Last update - 00:00 09/11/2006
Musings / On U.S. and them
By Michael Fox
The London boys' day school that I attended 60 years ago awarded an annual prize called the School Declamation Prize. To compete, a boy had to stand up in front of the whole school and declaim a speech that he himself had written on a subject of his own choosing. Though the prize carried a certain prestige there was always a paucity of entrants because the prospect of standing in front of 800 of your fellow pupils, each with a single burning desire to watch you fall flat on your face, was enough to daunt all but the foolhardy.
In this respect, 1951 was a typical year; there were a mere two entries. Of those two speeches, one was good, the other was bad and the judges had no difficulty in awarding the prize to the good one, an elegant disquisition on the life of Richard Wagner. But there was a serpent lurking in the prizewinner's Garden of Eden. One of the young listeners thought the speech sounded familiar, and the next day appeared brandishing a back copy of the Reader's Digest with an article on Wagner. There could be no doubt that the prize speech was a word-for-word copy of it.
The story has a moral, though not the one you would imagine. They took the prize away, of course; how could they not, when the rules of entry to the competition had been so blatantly infringed? But the reactions were puzzling. The boy who had shamelessly pilfered someone else's work and passed it off as his own became the object of sympathy, almost a hero. The one who had courageously exposed this outrageous theft was, for a time, ostracized. He had violated the code.
There is a code, common to almost all societies, according to which an informer is despised. Look at the epithets that are used - all derogatory: stool pigeon, nark, rat, snitch, sneak, blabber, squealer, grass, telltale, talebearer, tattler. English infants taunt the tell-tale tit whose tongue shall be slit, while American schoolchildren sing of the equally disagreeable tattle-tail who, inexplicably, hangs on a bull's tail. This code has a sound ethical base. When spies informed the Spanish Inquisition of the Judaizing practices of new Christians; when zealous young Komsomol members reported their parents for unpatriotic remarks; when a kindly neighbor of Anne Frank disclosed her hiding-place to the Gestapo - the informer deserved all the opprobrium to which history subjected him.
But, what if the authority to whom the information is entrusted is a just one? What if the information is given to right a wrong or to expose an evildoer? Closed societies deal harshly with informers, yet were it not for the lone courage of the whistle-blower, Roman Catholic priests would continue buggering young boys undisturbed, the larcenous heads of multinational corporations would have no one to prevent them from robbing their shareholders blind; and wife-beaters, child abusers, rapists and blackmailers would, unpunished, flourish like the green bay tree.
Someone's scale of values is screwy. The boy who plagiarized another's work was a thief and a cheat, yet was feted as a hero; the boy who exposed the theft became a pariah. A code that is unable to distinguish between information given for venal or vindictive purposes and information given to right a wrong is a perverted one and is due for an overhaul.
But, while I admit I intended to moralize, this sermon on stool pigeons is not the reason that I have dragged up the dreary tale of the Declamation Prize. For my main message I need to continue the story. The second speech, the bad one, did not win the prize by default, the judges wisely deciding not to award the prize at all that year. It was just as well because the second speech was richly undeserving of any kind of prize. Delivered haltingly by a boy who had not committed his words to memory, its subject was the United States.
I doubt if any copy of the speech is extant, but I remember the speech in general terms. It was a jejune attempt at satire, affecting to praise the United States, but being in reality one long sneer, full of the tired tropes of anti-Americanism. The would-be orator declaimed of Coca-Cola, Hollywood, chewing gum and skyscrapers. It was the kind of performance that I expect would make the boy who delivered that speech cringe for years afterward. In fact, I know that he still cringes, because I was that boy and I sometimes think that I would like to kick the behind of the boy that I was.
Principled distaste
When we talk of anti-Americanism we refer to more than a reasoned opposition to American policy or a principled distaste for its culture. There was much to criticize about the United States when I wrote that lamentable speech for the Declamation Prize. In 1951 we were seeing the beginning of the unlovely McCarthy era when it seemed that America, in its zeal for hunting communists, had, as a nation, gone quite mad. Today, too, America's foreign policy causes discomfort to many of its friends as does the strident religiosity that is so much a feature of American society. And few foreigners are able to understand America's strange addiction to firearms or its zest for executing criminals, a predilection it shares only with those bastions of freedom: Iran, China and Saudi Arabia.
But anti-Americanism is something of a different order. As seen in Western Europe and in the Islamic world it is nothing less than a hatred, as irrational as it is ineradicable. And it is rife. A striking example is the British dramatist Harold Pinter whose virulent anti-Americanism earned him last year's Nobel Prize for Literature and whose America-obsessed poems verge on the pathological.
If you want to determine whether a person is a rational critic of America or a paranoid, the acid test is that person's stand on the atrocities of September 11, 2001. Pinter's take on 9/11 was that it was "an act of retaliation against constant and systematic manifestations of state terrorism on the part of America over many years, in all parts of the world." Where do you start to counter such tripe? Salman Rushdie, who knows a thing or two about state terrorism, but of the Islamic variety, made the perfect riposte to that kind of anti-American balderdash: "To excuse such an atrocity by blaming U.S. government policies," he wrote, "is to deny the basic idea of all morality: that individuals are responsible for their actions."
Anti-Americanism has a long, and often surprisingly distinguished, pedigree. From "Martin Chuzzlewit" onward, English literature abounds with American characters that conform to a certain stereotype of uncouthness and naivete. But it is in France that anti-Americanism has been for centuries a cultural tradition shared by all sections of the intelligentsia from Stendhal to Sartre. A recent French writer called this consensus la pensee unique. Still, one cannot help being shocked afresh by the intensity of French anti-Americanism. Using 9/11 again as the touchstone, a book called "Le 11 Septembre 2001, l'effroyable imposture" ("9/11: The Big Lie") topped the French best-seller lists for several weeks. It argues that the attacks were organized by the U.S. Administration and that Osama bin Laden is a CIA agent.
But, because in France ideas are taken seriously, it is in France that a reaction has set in. A new group of French intellectuals - the "anti-anti-Americans" - has started to have its say. They point to the inconsistent nature of anti-Americanism. America is over-materialistic and over-religious; it is on the verge of collapse and too powerful; it is a nation of warmongers, but is afraid to risk the lives of its soldiers; it is racist, but excessively politically correct. And so on.
If the incoherence of anti-Americanism, the vitriolic hatred that America inspires in so many, strikes any chord, the anti-anti-American writers have spelled it out.
There is another pathological hatred that has striking parallels with anti-Americanism. The distinction of being at the root of everything that goes wrong in the world, of being the target of fantastic conspiracy theories, is one that Americans share with one other people: the Jews. Anti-Americanism in its rabid form, as several writers have pointed out, resembles nothing so much as anti-Semitism.
Time tempered the adolescent anti-Americanism of that boy. Now, as then, he is disturbed by much of the rhetoric that emerges from the United States. But, just as reading Orwell and Koestler cured him of relativism in the Cold War - in the struggle between the U.S.A. and the USSR, it was simply not true that one side was as bad as the other - he is today in no doubt that, in the struggle with global jihadism, neutrality is not an option and if you are not for America you are against it. European fence-sitting did not wash then and will not wash now. Were that boy to write that speech again today it would be very different.
In short, that boy grew up.