thrown on a
wall. The looming figure to which the shadow belongs is not, however,
al-Qaeda, but us. We are, after all, in the war-on-terror business.
It's how we've defined ourselves these last years.
If you accept Jones's definition, then you only have to go a modest
distance to conclude that we are the other great force on the planet
that "doesn't recognize borders." Keep in mind that, right now, we're
fighting at least two-and-a-half wars thousands of miles from this
sylvan campus, and in your name no less. When it comes to our "national
security," as we define it, borders turn out to matter remarkably
little in a pinch, as long, of course, as they're other people's
borders.
After all, we have established an extensive network of military bases, some gigantic, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and secured the right to treat them essentially as U.S. territory; we have hundreds of such bases, large and small, scattered across
the Earth, most not in war zones, a startling number of them built up
into impressive "little Americas." It's through them that we garrison
much of the planet (something you will almost never see commented upon
in the mainstream media, obvious though it may be). Our drone aircraft, flown by remote control
from bases in the United States, now regularly patrol distant skies, as
if borders did not exist, to smite our foes, whatever any locals might
think. Typically, as far as we know, our secret warriors continue to fund,
to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, a Bush-era project,
which also knows no borders, aimed at destabilizing the Iranian
government.
The Architecture of Meaning
Instead of simply continuing down this superhighway of borderlessness, let's just consider two sentences buried deep in a recent piece on the inside pages of the New York Times
about a roadside explosive device in Iraq that killed three Americans
in a vehicle. It's the sort of thing that Americans tend not to find
strange in the least. So as an experiment, try, as I read it aloud, to
take in the deep strangeness it represents:
"The Americans were driving along a road used
exclusively by the American military and reconstruction teams when a
bomb, which local Iraqi security officials described as an improvised
explosive device, went off. No Iraqi vehicles, even those of the army
and the police, are allowed to use the road where the attack occurred,
according to residents."
Keep in mind that this isn't a restricted road in Langley, Virginia.
It's a road outside the Iraqi city of Falluja, where we conducted two
massive, city-destroying assaults
back in 2004; in other words, the road which "no Iraqi vehicles... are
allowed to use" is thousands of miles and many borders away from
Washington.
And
that's nothing really. If you want to know something about American
"impunity" -- a fine nineteenth century word that should be more widely
used today -- when it comes to Iraq's borders, get your hands on the
text of Order 17. That order was issued by our viceroy in Baghdad, L.
Paul Bremer III, back in the salad days of the Bush administration,
when that era's neocons thought the world was their oyster (or perhaps
their oil well).
Promulgated on the eve of the supposed "return of sovereignty" to Iraq
in 2004, Order 17 gave new meaning to the term "Free World." In intent,
it was a perpetual American get-out-of-jail-free card. If I were the
president of this college, I would assign Order 17 to be read as part
of a campus-wide course on magical imperial realism. Here's but one
passage I've summarized from that document:
All foreigners (read: Americans) involved in the
occupation project were to be granted "freedom of movement without
delay throughout Iraq," and neither their vessels, vehicles, nor
aircraft were to be "subject to registration, licensing or inspection
by the [Iraqi] Government." Nor in traveling would foreign diplomats,
soldiers, consultants, or security guards, or any of their vehicles,
vessels, or planes be subject to "dues, tolls, or charges, including
landing and parking fees," and so on. And don't forget that on imports,
including "controlled substances," there were to be no customs fees (or
inspections), taxes, or much of anything else; nor was there to be the
slightest charge for the use of occupied Iraqi "headquarters, camps,
and other premises," nor for the use of electricity, water, or other
utilities.
Or, since actual architecture, like the architecture of language, is
revealing, consider our most recent embassy-building practices. An
embassy is, almost by definition, the face of our country, of us,
abroad. For our embassy in embattled Iraq, the Bush administration
ponied up almost three-quarters of a billion dollars (including cost
overruns). The result, now opened, is the largest embassy compound on the planet.
It's about the size of Vatican City, a self-enclosed world
with its own elaborate defenses and amenities inside the citadel of
Baghdad's Green Zone. Staffed by approximately 1,000 "diplomats," it's
the sort of place Cold War Washington might once have dreamed of
building in Moscow (not that the Russians would have let them).
Do the Iraqis want such an establishment in their capital? Would you,
if it was a foreign "embassy" in your land? Once again, that
old-fashioned word "impunity," which once went so well with words like
"freebooter" and "extraterritoriality," seems apt. We still practice a
version of freebooting, we still have our own version of extraterritoriality, and we do it all with impunity.
In our era, the imperial mother ship landed
in a country the size of California, but with a fraction of its
population, that just happens to have a lot of untapped reserves of
hydrocarbons. But that, I'm sure you're thinking, was the Bush era. You
know, the years of over-the-top unilateralism that crashed and burned
along with those dreams of a global Pax Americana and a domestic Pax Republicana.
You might think so, but the news -- what's left of it anyway -- tells a
different story. When it comes to "change you can believe in," a recent
piece
by Saeed Shah and Warren P. Stroebel of the McClatchy newspapers caught
my eye. They wrote: "The White House has asked Congress for -- and
seems likely to receive -- $736 million to build a new U.S. embassy in
Islamabad, along with permanent housing for U.S. government civilians
and new office space in the Pakistani capital."
In other words, the Obama administration is asking Congress to fork
over almost the exact price of our monster embassy in Baghdad (after
staggering cost overruns). Figure those always predictable overruns
into this project, and you may indeed have the first billion-dollar
embassy. To use a term the U.S. military once loved, this will result
in a large "footprint"
on Pakistani soil. It is, to say the least, not normal practice to
build and staff such mega-embassies. So if you have a taste for
symbolism, this sort of embassy says a lot about how Washington
imagines power relations on this planet. Think of these as our
ziggurats, our temples (as well as command centers) in foreign climes.
Far stranger than any of these strange specifics is this: none of them
seem particularly strange to us. They are news, yes, but not the sort
of news that opens eyes, starts discussion, sets Americans -- sets you -- wondering.
Two Lost Syllables
Now maybe we shouldn't be surprised by any of this. After all, isn't
this just how imperial powers like to operate: as if they owned the
planet, or at least had special rights that overruled the locals when
it comes to significant hunks of prime real estate?
Which brings us to a word I haven't said yet, the real subject of my
speech today: Empire. It's the word no one in Washington can say. Its
absence from our political discussion is perhaps what makes the United
States imperially unique, and yet without it, some crucial part of the
real world is missing in action too, some part of what might help us
understand ourselves and others.
Words denied mean analyses not offered, things not grasped, surprise
not registered, strangeness not taken in, all of which means that
terrible mistakes are repeated, wounding ways of acting in the world
never seriously reconsidered.
Think of a crucial missing word as a kind of invisible straight jacket.
Its absence, oddly enough, chains you to the present, to what's
accepted and acceptable. Just two missing syllables, em-pire,
making up a word that's proved so serviceable for so many centuries.
And yet, without it, our American world is a little like the one in the
sci-fi movie The Matrix. You remember, it's the one where human
beings imagine themselves moving and acting in a perfectly real land,
while their actual bodies are stored somewhere far more grim. One
question to ask yourself as you form your processional to leave these
grounds that have sheltered you these last years might be: Do you have
any idea what world you're walking into? If essential terms for
describing it are missing, can you even know? And no less important, do
you want to know?
You'll notice -- and here's the good news -- that I haven't offered you a shred of career advice, or a hint of optimism so far. And on this suitably gloomy day in this gloomy world of ours, I hope not to.
I also know that, whatever your minds may be on as you prepare to head
through your school's vast gates into a none-too-welcoming world, they
aren't on what I have to say today. That, quite honestly, gives me the
freedom to talk about a word you may not have heard in your four years
here, not applied to our country anyway.
Think about it. In these last moments of your campus life, don't you
find it a little strange that the United States, your country, has
military bases, more than 700 of them, scattered across every continent
and that your school offers not a single course on the way we garrison
this planet? Don't you find it just a tad odd that this seemingly
salient fact of our national existence hasn't seemed worth teaching,
debating, or discussing?
Let me tell you a little story of mine. In what still passes for my real life, despite my work at TomDispatch, I'm a book editor.
A few years back, I edited one by Chalmers Johnson, an experience a
little like passing through those great gates at the end of this
pathway, but in the other direction, and going back to school. The book
was called The Sorrows of Empire. It was quite well reviewed in our major papers (in the long-gone days of 2004 when they still had
book review sections), and became a bestseller. Oh, I should add that
the book focuses, in great detail, chapter after chapter, region after
region, on what Johnson called our global "baseworld." And yet not
until three years later, when Jonathan Freedland, a British journalist,
took up Johnson's work in the New York Review of Books,
did a major reviewer, praising it, focus on its central topic, the way
we garrison the world. This was, as you might imagine, no small trick
and it taught me something about what Americans find it easier not to
see, even when it's staring them in the face.
Graduation 1966
Fortunately, as I say, I can talk about this today without fear that
any of you will be affected by it. I'm the proof of that, or rather my
younger self, graduating in what seemed a sunnier moment 43 years ago.
Whoever spoke to the gathered graduates of the class of 1966 at Yale
College is long gone from my memory banks, just as I'll surely be from
yours.
A few days ago, preparing for this moment, I clambered to the top of my
closet -- no small thing now that I'm almost 65 -- and amid the piles
of junk and memorabilia I've squirreled away extracted a letter-sized
envelope of photos marked "college" from a larger folder that, long
ago, before I knew the half of it, I labeled "my life."
So here's what I can tell you about my own graduation. Unlike you, I
commenced, if that's what it was, on a sunny day, so the photos tell
me, and with flags flying. They were part of the processional, the
Stars and Stripes and what must be college pennants as well, as we
marched enrobed to our ceremony, which I no longer remember. I can't
tell you who spoke or what he -- it was surely a he then -- spoke
about, or what wisdom he offered us, only that he was probably an
Authority, with a capital A, and that, although the sixties were just
starting for me (the earlier years of that decade, in lived experience,
were really part of the 1950s for most of us then), I suspect that I
already had a creeping case of the skepticism toward authority for
which that period became either famous or infamous, depending on your
point of view.
I look jaunty and well prepared indeed (hair slicked down, a more
than serviceable smile) for a future in the State Department, or the
U.S. Information Agency, or as a prospective member of the cast of
season three or four of Mad Men
that would never come. I admit that, in the small packet of photos
preserved from that day, I find myself, whether in my charcoal suit and
tie or my robe and mortar board with tassel, almost unrecognizable.
It's as if I were holding in my hands a piece of amber with some
strange ancestral creature preserved inside. Or rather, if we were to
jump but four or five years ahead, now also my distant past, you and I
would surely agree that I will soon be unrecognizable with hair almost
to my shoulders and a little Mao cap perched on my head.
I feel today from this distance as if, in either case, I'm peering down
a Star Trekkian wormhole into another universe. A number of the people
I was photographed with I no longer recognize and a surprising number
of the rest are dead. From a wealthy southwestern family, my friend
Clay would die of AIDS a couple of decades later; from a working-class
Midwestern city, my former roommate John -- not photographed that day
because he had delayed graduating a year -- would in the twenty-first
century put a gun to his head in Las Vegas.
And then there's my aunt Hilda, smiling remarkably sweetly at the
photographer (possibly my father). A public school librarian with the
cadences of nineteenth century novels lodged in her head, sometime in
the 1980s, not so long before she died, she would begin a letter to my
daughter, then perhaps four years old, about her own father, my
grandfather, who ran away from home and worked as a "scribe" for a
lawyer in Hamburg to earn his passage to the New World:
"Your great grandfather, Moore Engelhardt, a boy of 16,
arrived in New York from Europe in March 1888. It was during the famous
blizzard, and after a sea voyage of about 30 days. He had no money. He
often said that he had a German 50 cent piece in his pocket when he
landed. His trip had to be in the cheapest part of the ship -- way down
below in steerage. Poor boy, I'm sure he was seasick a good deal of the
time..."
And then there's Moore's wife, Hilda's mother, my dear, tiny
grandmother Celia, who grew up in a New York City slum, and married
that poor boy -- he was 17 years her senior and they took a steamer up
the Hudson River for their honeymoon, as she used to say, "because he
had business in Albany the next day." She was there, too, standing
proudly in front of me under an archway, undoubtedly amazed that she,
or her grandson, ever got near Yale. And my father and mother, as well,
a photo taken with each of them, my father, bullish as ever, one foot
forward, my mother chic and petite; both of them, I think it's fair to
say, looking happier, if not prouder, than they undoubtedly felt at
that moment -- our relationship then being, politely put, on the dicey
side -- just as in the photos I look so much more at ease and confident
than I ever faintly felt.
All of them, except me, are now long dead.
I see cameras flashing everywhere right now, and yet this, of
course, is the world that awaits you. This is something so basic, so
hard to absorb that, unlike the purposeful killing of whole categories
of people, which we call "genocide," we simply have no word for it,
this winnowing of every generation, of everybody, until photos like
these have no personal meaning because no one in them is remembered. So
there's another missing word that, in addition to telling you a great
deal about the limits of language, should certainly put anyone's
travails of the moment into context and is, in this speech, as close to
optimism in tough times as I'm likely to get.
And
speaking for a moment of that "poor boy" who was me, who had been
raised on a glorious American story of victory in war and triumph in
peace, he had only the faintest sense that he was living in the heart
of the heart of a national security state whose interests were nothing
short of imperial. I mean, he was no fool. He had been an only child --
he thought the term was "lonely child" when young -- and undoubtedly in
desperation, he had ransacked his local library and read widely, even
if, like most young readers with no one to guide him, wonderfully
indiscriminately. (That is, in fact, the radical joy of libraries, as
opposed to bookstores: you can try anything on the shelf without the
need for investment.)
And it wasn't that he hadn't come up against the dangers of the Cold
War either. Like most Americans, he had found himself right at the edge of world's end on October 22, 1962, the night President Kennedy appeared
on radio and television to announce that the Soviet Union and the
United States were facing off over nuclear missiles to be emplaced in
Cuba, and the world was at the brink of destruction. The Cuban Missile
Crisis, it would be called.
He was then 18 years old. Like many Americans at that moment, he
thought he might be toast by morning; that his life, which (as far as
he could tell) showed no sign of having begun, might well be over. Of
course, that world of ashes and cinders never came to be, and as you
know he made it to graduation. By then, he had taken his first modest
steps toward opposing an American war in Vietnam, signed his first
petition, and gone to his first demonstration, ever so hesitantly
because he really was a good American boy and these were not things you
were then brought up to do, or did thoughtlessly.
He was living in a city, New Haven, where young people wore jackets
with CIA emblazoned on the back. (It stood, believe it or not, for the Culinary Institute of America.)
And he knew graduate students, returning from far-flung places like
Indonesia, where, in 1965, at least 500,000 communists had been
slaughtered, who were regularly debriefed by the CIA. But no one he met
thought such things out of the ordinary. He knew people who had been
garrisoned in Japan, Germany, and elsewhere. There were hints galore of
what world we were really living in. But you couldn't have proved it by
him. American Empire? No way, not in those days. It didn't go with
George Washington, the Revolution, the Pony Express, or the Civil War.
It wasn't an American word. There was, of course, the Soviet Empire.
And there had been the British and Roman Empires, which were huge but
nothing to brag about, and then there was us, and what we were
committed to was, as everyone still said then, the Free World. As at
least a partial explanation for what he didn't grasp, let me point out
that the United States was surfing the crest of so much wealth, was so
dominant and powerful that, no matter the imperial stupidities and
crimes of its agents, overt and covert, committed in its name or not,
blowback was slow to come. As with the Iranians, blowback could then
take 26 years, not as now months, weeks, or days. It was, in a sense,
easier not to notice, though evidently not so much easier given how few
seem to notice today.
While he could, then, see flaws in the Manichaean version of our
universe that surrounded him, he still considered Vietnam at worst a
tragic blunder or error, and he still hoped someday to be an American
diplomat or, via the United States Information Agency, to be able to
explain to confused foreigners what was best about our country.
If you had claimed that he lived in an imperial garrison state in 1966,
he would undoubtedly have sat you down and explained to you, in all
seriousness, why that couldn't be so. Despite President Dwight D.
Eisenhower's farewell address in 1961, he paid little attention to the military-industrial complex and might not, then, even have known the term.
It has to be said that while, for some, the gift that kept on giving in
terms of understanding how our world worked was the Civil Rights
movement, for him it was, grimly enough, the war in Vietnam (which, in
another sense, might have been thought of as the pit into which you
never stopped falling). That never-ending horror would certainly change
the course of his life, taking dreams of the State Department or the
USIA off the table and, in the end, make the idea that he was living in
an imperial state plausible to him. He gained in those years a new
language and a new understanding of how the world worked.
Of Graveyards and Empires
Looking out over this crowd today, I find it unbearably strange that,
43 years later, with new and bloody counterinsurgency wars underway in
lands once hardly known to most Americans, with our military bases
implanted in countless lands, with the Pentagon budget at almost
unimaginable levels, with our operatives abroad still involved in
assassinations and renditions, "empire" remains MIA and most Americans
have no sense -- no conscious sense, at least -- that they are living
in an imperial garrison state.
Let me amend that, actually. Americans love the word "empire." Just a
dip into Google.news.com tells you that. On a given day, you quickly
discover that you can play a revamped version of Empire: Total War on your Xbox (it's set in the 18th century), will someday be able to catch the comedy Soakers, soon to be filmed in Hawaii by the Empire Film Group, and can attend the Empire Ranch Men's Golf Club Director's Cup Tournament in California, or await the $12 million facelift
of the Empire ballroom at New York City's Grand Hyatt Hotel in, by the
way, the "Empire state." Meanwhile, Empire Resorts, a struggling gaming
company, has just gotten
a much needed extension to a line of credit "staving off insolvency";
and the word "empire," it turns out, goes remarkably well with
trendiness ("fashion empire"), medicine ("Empire medical training"), food ("BT Bistro the latest in Trigg's restaurant empire"), and even the business of sex
("Reports surfaced this week that Hugh Hefner, longtime publisher of
Playboy magazine, is considering relinquishing the reins of his bawdy
empire...").
Put "American empire" into the same search engine, on the other hand,
and you get Brits, peripheral websites like this one, or maybe Pravda.
Of course, there was one brief Camelot-like moment when the American
empire came into its own in Washington. After the Afghan War of 2001
seemed to end in triumph and before the Iraq one headed down the tubes,
the neocons of the Bush administration and associated drum-thumping
pundits and think-tankers overcame an American aversion to empire (and
so, in a sense, to reality) and began proclaiming that we were the
biggest, the best, the most dominant power this planet had ever seen,
that the Romans and the Brits were but puny precursors.
For me, it was a strange moment when the language of total global
domination which, in my childhood, had been the onscreen fare of evil
Nazis, imperial Japanese, and Russians, suddenly morphed into an
essential part of the American dream, or a distinct Washington bragging
point anyway. How brief that was. After a heady year or two, the
insurgency in Iraq once again erased "empire" from the American
lexicon.
It's true that an American president can still say, as Barack Obama recently did
at the U.S. Naval Academy: "We will maintain America's military
dominance and keep you the finest fighting force the world has ever
seen." But global domination? Empire? Banished to the outer realms of
some other universe.
In my dictionary, the imperial stands as the polar opposite of both
equality and humility. As I see it, either you try to live on a planet
with other people, no matter how fractious, difficult, and hostile they
(or you) may be, or you try to rule over them, and land your
billion-dollar, thousand-diplomat, mother-ship embassies on their turf
to show "the flag," with everything that's come to mean.
If that's what's going on, then some of you better find a language that
describes it better. After all, if reality is denied linguistically,
it's that much harder, when blowback occurs, to understand it as such;
it's that much harder to grasp the possible links between fighting
endless frontier wars, maintaining a global "presence" (or ensuring
Obama's "military dominance") and our present insecurity. That you
can't get a job may indeed have something to do with how, and at what
cost, we maintain ourselves on the planet, but if you can't describe
reality, you'll never know that. The connections will escape you.
American officials increasingly talk,
ominously or fearfully, about Afghanistan as "the graveyard of
empires," but without ever quite acknowledging that, if they are the
"graveyard," then we must be the "empire." This is a kind of madness,
even if it passes for normalcy in Washington, in the media, and so in
our world. And for this madness, sooner or later, a price will be paid.
Speaking Up
As I end, let me complicate things just a bit, even as I propose a
project for you, something you can do no matter how this world greets
you as you exit that gate. Let me first admit this: it's just possible
that even "empire" doesn't quite cover whatever we are. After all,
where are our colonies? The British could color significant hunks of
the global map red and claim the sun never set on their empire. We can
say the same only of our garrisons.
It's certainly time to reattach "American" to "empire," but that's
probably not adequate. There may, as yet, be no proper words or phrases
for what we are, globally speaking. But perhaps someday you'll come up
with them.
You are, I assure you, entering an extreme world at an extreme moment.
Don't leave it solely to them to describe it for you. Don't just let
yourself be used by the language that our world makes so readily
available to you.
Back in 1946, in his stirring essay, "Politics and the English Language," which he would later vividly illustrate in his novel 1984,
George Orwell wrote of the problems, but also the satisfactions, of
letting them define the limits of what can be spoken. You can, he
pointed out, certainly save yourself some trouble "by simply throwing
your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in.
They will construct your sentences for you -- even think your thoughts
for you, to a certain extent -- and at need they will perform the
important service of partially concealing your meaning even from
yourself."
But he also wrote: "Political language... is designed to make lies
sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of
solidity to pure wind."
Maybe what we need is fewer lies, less wind, and a new, stripped-down,
weeded out, more honest vocabulary for our political world, words that
don't fall so far short of the world as it is. "Empire" is but one MIA
word. It's your job to find more of them, and where they don't exist to
invent them. If you want to live in this world and not The Matrix version of it, you need a language that works for you, and you may have to create it. You need, in short, to speak up.
As all the collapsing businesses and the millions of out of work
Americans make clear at this moment, you can be constrained from doing
many things, but not from defining the world for yourself, and maybe
even for some of the rest of us. Not if you want to.
Don't take my word for it. Take your own... and depart.
From the Edge of the Campus of Life,
June 2, 2009
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.
[Note for Readers: Just to be clear, I was invited to no
campus to give this commencement speech. I gave it in the campus of my
mind. I should also add that I've written at length about the strange
American world I grew up in -- its movies, TV shows, children's toys,
comics, and so much else -- in my book, The End of Victory Culture
(put out in a new edition, updated last year for the crash-and-burn
Bush era). If you want to know more about the deep strangeness of the
world I came from, the world you're inheriting, you might consider
picking up a copy and checking it out.]
Copyright 2009 Tom Engelhardt
It
was also here that Ford first paid his workers five dollars a day,
creating one of the fastest growing and most prosperous working-class
neighborhoods in all of America, filled with fine arts-and-crafts style
homes. Today, Highland Park looks like a war zone, its streets covered
with shattered glass and lined with burnt-out houses. More than 30% of
its population lives in poverty, and you don't want to know the
unemployment numbers (more than 20%) or the median yearly income (less
than $20,000). 
Last month, the New York Times 
