[from the June 30, 2003 issue of The Nation]

George W. Bush is generally regarded as a mangler of the English language. What is overlooked is his mastery of emotional language--especially negatively charged emotional language--as a political tool. Take a closer look at his speeches and public utterances, and his political success turns out to be no surprise. It is the predictable result of the intentional use of language to dominate others. 
     President Bush, like many dominant personality types, uses dependency-creating language. He employs language of contempt and intimidation to shame others into submission and desperate admiration. While we tend to think of the dominator as using physical force, in fact most dominators use verbal abuse to control others. Abusive language has been a major theme of psychological researchers on marital problems, such as John Gottman, and of philosophers and theologians, such as Josef Pieper. But little has been said about the key role it has come to play in political discourse, and in such "hot media" as talk radio and television. 
    Bush uses several dominating linguistic techniques to induce surrender to his will. The first is empty language. This term refers to broad statements that are so abstract and mean so little that they are virtually impossible to oppose. Empty language is the emotional equivalent of empty calories. Just as we seldom question the content of potato chips while enjoying their pleasurable taste, recipients of empty language are usually distracted from examining the content of what they are hearing. Dominators use empty language to conceal faulty generalizations; to ridicule viable alternatives; to attribute negative motivations to others, thus making them appear contemptible; and to rename and "reframe" opposing viewpoints. 
    Bush's 2003 State of the Union speech contained thirty-nine examples of empty language. He used it to reduce complex problems to images that left the listener relieved that George W. Bush was in charge. Rather than explaining the relationship between malpractice insurance and skyrocketing healthcare costs, Bush summed up: "No one has ever been healed by a frivolous lawsuit." The multiple fiscal and monetary policy tools that can be used to stimulate an economy were downsized to: "The best and fairest way to make sure Americans have that money is not to tax it away in the first place." The controversial plan to wage another war on Iraq was simplified to: "We will answer every danger and every enemy that threatens the American people." In an earlier study, I found that in the 2000 presidential debates Bush used at least four times as many phrases containing empty language as Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Bush Senior or Gore had used in their debates. 
    Another of Bush's dominant-language techniques is personalization. By personalization I mean localizing the attention of the listener on the speaker's personality. Bush projects himself as the only person capable of producing results. In his post-9/11 speech to Congress he said, "I will not forget this wound to our country or those who inflicted it. I will not yield; I will not rest; I will not relent in waging this struggle for freedom and security for the American people." He substitutes his determination for that of the nation's. In the 2003 State of the Union speech he vowed, "I will defend the freedom and security of the American people." Contrast Bush's "I will not yield" etc. with John F. Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." 
     The word "you" rarely appears in Bush's speeches. Instead, there are numerous statements referring to himself or his personal characteristics--folksiness, confidence, righteous anger or determination--as the answer to the problems of the country. Even when Bush uses "we," as he did many times in the State of the Union speech, he does it in a way that focuses attention on himself. For example, he stated: "Once again, we are called to defend the safety of our people, and the hopes of all mankind. And we accept this responsibility." 
    In an article in the January 16 New York Review of Books, Joan Didion highlighted Bush's high degree of personalization and contempt for argumentation in presenting his case for going to war in Iraq. As Didion writes: "'I made up my mind,' he had said in April, 'that Saddam needs to go.' This was one of many curious, almost petulant statements offered in lieu of actually presenting a case. I've made up my mind, I've said in speech after speech, I've made myself clear. The repeated statements became their own reason." 
    Poll after poll demonstrates that Bush's political agenda is out of step with most Americans' core beliefs. Yet the public, their electoral resistance broken down by empty language and persuaded by personalization, is susceptible to Bush's most frequently used linguistic technique: negative framework. A negative framework is a pessimistic image of the world. Bush creates and maintains negative frameworks in his listeners' minds with a number of linguistic techniques borrowed from advertising and hypnosis to instill the image of a dark and evil world around us. Catastrophic words and phrases are repeatedly drilled into the listener's head until the opposition feels such a high level of anxiety that it appears pointless to do anything other than cower. 
     Psychologist Martin Seligman, in his extensive studies of "learned helplessness," showed that people's motivation to respond to outside threats and problems is undermined by a belief that they have no control over their environment. Learned helplessness is exacerbated by beliefs that problems caused by negative events are permanent; and when the underlying causes are perceived to apply to many other events, the condition becomes pervasive and paralyzing. 
     Bush is a master at inducing learned helplessness in the electorate. He uses pessimistic language that creates fear and disables people from feeling they can solve their problems. In his September 20, 2001, speech to Congress on the 9/11 attacks, he chose to increase people's sense of vulnerability: "Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen.... I ask you to live your lives, and hug your children. I know many citizens have fears tonight.... Be calm and resolute, even in the face of a continuing threat." (Subsequent terror alerts by the FBI, CIA and Department of Homeland Security have maintained and expanded this fear of unknown, sinister enemies.) 
    Contrast this rhetoric with Franklin Roosevelt's speech delivered the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He said: "No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.... There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory and our interests are in grave danger. With confidence in our armed forces--with the unbounding determination of our people--we will gain the inevitable triumph--so help us God." Roosevelt focuses on an optimistic future rather than an ongoing threat to Americans' personal survival. 
    All political leaders must define the present threats and problems faced by the country before describing their approach to a solution, but the ratio of negative to optimistic statements in Bush's speeches and policy declarations is much higher, more pervasive and more long-lasting than that of any other President. Let's compare "crisis" speeches by Bush and Ronald Reagan, the President with whom he most identifies himself. In Reagan's October 27, 1983, televised address to the nation on the bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut, he used nineteen images of crisis and twenty-one images of optimism, evenly balancing optimistic and negative depictions. He limited his evaluation of the problems to the past and present tense, saying only that "with patience and firmness we can bring peace to that strife-torn region--and make our own lives more secure." George W. Bush's October 7, 2002, major policy speech on Iraq, on the other hand, began with forty-four consecutive statements referring to the crisis and citing a multitude of possible catastrophic repercussions. The vast majority of these statements (for example: "Some ask how urgent this danger is to America and the world. The danger is already significant, and it only grows worse with time"; "Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists") imply that the crisis will last into the indeterminate future. There is also no specific plan of action. The absence of plans is typical of a negative framework, and leaves the listener without hope that the crisis will ever end. Contrast this with Reagan, who, a third of the way into his explanation of the crisis in Lebanon, asked the following: "Where do we go from here? What can we do now to help Lebanon gain greater stability so that our Marines can come home? Well, I believe we can take three steps now that will make a difference." 
     To create a dependency dynamic between him and the electorate, Bush describes the nation as being in a perpetual state of crisis and then attempts to convince the electorate that it is powerless and that he is the only one with the strength to deal with it. He attempts to persuade people they must transfer power to him, thus crushing the power of the citizen, the Congress, the Democratic Party, even constitutional liberties, to concentrate all power in the imperial presidency and the Republican Party. 
     Bush's political opponents are caught in a fantasy that they can win against him simply by proving the superiority of their ideas. However, people do not support Bush for the power of his ideas, but out of the despair and desperation in their hearts. Whenever people are in the grip of a desperate dependency, they won't respond to rational criticisms of the people they are dependent on. They will respond to plausible and forceful statements and alternatives that put the American electorate back in touch with their core optimism. Bush's opponents must combat his dark imagery with hope and restore American vigor and optimism in the coming years. They should heed the example of Reagan, who used optimism against Carter and the "national malaise"; Franklin Roosevelt, who used it against Hoover and the pessimism induced by the Depression ("the only thing we have to fear is fear itself"); and Clinton (the "Man from Hope"), who used positive language against the senior Bush's lack of vision. This is the linguistic prescription for those who wish to retire Bush in 2004.

From http://www.zpub.com/satty/index.html

Another Ghost of the 60's is gone 
by Thomas Albright -Art critic- The San Francisco Chronicle  (Feb '82)

It was later than the phone usually rings on Sunday night, and the voice at the other end was edged in black. It was Mark Green, the photographer and unofficial archivist of beatnik North Beach, who keeps accounts of the lives of its survivors like a scoutmaster watching over his troop on an overnight hike. 
     "I think Satty's dead," he said. 
     "A friend was walking by his place this morning and saw a body being carry out the door." 
     It has not been easy to check on Satty's whereabouts in recent months. One of the better known poster artists when the psychedelic era was in full flower in the 60's. Satty was as much a part of the scene as Dr. Hip or the Grateful Dead. For a few years, his life had been one long summer of love. He staged huge parties where socialites and hippies mingled, in a subterranean basement of the pre-earth quake building where he lived on Powell Street. He had converted the basement into a surreal environment that resembled a cross between Mrs. Havisham's parlor in "Great Expectations" and something out of Luna Park. Arnold Newman photographed him in his underground sanctum for a spread on the San Francisco scene that was published in Look magazine. 
      But a year or so ago, friends said, the miseries hit. Satty retreated for days at a time to a crow's nest in the attic reached only by a rickety ladder where he holed up without answering the phone. He was in and out of hospitals and dry-out clinics. A coroner's deputy confirmed that a body picked up earlier that afternoon had been identified as Wilfred Podreich. This was Satty's real name. Death was caused, the deputy said, through "a fall from a ladder while inebriated." 
       Satty, (spelled with an umlaut over the a) was born 42 years ago in Bremen, Germany. He used to talk about the war-torn city where he grew up as "a big surrealistic playground." He was schooled in architecture, engineering and design, and spent some time working in Brasilia before he settled in San Francisco in the early 60's. It was the threshold of the psychedelic era, and Satty soon began making posters, developing an extraordinary collage technique that brought together both the technological and surreal sides of his background. 
    Satty gathered up old lamps, misshapen easy chairs, mannequins and dolls from trash bins in Pacific Heights and installed them in a basement hollowed into the mud under an old frame building near Fisherman's Wharf. The basement was divided into a warren of variously weird compartments like the different rooms in Hesse's Magic Theater. The building had almost as many levels, and ladders, as a Hopi Indian pueblo, a ladder from the second floor to the attic; another that afforded the only access to the basement; a third that led from the basement to a musty, windowless chamber on a kind of mezzanine that was like a movie set-version of an alchemist's library, lined with ancient books and presided over by a human skull. Here, Satty kept an incense and constantly expanding "image bank", snippets cut from old engravings, the photographs of contemporary news magazines and every other conceivable source. Sequested like a medieval copyist in his cell, working with the meticulous perfectionism of a Dutch diamond cutter and the obsessiveness of a paranoiac possessed by an "idee fixe", Satty combined and recombined these fragments into often magical collages where it was impossible to tell where reality ended and fantasy began. 
      The wine and roses - and grass and hash and coke - continued into the late 70's. There were four published books of Satty's work: "Cosmic Bicycle," "Time Zone," "The annotated Dracula," "the Illustrated Poe." There were free-lance assignments for Rolling Stone, the New York Times and Washington Post, and bits on French and German television. 
       Four or five years ago, Satty tore into a new project, a series of collages based on early San Francisco history. He went at it with an unwonted single-mindedness, working for days and nights at a time, and then burning out for equally long periods in the womblike aerie in his attic. His celebrity began to slip into the shadowy forgetfulness that engulfs the reputations of so many contemporary personalities who fail to keep their names continually before the public. His wife, a beautiful sylphlike woman who had wandered down from Sacred Heart Convent in Pacific Heights seven years earlier to check out the action in North Beach and had decided to stay, left late last year. Then, friend said, creditors began lining up at the door, and Satty started to drink. He was imperious, yet as passive and vulnerable as a small child. There was a similarly schizoid quality to his art. He was fascinated by the grotesque and bizarre, but he was also disheartened by the bland impersonality that he saw overtaking the lifestyles of the 70's, and there was another side of his art that sought to reflect a primeval kind of innocence, to reconstruct a futuristic Garden of Eden. Acquaintances said Satty had been miserable during the last year. He had planned to make a book of his early San Francisco collages, which had grown to more than 300 pieces, but he never finished the project. He broke his foot in a car accident, and his pelvis in another fall some month ago from the same ladder that he was found dead beneath last Sunday. Not long ago, he had dried out for a month in a Marin County detox center, and in recent weeks had seemed slowly and painfully to have been pulling his act together again. Friends tried to talk Satty into moving out of his North Beach sanctum, with its basement filled with hippie ghosts and echoes of vintage Grateful Dead. He didn't want to leave. As long as he stayed inside its walls, it was still 1967, and Satty could never quite square the fantasy world he had created then with the reality of the 1980's. When Satty died last Sunday, another bit of the 60's faded away and so did a little more of that decade's utopian idealistic vision. Funeral services are pending. 

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EXCERPT OF ART news MAGAZINE - MAY 1982 - BY THOMAS ALBRIGHT 

As an artist, Satty occupied a curious kind of no man's-land in the San Francisco art world. He wanted to create a "visual language" that would be an alternative to the impersonal imagery of the mass media, a language in which the imagination was liberated to discover and explore. His sense of social mission led him to favor techniques of mechanical mass reproduction his collages were generally conceived not as unique, original pieces, but as prototypes for photographic reproduction; this did not sit well with an Art Establishment that tended to frown on such concessions to populism. On the other hand, although he was accepted as a peer by the poster artists among whom he worked designing advertisements for rock concerts, Satty's mode of expression was only remotely related to the upbeat, exuberant style of psychedelic art. His work evidenced its Germanic roots with a more somber, dreamlike realm of utopian, surrealist fantasy spiced by disarming accents of the bizarre and grotesque. Generally excluded from the museum and gallery world, Satty had by the early 70's largely turned away from making posters, adopting the published book as his principle vehicle. 

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EXCERPTS FROM REVIEW - AUGUST 1984 - BY KATE REGAN - SATTY: FEVER DREAMS OF THE CITY'S HISTORY 

The fantastic visions of Wilfred Satty conjure up a San Francisco so vivid, so hauntingly surreal and compelling that they may transform forever our understanding of the city San Francisco's history -turbulent, raucous and always dramatic- has swept artists and writers since the earliest days, but surely no one has evoked the exuberance, squalor and bewildering diversity of the 19th-century San Francisco life more richly than Satty in this collages. More than 100 of them have been chosen for display in the California Historical Society's sumptuous 19th-century mansion of Jackson Street and they are accompanied by lively quotes from "Annals of San Francisco," the city's first history and other contemporary records that inspired Satty to create a visual history as dramatic as the writings. 
        Drawings from his enormous collection of 19th-century illustrations, and using his knowledge of overprinting, collage, overlays, paints and offset lithography, Satty superimposed and juxtaposed images to create layered compositions of such wildness, density and subtle detail that they speak more tellingly than any static visual records of the time could do. His transformations of the original materials range from the discreet addition of a few whimsical oddities in the foreground of an etching, to the full-out hallucinations of an opium den or a ballroom swirling with romantic delirium. And the fact that these are all 19th-century images, radically revised by a 20th-century eye, gives one the eerie sense of shifting back and forth in time, space and perception. There's a startling sardonic humor in Satty's visionary history, but there is love as well for the reckless, plunging voracity of those early days. 
      Satty's life was easily as turbulent as anything he portrayed in art. Coming from the "big surrealistic playground" of war-torn Bremen, Germany, he settled in San Francisco in the early 60's, at the very beginning of the psychedelic age, and became one of the best known poster artists of the time. Gathering around him a weird and wonderful array of found objects, he created a subterranean dwelling on Powell Street near North beach that the late Thomas Albright described as "a cross between Miss Havisham's parlor in "Great Expectations" and something out of Luna Park. His large parties, mingling socialites and hippies in a happy confusion as raucous as any of the bar room tangles he collage , were legendary events. Obsessed with extending the mass-media possibilities of lithography to create his own provocative revisions of reality. Satty created an enormous "image bank" from which he snipped and intricately pieced together his collages. His end was as abrupt and tragic as that of many earlier California dreamers: Satty died in 1982 from "a fall from a ladder while inebriated," according to the San Francisco's coroner's office. He was 42 years old, burnt out by the very intensity and imperious innocence that illuminated his art. 

Filed at 7:27 p.m. ET

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S. troops psyched up on a bizarre musical reprise from Vietnam war film ``Apocalypse Now'' before crashing into Iraqi homes to hunt gunmen on Saturday, as Shi'ite Muslims rallied against the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
     With Wagner's ``Ride of the Valkyries'' still ringing in their ears and the clatter of helicopters overhead, soldiers rammed vehicles into metal gates and hundreds of troops raided houses in the western city of Ramadi after sunrise as part of a drive to quell a spate of attacks on U.S. forces.
    ...
    Before Saturday's robust sweep through Ramadi, 100 km (60 miles) west of Baghdad, soldiers of the First Battalion of the 124th Infantry Regiment psyched themselves up at a base nearby in a musical moment redolent of Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film about the Vietnam war.
     Hit-and-run strikes on U.S. troops have been concentrated in Sunni Muslim towns such as Ramadi west and north of Baghdad.
    One unit of troops dragged half a dozen men from their homes as women wailed. They seized weapons and a computer disk.
     Officers said they aimed to capture five men from the Fedayeen paramilitary force, which put up some of the fiercest resistance to U.S. troops during their invasion.
    The raid was part of Operation Desert Scorpion, launched on June 15 to crack down on militants and befriend civilians by helping with aid and reconstruction projects.
    A U.S. military spokesman said on Saturday that 90 Desert Scorpion raids had captured 540 people.

ASSOCIATED PRESS 

LAGOS, Nigeria, June 21 — More than 100 villagers scavenging gasoline from a vandalized pipeline were killed when the gushing fuel exploded in rural
southeastern Nigeria, Red Cross officials and witnesses said Saturday. 
          IT WAS NOT immediately clear what touched off the blast late Thursday on an excavated length of pipe 30 miles north of the city of Umuahia. The national ThisDay newspaper cited witnesses as saying it may have been caused by a spark from a motorcycle used by one of the victims.
       Emmanuel Ijewere, president of the Nigerian Red Cross, confirmed 105 people were killed and said more deaths were likely as rescue crews continued to collect bodies and interview survivors, including an unknown number of wounded languishing in homes and hospitals with “third degree burns.”
       ThisDay put the casualties at about 100.
       Ndu Ughamadu, spokesman of the state-owned Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation confirmed the pipeline had been ruptured by “vandals,” adding it wasstill unclear how many people had been killed. 
           Witnesses speaking on condition of anonymity said villagers had been scooping fuel from the pipeline for six weeks since it was first ruptured in early May. The residents said authorities had continued to pump fuel through the line despite being informed of the breakage.
       A team of emergency officials and engineers were on the scene to determine how best to extinguish the blaze, which was apparently still burning late Friday, Ughamadu said.
       The pipeline was carrying fuel from a state-owned refinery in the oil city of Port Harcourt to the city of Enugu, 140 miles to the north.

WORD OF DISASTER EMERGED SLOWLY
       Word of the disaster emerged slowly because many survivors apparently feared prosecution for theft and sabotage, Ijewere said. 
        ThisDay cited witnesses as saying police colluded with the vandals by charging villagers fees of around 80 cents for scooping up buckets and barrels of fuel for resale.
       A police officer reached by telephone at the state command in Umuahia declined comment.
       Pipeline vandalism, known as “bunkering” or “scooping,” is common in Nigeria despite the risk of a deadly fire or punishment including prosecution or being shot on sight by security forces.
       Thousands have been killed in explosions in recent years, including more than 1,000 in a 1998 blast in the Niger Delta town Jesse. Since then, the government has tried to educate villagers about the danger of scavenging pipeline fuel.
       But poverty and residents’ anger at the government and oil industry for allegedly polluting the environment and financially neglecting the oil-rich Delta have kept the illegal practice alive.
       Nigeria is Africa’s largest petroleum exporter and the fifth largest source of U.S. oil imports. 

The Empire Strikes Back
by ANATOL LIEVEN

American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of US Diplomacy
by Andrew J. Bacevich

Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World
by Walter Russell Mead

Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power
by Niall Ferguson

The Decline of American Power
by Immanuel Wallerstein

The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power
by Max Boot

Empire
by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

A few years in Washington, DC, snake-oil capital of the universe, and you begin to think that anything can be packaged as something else. Well, almost anything. Until I read Empire, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, I would never have believed that a postmodernist paean to Italian anarcho-syndicalism could be presented by its publishers as a defense of "the idealism of the Founders and Abraham Lincoln," and of the universal validity of the US Constitution. 
       This wonderful joke is the best thing about Hardt and Negri's book, which otherwise is distinguished by a clarity of language and coherence of thought processes that suggest an Italianate Finnegans Wake. Its history is often quite fanciful. Its portrait of the liberating work practices of the postmodern industrial proletariat would seem to be drawn from the life of a SoHo fashion designer. Its vision of the improving possibilities of bioengineering as far as the mass of humanity is concerned displays an extraordinary naïveté concerning the realities of wealth and power. As for its vision of a modern world "empire," this is not without interest as a portrait of certain aspects of "globalization," but the authors' attempts to define this picture as an "empire," and to distinguish "empire" both from "imperialism" and from contemporary American hegemony are strained, to say the least. 
       It is difficult to resist the conclusion that this curious choice of the word "empire" as a name for these patterns of globalization reflects the new modishness of empire as a subject--as witnessed by the number of books now appearing on this theme. Only a few years ago, to use this word to describe the United States would have branded you automatically as a member of the left. Today, it is being taken up by writers across the spectrum, and with unbridled pride by right-wingers like Max Boot of the Wall Street Journal. 
       But, as Niall Ferguson notes in the conclusion to his vivid and often insightful history of the British Empire, this new open popularity of empire as a self-description in the United States is so far characteristic only of intellectuals. As far as the mass of the American people is concerned, this is still "an empire in denial." And in presenting its imperial plans to the American people, the Bush Administration has been careful to package them as something else: on the one hand, as part of a benevolent strategy of spreading American values of democracy and freedom; on the other, as an essential part of the defense not of an American empire, but of the American nation itself. 
      This is something that must be stressed if the power and the danger, but also the fragility, of the Bush program are to be understood: The United States under Bush is driving toward empire, but the domestic political fuel being fed into the engine is that of a wounded and vengeful nationalism. This sentiment is for the most part entirely sincere, and all the more dangerous for that. If recent history is any guide, there is probably no more dangerous element in the nationalist mix than a sense of righteous victimhood. Will this fuel continue to be available to the Bush Administration in its drive for empire? Or to put it another way, will the packaging retain its shine? This depends partly on whether the United States comes under further massive attack by Islamist terrorists, but still more on the extent of the sacrifices that ordinary Americans will be called upon to make for the sake of empire. 
      An unwillingness on the part of the masses to make serious sacrifices for empire is hardly new. As Ferguson points out, until the First World War the British Empire was conquered and run very much on the cheap, and this was true of the other colonial empires as well. The Royal Navy was of course expensive, but then it doubled as the absolutely necessary defense of the British Isles themselves against invasion or blockade. Then as now, given the overwhelming superiority of Western firepower and military organization, enormous territories could be conquered at very low cost and risk. When European empires ran into areas that were truly costly to conquer and hold--the British in Afghanistan, the Italians in Ethiopia--they tended to back off. And in Ferguson's view, the unprecedentedly high rate of casualties among white British troops in the Boer War helped initiate the process of British disillusionment with empire. 
      This was something of which the general staffs and the conservative establishments of Europe were well aware. Acute students both of Clausewitz and of police reports on the mood of their working classes, they knew the importance of mass support for any serious war, and the limits on how far empire could be used for purposes of mass mobilization. So sensible governments with the ability to do so always used volunteer troops and foreign mercenaries, not conscripts, for colonial wars--the French Foreign Legion, for instance, was created for this explicit purpose. 
      In his 1983 study The Conquest of Morocco, Douglas Porch offers a fascinating description of the various stratagems used by General Lyautey and the other French imperialists to convince a skeptical French public to support this adventure, which many regarded as a costly distraction from the need to strengthen France's defenses against the real national threat, Germany. These ranged from religious appeals to convert Morocco through civilizational arguments about the need to create a modern Moroccan state, to suggestions that because Germany also had designs on Morocco, it was necessary to combat Germany there as well as in the fields of Lorraine. 
       In their efforts to rally democratic support as a defense against socialism at home, the capitalist elites in Europe before 1914 similarly relied much less on imperialism than on nationalism. And in 1914, the impulse that drove the European masses to support the war and to immolate themselves in it was nationalism, universally expressed in the belief that the homeland itself was in imminent danger of attack. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, have given the Bush Administration a tremendous opportunity in this regard, one they have exploited to the hilt. For that matter, Bush's election campaign vastly played down his followers' imperial ambitions (remember the call for American "modesty"?) while appealing to "folk values" closely associated with what Walter Russell Mead has dubbed "Jacksonian nationalism," against the alien, European-influenced cultural elitism of Gore and the "East Coast elites." 
        But nationalism is a notoriously wild horse to let loose. At the time of writing, a critical question hanging over the American empire in the Middle East is whether, for the sake of that empire, Bush will be able to confront an Israeli nationalism that members of his own Administration themselves partly share, and that they have also inflamed and exploited for domestic political ends. If he is not willing to take the domestic political risk of confronting this nationalism (which for many Americans has become deeply entwined with their American nationalism), then his imperial project in the Middle East will become much costlier and more dangerous. 
      Even Mead, who gives a sympathetic portrait of the Jacksonian nationalist tradition in his splendid new book, also worries about the tendency of its adherents to be carried away by furious emotion, and to switch from contemptuous indifference to the outside world to a spirit of annihilatory ruthlessness if they feel that America has been attacked. As he and others have pointed out, democracies may go to war less willingly than autocracies, but when they do so, they have a tendency to fight with fewer restraints and to aim for total rather than partial victory. 
      The European nationalist death-ride unleashed in 1914 began by destroying the sons of the old European elites, and by 1945 had destroyed their dominance and in many cases their countries as well. They may have started the war; unlike the coolheaded nineteenth-century imperialists in their overseas campaigns, they were unable to stop it even when it became apparent that its course was disastrous to them and their countries. As Dick Diver puts it in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night, "This was a love battle--there was a century of middle-class love spent here.... All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high explosive love." 
       Here lies one clue to the difference between the American imperialism of Clinton and that of Bush, a difference that is real but--like the relationships between nationalism, capitalism and imperialism--is also by no means simple. Clinton packaged American imperialism as globalism, and he was also genuinely motivated by a vision of global order in which America would lead rather than merely dictate. Bush is not just packaging imperialism as American nationalism; he and his followers are genuinely motivated by nationalism, in a way that Clinton was not, and, as nationalists, they are absolutely contemptuous of any global order involving any formal check whatsoever on American action. 
       Within the United States, empire as such still needs to be wrapped up. The United States has a tradition of hostility to empire going back to its own revolution against the British and its foundation as an independent state. This hostility therefore became one element in what Samuel Huntington and others have called "the American creed," or national ideology. But as American historians of many different political stripes have pointed out, the language of imperial expansion also dates back to the earliest years of the American Republic, and was not restricted to the North American continent. In the decades before the Civil War, the South in particular bubbled with demands for the annexation of Cuba and even Mexico. Although such thinking exploded in the run-up to the Spanish-American War of 1898, it had been percolating for some time. 
       In a fascinating new study, Andrew Bacevich, a distinguished soldier-turned-historian, traces the strong continuities from the 1890s in American thought and action since the end of the cold war, above all, the use of the language of civilizational duty (to the spread of democracy, freedom and good government) as a justification for imperial conquest--though except for historical romantics like Boot, the explicit language of the "white man's burden" has been abandoned, even if its spirit remains. Of course, 1898, like 2003, is special, since it was in that year that the United States began to imitate the nineteenth-century European colonial empires and to establish direct imperial rule over foreign possessions. Elsewhere, the United States has generally either annexed those territories whose small populations it could swamp (Hawaii, northern Mexico) or exerted indirect dominance, as in Central America: neocolonialism avant la lettre. 
       When it comes to the exertion of such indirect imperial control, it is possible to draw a rather straight line from the Monroe Doctrine to the Bush Doctrine. Thus Walter Russell Mead argues that US strategy since 1945 has progressively extended tougher and tougher versions of the Monroe Doctrine from Latin America to the entire world. In his view, the moves of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his successors to dismantle the British and French colonial empires directly echo Monroe's rejection of European empires and spheres of influence in the Americas, while Bush II's doctrine, like Theodore Roosevelt's corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, asserts the universal right of US intervention not only in defense of its own interests but for the sake of the replacement and reordering of "rogue states" and hostile regimes. 
        Neither Mead nor Bacevich would see much difference in this regard between Bush and Clinton, both of whom, in their view, implemented an American imperial project with deep roots in the very nature of America's state and society. For them, Bush's Iraq is just Clinton's Kosovo or Haiti on a much larger scale and with greatly increased risks. They have a point. Clinton, after all, moved rather quickly to combat Russia's plans to retain a sphere of influence in the territory of the former Soviet Union and was not too scrupulous about the regimes he helped in the process. Clinton preserved NATO as what was then seen as the essential vehicle of US strategic dominance in Europe and, as Bacevich argues, fought the Kosovo war largely in order to justify NATO's continued existence as this vehicle. 
       This is a view essentially shared by Immanuel Wallerstein and other Marxist historians, though they would of course add that this imperial drive is also implicit in the nature of American capitalism. Is this vision of imperial continuity between the administrations correct? And if so, why the intense nostalgia for the Clinton Administration now felt by so much of the world, especially in Europe? Is this just the lingering after-effect of the old rogue's seductions, a striking case of huge masses of people mistaking form for substance, the packaging for the contents? 
      Not entirely. In the first place, it must be noted that, to a considerable extent, American power in the world, especially after the disappearance of the only other superpower, has been not only a willed project but also an objective fact, and this is bound to be reflected both in US policies and in the reactions of other countries to the United States. Even if the United States had carried out much deeper cuts in military spending than occurred in the 1990s, the collapse of the Soviet military would still have left the United States far and away the strongest military power on the planet. Moreover, in seeking to understand the direction of US world policy, it is, of course, critically important to analyze the great abstractions: imperialism, capitalism, nationalism. But in doing so, it is also important not to lose sight of the role of chance events (notably 9/11), of personality and of differing political cultures and ideological currents within America. 
        Or, to put it at its crudest, imperialism, like any other program, can be conducted intelligently or stupidly. One aspect of this is the packaging. Suaviter in modo, fortiter in re, said the Romans. "Speak softly and carry a big stick," said Teddy Roosevelt, and, doubtless, similar phrases exist in Chinese and Quechua. But this tactical difference may also reflect a deeper difference of strategy. Drawing a diplomatic veil over the extent of other countries' inferiority to yours in terms of power, and presenting your plans in terms of alliances rather than unilateral action, may also reflect a desire to co-opt rather than conquer, and show a more acute awareness of the actual limitations on your own power. The German and Japanese empires of the twentieth century failed not only because they started late and from an inadequate power base but because they conducted their foreign policies with an incredible degree of savage stupidity. 
       From this point of view, Clinton may well be justifiably seen by future generations as a particularly intelligent and valuable servant of American imperial capitalism, in a way that went beyond diplomatic cleverness. He seems to have understood three things that the Bush Administration has wholly or partly forgotten: that the American economy is utterly intertwined with the world capitalist order, depends on the health of that order and draws immense benefits from that order. This is indeed likely to be seen by future historians as the central tragic irony of the Bush Administration's world policy: that the United States, which of all states today should feel like a satisfied power, is instead behaving like a revolutionary one, kicking to pieces the hill of which it is king. 
       Clinton's policy, by contrast, was much more that of a stable hegemon. It was rooted in a recognition that the present age, especially since the collapse of Soviet Communism, has offered the American government unprecedented opportunities when it comes to co-opting the elites of other major states and defusing radical hostility to the United States. As noted above, the notion of "democratic peace" is deeply flawed and ambiguous, historically speaking. It is of especially questionable value in today's world, when so many countries are in fact only shell democracies, in which democratic government acts as a cover for oligarchical rule. Moreover, by far the single greatest example of successful capitalist economic development, China, is not a democracy and shows few signs of becoming one. 
       However, what has happened--first in China and then in Russia--is that the political elites of these countries have become massive property-holders, and this in turn has given them a massive stake in the stability of the international capitalist system, and hence in the avoidance of major war. It may be argued, of course, that this was also true of the European elites of 1914. But unlike their predecessors, the elites of today do not come trailing a heritage of military aristocracy led by military monarchy; and the masses over which they are ruling, like those of the West over the past century, have been largely demilitarized by socioeconomic change and urbanization. So while the notion of a "democratic peace" may be overblown, that of a "capitalist peace" seems valid--as long as the United States does not so infuriate and humiliate the rulers of other major countries as to lead them to forget their own best interests. It may be, however, that their fears in this regard are exaggerated, and that as far as the threat from the United States is concerned they just have to sit it out for ten or twenty years, until a majority of Americans decide that empire is just not worth the cost. 
       What Clinton--like Eisenhower--also realized is that the expansion of raw, direct American power in the world depends on and is also limited by the need to maintain the health of the US economy, and through this the economic well-being and hence the long-term political support of the majority of the American people. For the US imperial project suffers from three main underlying weaknesses. The first is the new threat to the American mainland from terrorism using weapons of mass destruction. In the short term, this, as I have suggested, can even strengthen US imperialism by adding the fuel of national vengeance; but if, God forbid, terrorists ever gain the ability to strike such heavy blows that they seriously damage the US economy, then American power will also be weakened. 
      The second weakness is lack of military resources. This may sound absurd, given the fact that America is now spending nearly as much on the military as the rest of the world put together. If one looks at the actual numbers of US troops, however, a rather different picture begins to emerge. For if the United States spends much more than anyone else on its troops, its troops are also much more expensive to maintain than those of most other countries, and more costly than the "scum of the earth" who staffed the colonial armies of the nineteenth century. It does not have very many of them, and a very high proportion of them are now tied down for the foreseeable future patrolling Iraq. It may be, therefore, as many US officials say in private, that the Bush Doctrine was a "doctrine for one case only"--namely Iraq; and that a planned war to invade and occupy Iran or North Korea is inconceivable. That doesn't necessarily mean that such wars won't happen, but that they will be the accidental rather than the deliberate results of Bush Administration policies. 
       This brings me back to the third weakness: the willingness of American citizens, particularly among the elites, to make sacrifices for the sake of empire. For one thing is gradually becoming clear: Given its immense wealth, the United States can afford a military capable of dominating the earth; or it can afford a stable, secure system of social and medical entitlements for a majority of its aging population; or it can afford massive tax cuts for its wealthiest citizens and no tax raises for the rest. But it cannot afford all three, unless it can indefinitely sustain them through a combination of massive trade deficits and international borrowing. This seems most unlikely, especially in the midst of a global economic downturn. 
        It is quite true, as the radical imperialists argue, that in the 1950s the United States sustained far higher levels of military spending as a proportion of the budget and GDP, but at that time, the rest of government spending was considerably lower, and the United States was in the midst of an era of very steep economic growth lasting three decades. Unless today's US and world economies can return to such growth--not for years but for decades--then something is sooner or later going to break, and break disastrously, if the Bush Administration continues its present policies. Such a disaster, however, would engulf not only the American empire but the lives and hopes of countless Americans, the stability and growth of the present world economic system, and possibly even the US political order. And this would be the ultimate American tragedy, for it is above all the mixture of economic opportunity and the US Constitution that are the bedrock of America's moral and ideological power in the world today, and will be America's chief legacy to future ages of the world. 
       It is interesting in the light of all this to revisit the work of Immanuel Wallerstein. The title of his new book, The Decline of American Power, appears curious at first sight. So regularly has Wallerstein predicted the decline of American power over the decades, and so steeply has American power in fact risen, that he has often appeared as the boy who cried wolf. But then, in the fable, the wolf, of course, eventually turned out to be all too real, just a bit late. And even if one finds Wallerstein's model of the world system too schematic and undifferentiated, he is still worth reading for the tremendous breadth of his scholarship and the fecundity of his insights. 
      Among these is his grasp of the essentially insatiable nature of capitalism--or at least of American capitalism, for one criticism that might be made of Wallerstein is his relative indifference to the importance of different national cultures in capitalism. Anyone who doubts their importance even when it comes to economic policy might want to contrast the two great newspapers of the Western capitalist classes, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, and note the horrified incredulity with which FT writers have attacked the Bush Administration's tax cuts, so ardently demanded by the editorial page of the Journal. 
      For just as US imperialism, emboldened by a strong shot of nationalism, is busy undermining the world political order of which the United States is hegemon, so dominant sections of the US capitalist elite are suicidally gobbling up the fiscal foundations of American economic stability and the American capitalist system. Their pathological hatred of FDR, who did more than any other man in the twentieth century to preserve and extend American capitalism, has been echoed in our own day by their visceral, hysterical loathing of Clinton, who, objectively speaking, also served them very well. This is a truly strange and awful sight, and--pace Niall Ferguson--one that bears little resemblance to the behavior of the old British imperial elites, at least once their empire had been achieved. In their criminal arrogance, these contemporary American projects and attitudes are much more reminiscent of Wilhelmine Germany, and we must hope that they do not receive a condign punishment. For in the words of Arnold Toynbee, "great empires do not die by murder, but suicide."

Super Flat Times website

From the June 10 Village Voice:

Pleased to Meat Me
by Dennis Lim

Super Flat Times
By Matthew Derby 
Back Bay, 192 pp., $13.95 

Like H.G. Wells's The Shape of Things to Come, Matthew Derby's wondrous debut collection of stories, Super Flat Times, imagines a history of the future. Wells's speculative treatise—published in 1933 and narrated from the vantage of 2106 (the last recorded event, chillingly, is "the levelling of the remaining 'skeletons' of the famous 'Skyscrapers' of Lower New York")—foretold wars and advanced a theory of socialist-technocratic utopia. But Derby is interested in the literal shape of things to come—their color, texture, taste, smell, and sound, their object-like qualities and synesthetic possibilities. 
       A malevolent, obscurely motivated government looms (as do mysterious, diktat-issuing Corporations), but otherwise, Derby's dystopia upends the tenets of sci-fi along with the laws of science. A bizarrely seamless fusion of the haunting and the ridiculous, this is a world where lines of work include face attendant and air harvester, where population control involves conception simulators and buttoned uterine flaps, where solid clouds serve as seedbeds for behavioral drugs, where all-meat diets are enforced by law and retired teenagers are taught a new energy-efficient type of eating called Eating. 
      The prologue situates us in the baffled aftermath of a genocide that most of the survivors do not recall. The stories that follow, results of a necrological project entrusted to Those Who Have Been Allowed to Remember, take the form of recovered memory—retrieved not with hypnosis but drilling equipment. The victims were buried in concrete, their dying breaths now air pockets embedded deep within the mass graves. As the prologue's author—one Mi Jin Ahn-Strauss, writing in Seoul II—explains, "This air, once isolated in a glass cabinet at the Hall of Memory and massaged by a professional translator, can sometimes reveal the Missing Person's final thoughts." 
       Things to Come presented itself as the "dream book" of a Swiss scientist. Even more fantastical, Derby's overriding conceit confers mock-sacred status on Super Flat Times as a book of the dead, an album of prayers "to be placed on a wooden lectern and read aloud at gatherings." Each narrator is deceased, each narrative an eternal freeze-frame. Only one captured memory addresses its thinker's imminent execution, and it does so with the droll placidity of the other stories: " 'It helps to think of the first thing you can remember,' she whispered, but what I heard was 'think of the worst thing you can remember.' " 
      So what do the dying think of, as they sink stiffly into gray quicksand? The most disconcerting thing about Super Flat Times may be its contention that your existence will not flash before you in a nostalgic home-movie blur, that ulcerating, lifelong disappointments will make a final panicked appearance in the fading embers of consciousness, that anyone who says they have no regrets is lying. Derby barely lets a sentence go by without a stab of loopy hilarity, but also marinates his scenarios in mundane, inconsolable sorrow. 
      Beneath the busily mutating surface weirdness, the stories are rife with abandonment and loss—lovers fighting paranoia, inertia, and each other, but mainly, nuclear units in meltdown (parents are inadequate and pathetically contrite, children resentful and appallingly ductile). A patricide here, an infanticide there. Dr. Spock books seem to have been replaced by the Eraserhead parenting manual. A couple lose their daughter at the mall, but avoid looking in the obvious places so as not "to cheapen the disappearance." A mother finds her son, distressed by his father's depression, clinging to an icy tower of marbled beef. The child of separated lesbians (same-sex marriages are common in these Super Flat Times) stumbles upon troubling photographic evidence: "Daddy" was an aluminum tub, its contents "emptied . . . into his mother's womb." 
      Throughout, alienation verges on the psychosomatic. The body is regarded as outside oneself, a curious, brittle object prone to grotesque accidents. Confronting cross-sectioned images of himself at a clinic, someone notes, "You begin to understand . . . how much work the skin does in holding off this absurdity." Derby proves quite the body-horror maestro (more in the Farrelly Brothers than William Burroughs vein), and his storytellers have a juicy, childlike way with the details of corporeal gross-out. Flouting Atkins-diet wisdom, one recounts how the exclusive consumption of meat altered the human physique: "We got fat for a while . . . but then the fat left us, so that what we were left with were baggy flaps of limp, oily skin, whole bolts of extra body. We gathered this loose flesh in long, flat clips at our shoulders, so that the worst among us appeared to have wings." 
      The cautionary sci-fi tropes of artificial breeding and ethnic purification are also subjected to the demolition Derby. The Royal Child Harvest compels women to produce "up to nine thousand eggs a month, grapefruit-sized clusters that often broke the carrier's hips." The solution to miscegenation is outlined in the horrible, literal-minded terms of an eight-year-old: "They wanted everybody back inside their original race. . . . they let people with mixed blood choose one strain they'd like to keep, and a machine would separate out all the rest." 
     Often recalling the coiled equipoise and tonal fissures of Ben Marcus and George Saunders, Derby's sentences are designed to ambush—indifferent declarations booby-trapped with implausible dissonance: "I like home, generally, but I do not like home the way that I left it—with a large wild bobcat living there." "It is difficult to remember with any clarity the time in which we met, partially because I sold a great deal of those memories to buy cloth for Philip's bassinet." "I found a piece of another woman caught in his teeth." Science fiction generally encourages the reader to secure a foothold in alien realms (decipher the rules, detect the parallels to ours), but Derby totalizes the disorientation by utterly thwarting—or, perhaps, tantrically prolonging—that experience. If the genre operates via defamiliarization, SFT atomizes that sensation of "cognitive estrangement" (as critic Darko Suvin termed it)—the oddness is in the telling, the matter-of-fact inversions of logic, the super flat affect, in every deliberately chosen word. 
     The cumulative effect warps perspective—it starts to seem that these stories, born of an involved alchemy, are in a subtly foreign language. Indeed, we learn that the era's lingua franca is called English III—no further elaboration, but the joke underscores the concept's brilliance. This post-apocalypse of erased memory banks is after all a world of lost and only partially found; it makes sense that language itself has been extinguished and tentatively relearned. Derby's methodology—to break something down, squint at its constituent parts, piece it back together—applies not just to words but emotions. The end result is something altogether unexpected and heartbreaking, fragments cemented with the residue of a mysterious violence.