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COVER STORY: US RETALIATION
IDEOLOGY OF THE NEW TERROR
HATE AMERICANA
Anti-Americanism, rejected by civil society, lives
only in the mind of the civilisationally challenged
The terrible spectacle
of Americanism was there in the towering flames, only for the eyes of
the living. Low-flying jetliners in the morning sky, coming from you don't
know where to kiss and kill the monument in glass and steel to wealth
and freedom, the Tower of Adam Smith. But Arnold Schwarzenegger was not
in the cockpit. And it was not some digital chiller manufactured in a
Hollywood studio.
The reality show was holier than Hollywood,
PAX Americana's package deal in culture. And here lies the irony of anti-Americanism.
Target Yankeedom, the most representative cause of the slum-dwellers of
civilisation, even in its deadliest expression, can't escape the cultural
fantasy of the enemy. As if Osama bin Laden had watched Independence Day
in the private luxury of his bunker somewhere in Afghanistan, and, after
an inspired Inshallah, gone to bed with a heavily underlined Tom Clancy.
At the moment though every anti-Americanist
is not reading Clancy or watching Arnie. He is misreading the scriptures
to understand the geomancy of his empire. Or, he is leafing through the
antique work of revolution for a slogan against the imperialist. Or, like
that Islamic cab driver in Salman Rushdie's Fury, cursing the blasphemer
in the marketplace, "Hey! American man! You are a godless homosexual
rapist of your grandmother's pet goat." It is the unifying energy
of the new geopolitical disenchantment, and united by it are the mullah
from the stone age sanctuary of Afghanistan, the martyr from Saddam's
Republic of Terror, the Islamist from Hasan Turabi's Sudan, the freedom
fighter from the ghettos of Gaza, the zealot from the savaged streets
of Algiers, the abandoned revolutionary from Castro's wasteland. Their
resentment is a rejoinder to the morality of American unilateralism-the
Jewish cause, the US military presence in the Middle East, and the Washington
way of dividing the world between good and evil
The angry anti-Americanist is the outsider in
the post-1989-or post-history according to the liberals in the triumphant
marketplace -world order. In the evening of the previous century, America,
the singular superpower, experienced what columnist Charles Krauthammer
called "the unipolar moment" in history. And anti-Americanism,
more specific than anti-imperialism, badly needed a new Kremlin. It could
not have been Pyongyang. It doesn't have a centre, it doesn't have a helmsman.
But it does have an empire, in the mind of the so-called mad mullah, successor
to the redundant revolutionary, and his power too flows from the Book,
which, like the red book, promises ultimate bliss. That is, ultimate horror
for the civilised world, as it was in New York and Washington.
The funny thing, though, is anti-Americanism
has lost the war in civil society long ago. Don't be surprised if the
romantic in Cafe Jehad speaks with an American accent. McAmerica is a
cultural reality, and the cultural alternative of the one who wants to
bomb it travels back in time to the darkest backyard of civilisation.
It's Prophet versus Pizza Hut.
—S. Prasannarajan
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