Thinking Otherwise: The Prospect for a New American Century

October 8, 2009

By William Irwin Thompson

“We Irish think otherwise.” Bishop Berkeley

With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Neoconservatives in the Project for a New American Century gloated, in the afterglow of Reagan, that America was now a single Superpower and had a window of opportunity to reshape the world along the lines of thought that proposed that the free and unfettered market was the archetype for all forms of human relations, economic, political, and cultural.

To effect this global transformation, the Neocons led the United States into invading Iraq in order to transform an authoritarian, secular, Bath socialist dictatorship into an American satrapy—this as the first step in converting medieval Islamic Caliphates into secular, free market capitalist societies. The second step was not so much a conscious decision as much as the consequences of unfettered markets and a cultural drift that served to slide the American economy away from twentieth-century industrial production toward an informational service and banking economy based upon credit services and real estate derivatives.

In this new form of global capitalism, the US corporate directorate outsourced industrial production to China, who was then expected to use their new wealth to buy US Treasury bills and banking instruments. Before the banking crisis of 2008, the financial sector had grown almost to the point of being one quarter of the American economy.

The financing of the war in Iraq was charged on our imaginary VISA card and the professional upper middle class was encouraged to buy movie-set houses made out of particle board and dressed up to look like Gone with the Wind’s Tara or faux Tudor baronial mansions with three car garages. Our new style of house construction became a symbol of our economy as a whole. The working class—which is never called that in the USA but is always called the middle class—was encouraged to have the suburban tract house of its dreams for no money down and was thus distracted from noticing that the multinational corporate executives had mortgaged its country to China.

But what it all came down to was down. The war in Iraq was neither won nor lost, and like a rodeo rider who shifts horses not because he has tamed his bronco, but simply because he has ridden it for his allotted time, Americans jumped off, and transferred all their debts to a new credit card with higher interest rates as we changed wars from Bush in Iraq to Obama in Afghanistan.

As the interest payments mounted, China began to grow nervous about buying all those Treasury bills and holding so many dollars, and Western Europe with its new Euro began to rethink the Cold War notion of having an American foreign policy as its own.

Our Secretary of Defense Robert Gates now assures us that as a Superpower we cannot afford to walk away from Afghanistan, and pundits in the British Guardian warn us that if the USA pulls out, Iran, Russia, and China will only be too happy to move in. It does not occur to anyone that such an involvement of Afghanistan’s neighbors, Iran, China, and Russia in Central Asian problems might be a good thing—though not, of course, for U.S. pipeline and oil companies–because the bitter truth is that we cannot solve the problems of Afghanistan, Iran, and North Korea without Russia and China. In short, we are not now and never have been “a Single Superpower.”

As one considers war lords in Afghanistan and pirates in Somalia, the outline of a new world disorder begins to emerge. This new world is not a nineteenth and twentieth century one of contending powers and empires that a Metternich or a Kissinger could address to play “the Great Game;” rather, it is a world of cultural entropy in which the energetic and thermodynamic bonds of nation-states come apart. Mexico becomes a failed state like Somalia in which the warlords are conflicting drug cartels creating unspeakable violence everywhere. California, which used to have the sixth largest economy in the world, now hovers at the edge of bankruptcy and seeks to save money by destroying the greatest public university in human history, and unemployment begins to bring the American Dream toward a rude awakening. It will only take the flick of a force majeure in the form of another Katrina or a megaquake in San Francisco or Seattle to knock this inverted colossal American Dollar pyramid completely down.

During the collapse of Maya civilization, the priests and kings continued to build costly Maya pyramids, refusing to see what was happening to their ecological infrastructure through human deforestation and climate change. And now during our collapse, the Obama administration refuses to effect a new paradigm-shift in global thought—despite its electoral mandate to do so. “Yes we can” has become “Well, no we can’t actually.” To save the banking system, Obama went to those sorcerer’s apprentices of Donald Rubin–Summers and Geithner. To rescue the industries of the lobbyists and the insurance companies, Obama abandoned a public plan at the start and became so terrorized by the media illusions of the lunatic Right of the Becks and Limbaughs that he continues to hold to the yellow stripe in the middle of the road. Obama is a Centrist to the core, and so today he announced to Congress that he is seeking a “middle road” between leaving Afghanistan or increasing troops. To respond to the threat of foreign terrorism with its highly effective loosely organized distributive lattice, Obama has fallen into the old 1960s computer mainframe thought-form of a Central Processing Unit and still seeks to fight al Qaeda and the Taliban with an invading army. With 1940s movies of American GIs liberating France and handing out Hershey bars to the adoring populace, the USA invaded Iraq and then invaded Afghanistan. And so with Wall Street thinking applied to our economy, and conservative thinking reasserted for Afghanistan, Obama has abandoned any pretense of being a liberal capable of a paradigm-shift in foreign policy.

Instead of a world-system of contending former superpowers like the USA and Russia competing with a world of newly emerging superpowers like Western Europe, India, and China, imagine a world of cultural Malwarecausing the collapse of systems everywhere. Imagine a band of Christian Evangelical Rednecks in our own Air Force hijacking atomic weapons to deal with Muslim infidels in their own way. (Remember when the Air Force lost some nukes and left them sitting unguarded on the tarmac?) Imagine an Islamist suicide bomber with a WMD in London or New York. Imagine earthquakes, typhoons, and dried up watersheds in India, dust storms combining with coal air pollution in China and Indonesia crossing the Pacific to our own West Coast. Imagine a world of more drug and gun cartels, more LA style teenage gangs everywhere, and Somali-style pirates holding hostages in London, Paris, and New York. Imagine, and you won’t be day-dreaming; you will be seeing the news the media ignore in order to report on the behavior of celebrities. Even the liberalHuffington Post has become a tabloid filled with photos of celebrity nip slips.

We are ruled by two estates, not four, and these are the politicians and the chattering class reporters who feed off one another, reporting on what the other said as if that were news. The right wing media have created the perception that Obama is a socialist, when the truth is he is a centrist who has completely sold liberals and progressives down the river because he knows in the USA they have nowhere else to go. We tried voting for Greens or Nader, and that got us Bush and Cheney. So the lunatic Right has hijacked Obama and negated the election it lost.

Our problem is that the kind of people we elect to political office are not smart enough to see the world we are actually living in. Our politicians live, as Reagan did, in a B movie of the post World War II American suburbs—”the real America” of Sarah Palin or the world captured in the popular TV series of Mad Men. With mad men in the executive and legislative branches of our government, the sad truth is that human beings simply are not smart enough to deal with the problems they have created. We need to be optimistic to live each day, to dismiss any other perception as pessimism, or the lunatic visions of conspiracy theorists who are not Mainstream Americans and are in need of anti-depressants. But this adaptation of sunlit optimism is no longer adaptive under our warm polluted skies, and what we now face is a challenge to our very capacities of perception. This is a challenge the human species simply cannot handle. And so we face not just a crisis of superpower world politics, or an ecological crisis of industrial civilization, but a crisis in human evolution itself. Welcome to the Prospect for a New American Century.

Cultural Historian William Irwin Thompson writes regularly for Wild River Review