We are expected to go along with this plan, in which people lose wars
and corporations win them—the missile builders, the mining companies,
the oil magnates, and that's just scratching the surface—and a
little person like me should not dare be so insolent as to suggest a
moment's time-out to review the monstrous human waste of an endless
cycle of violent retaliation. Well, I'm daring. I have read that some
of the missiles we are using (on the day of this writing) against our
current enemy—one of the poorest countries on earth—cost a million
dollars apiece. Excuse an outrageous suggestion, but has anyone
considered just sending the innocent civilians the cash so they can
dispatch the wretched tyranny in their midst and save everyone a huge
cleanup? Masses of people tend to join cults of anger and vengeance only
when they are desperate. History shows that populations with food in
their bellies, literacy skills (women included), access to information,
and immunization against the major diseases do not long tolerate
martyrdom to the likes of the Taliban warlords or Saddam Hussein. And if
those citizens were not grateful outright for our help in their
liberation, at the very worst they might just forget about us—whereas
our present strategy of asserting predominance with bombs is liberating
some but starving others, driving millions to seek refuge in
snow-covered, stony mountains, and ultimately sowing dragon's teeth of
unforgettable enmity across the soil of one more desert.
Arrogance is a dubious weapon—an inappropriate side dish, anyway, to
serve with a war. In fact, the very word wartime invokes for me a much
more modest cultural mind-set, and lately I find myself saying this word
quietly, again and again: wartime. It brings a taste to the root
of my tongue, and to my inner ear the earnest tone of my parents
recalling their teenage years. The word speaks of things I've never
known: an era of sacrifice undertaken by rich and poor alike, of gardens
planted and warm socks knitted in drab colors, communities working
together to conquer fear by giving up comforts so everyone on earth
might eventually have better days.
I went looking to see if I was imagining something that never happened.
I found a speech delivered by Franklin D. Roosevelt on January 6, 1941,
that made me wonder where we have mislaid our sense of global honor. "At no previous time has American security been as seriously
threatened from without as it is today," he noted, as he could have
done this day. But instead of invoking a fear of outsiders, he embraced
their needs as America's own and called for defending, not just at
home but on all the earth, what he called the four freedoms: freedom of
speech and expression, freedom of religion, freedom from fear, freedom
from want. "Translated into world terms," he said, the last meant "economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy
peace-time life for its inhabitants." He warned that it was immature
and untrue "to brag that America, single-handed and with one hand tied
behind its back, can hold off the whole world," and that any such "dictator's peace" could not be capable of inspiring international
generosity or returning the world to any true independence: "Such a
peace would bring no security for us or for our neighbors. Those who
would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety
deserve neither liberty nor safety."
What reassurance I found in those words. I'm not an aberration, after
all; I'm a good American, living in an aberrant moment, and I'm not
the only one. When I ask around, almost everyone secretly agrees with me
that we seem to be contriving a TV-set imitation—the look with no
character inside—in our new-fab wartime of flags flapping above
shopping malls and car-sales lots, these exhortations to purchase, to
put down a foot and give not an inch. There's a rush on to squash the
essential liberties of others and purchase some temporary safety. The
four freedoms are not much in evidence. Faith and speech have taken hard
blows, as countless U.S. citizens suffer daily intimidation because
their appearance or their mode of belief or both place them outside the
mainstream of an angry nation at war. Any spoken suggestion that there
might be alternatives to violent retaliation is likely to be called an
affront against our country. I have struggled to find some logical path
that could lead to this conclusion—that is, the notion that
ambivalence about war is un-American—and have identified as its only
possible source a statement made by our president: "Either you're
with us, or you are with the terrorists." He was addressing nations of
the world, but that "us" keeps getting narrower. If FDR's words
were published anonymously today, especially those about force leading
only to a "dictator's peace," FDR would get hate mail.
Fearless, gripping, at once darkly funny and tender, spanning three continents and numerous lives, Americanah is a richly told story set in today's globalized world.
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