W ALTER W. H ÖLBLING Americans and Their Enemies: Political Rhetoric and Real Politics That the Heathen People amongst whom we live, and whose land the Lord God of our Fathers hath given to us for a rightful Possession have […] been planning mischievous devices against that part of the English Israel which is seated in these goings down of the sun, no Man that is an Inhabitant of any considerable standing, can be ignorant. I. Mather, A Brief History of the Warre with the Indians in New England […] Boston, 1676, 1; qtd. in Slotkin 83 Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade. […] States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic. George W. Bush. “State of the Union Address.” January 29, 2002 There are still governments that sponsor and harbor terrorists - but their number has declined. There are still regimes seeking weapons of mass destruction - but no longer without attention and without consequence. Our country is still the target of terrorists who want to kill many, and intimidate us all, and we will stay on the offensive against them, until the fight is won. George W. Bush, “State of the Union Address”, January 20, 2005 What on the American side is seen as justified defensive rhetoric in the face of an imminent external threat often, though not always, comes across as an aggressive-defensive attitude when viewed from the outside. Already Richard Hofstadter traced this particular aspect of American rhetoric in his book The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1966), and he found it characterized by the tendency to secularize a religiously derived view of the world, to deal with political issues in Christian images, and to color them with the dark symbology of a certain side of Christian tradition. Social issues could be reduced rather simply to a battle between a Good and an Evil influence. (xif.) There is ample evidence that variations of the original Puritan version of the “errand into the wilderness” have strongly colored official as well as popular American discourse in times of catastrophe, or fear of catastrophe, or in fictional scenarios of catastrophe. Over the years, these threats have 212 W ALTER W. H ÖLBLING had many faces, most of them external - wild nature, Indians, other religions and ideologies (Jacobins, Freemasons, Catholics), and foreign powers - from the Spanish and the French and the King of England to the Mexicans, Habsburgs, the German “Huns” in World War I, the Axis powers in World War II, World Communism with the USSR and China, and its outposts in Cuba, Vietnam, Chile, Nicaragua, and Grenada, and most recently the socalled “rogue states” and international terrorism. At various periods there were also immigrants from “exotic” countries (remember the restrictive Immigration Acts of the 1920s), cyber-terrorists, foreign drug-lords, and aliens from outer space. Some of these threats have also come from within - African-Americans, emancipated women, leftish unions, Hollywood, conspiring power-hungry politicians, entrepreneurs and scientists, alcohol, organized crime, communist spies, smokers, as well as supporters of dangerous movements like pro-choice, multi-lingualism, same-sex marriage, and so on. In short, seen from a European perspective, the unifying American master narrative seems to be in constant need of an identifiable threat, preferably from the outside, in order to maintain its persuasive power and to provide the necessary cohesion among increasingly differentiated political/ cultural/ ethnic interest groups within its dominion. My argument here is that since the time of William Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation and Mary Rowlandson’s paradigmatic first Indian captivity narrative (cf. Van der Beets), when nature and indigenous inhabitants of the American continent still constituted real dangers for the small numbers of European colonizers, there has developed what one might call an asynchronicity between the actual threats and the ones identified in the dominant discourse, i.e., the rhetorical figures and images employed in this discourse are often out of sync with historical realities. This implies, among other things, that 1. Survival and acceptance of traditional rhetorical and narrative concepts and images continue much longer than the actual historical situation would warrant. These constructs can be considered examples of a “storifying of experience,” as they employ specific symbol systems, myths, narrative structures and modes of discourse that are considered as adequate conceptual frames for the understanding of a historical situation. If they have sufficient explanatory power, these models of rhetorical sense-making persist as conventions even in the face of political and historical inadequacy. 2. Because of their familiarity they can easily be instrumentalized for political, religious, and economic purposes. 3. Even in the face of contradictory factual evidence, they can serve as formulaic rituals in times of crisis, uniting the nation against a real or imagined danger. Americans and Their Enemies: Political Rhetoric and Real Politics 213 4. In fact, the usage of these words sometimes tends to gain a life of its own which may actually create the situation it supposedly tries to avoid. A very obvious example are the American “Indians” as the ubiquitous enemies in U.S. Western novels and later on in Hollywood movies at times when, historically speaking, Native Americans had not been a real danger to the development of the nation for several generations. Similarly persistent, though different in its origins, is the image of the potent black male lusting after white maidens, in spite of the proven fact that the historical reality of the situation has been rather different. On another level, since the 1980s we can observe an “English only” movement in several U.S. states that tries to legally guarantee the use of English as the only official language. From a European view, this attempt is as pathetic as it is unnecessary: as if one could “protect” a language, in the first place; as if English (of all languages! ) needed any protection; as if knowing/ speaking more than one language would make you less “American”; as if the belief in common American values were dependent on one particular language. As it is, as early as 1889 Mark Twain’s satirical novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court radically questions the American auto-stereotype of the lone cultivator in the wilderness. The text clearly shows structural characteristics of the “captivity narratives,” but the traditional situation of the captive has been turned upside down. Here, it is not the representative of the civilized world who is permanently threatened with death and/ or moral degradation by his transfer into a “primitive” society. Rather, it takes Twain’s hero Hank Morgan, foreman of an arms factory, only a few years to uproot the social and spiritual order of King Arthur’s medieval England and threaten it with extinction. 1 That he cannot succeed in the end is due to the logic of the story but does not invalidate Twain’s critique which, one should remember, is voiced at a time when Native Americans in the USA come as close to extinction as ever before or after. While deconstructing, on the one hand, an outdated American auto-stereotype, Twain also presents us with an exaggeratedly drawn hetero-stereotype according to which Americans, seen from a European point of view, excel in practical ingenuity and business skills, but are rather naive, provincial, and underdeveloped as regards cultural sensibility and creativity. The Yankee 1 Daniel Aaron, The Unwritten War, 140-145, sees the novel primarily as Twain’s belated contribution to the Civil War, in which he did not serve personally. Given the comprehensive theme of the novel and its structural similarity to the “captivity narratives”, a more contextual socio-cultural interpretation seems appropriate: two years before the novel is published, the Dawes Act, an attempt to integrate American Indians into society, yields results that are about as fatal for the Indians as Hank Morgan’s reforms are for the medieval feudal system. 1890, the year after the publication of Twain’s book, the “Indian Barrier” is abolished and the American “frontier” officially closed. 214 W ALTER W. H ÖLBLING - with the best of intentions - as destroyer of a European medieval culture whose values and spirituality remain alien to him comes across as a glossy pop-art version of those fictional American travelers in Europe that populate the novels of Henry James since the 1870s (The American, 1877; Daisy Miller, 1878; The Portrait of a Lady, 1880/ 81) and try to re-assess, usually with moderate results, their relationship to the cultures on the other continent. Finally, Twain in this novel, with wonderfully ambiguous irony, not only reverses the conventional structure of the captivity narrative, he also expands it and makes it international: Now the wilderness to be cultivated is Old England, and the Indian braves here are the ancestors of the New World cultivators. Twain’s satire also implies that the new American interest in their European origins carries the seed of an expansionist re-conquest, given the fact that the American continent has been officially settled and new frontiers must be sought outside the continental USA. Not surprisingly, Twain’s novel does not seriously impair the validity of the national auto-stereotype of the righteous American hero defending Faith and Civilization against the onslaught of barbarian hordes. In World War I, this lends itself easily for use in the American view of the situation in Europe: Americans as “Knights of Democracy” in the “Great Crusade” against “the Hun”, in order to save “La Belle France,” “Innocent Belgium,” and “Classical Italy” (symbolizing European culture) from destruction - this conceptual framework projects the symbol system of the “captivity narratives” onto the international scale, complete with all the major components of missionary zeal, racial warfare, gender-specific roles of victim and savior, and their not so implicit sexual connotations. 2 Susan Brownmiller, in Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (1975), points to the far-reaching sexual aspects of the feminine allegorization of France in American propaganda of World War I: “The Rape of the Hun” became an instant byword in this country. It came to symbolize the criminal violation of innocent Belgium. It dramatized the plight of La Belle France. It charged up national patriotism and spurred the drive for Liberty Loans by adding needed authenticity to the manufactured persona of an unprincipled barbarian with pointed helmet and syphilitic lust who gleefully destroyed cathedrals, set fire to libraries, and hacked and maimed and spitted babies on the tip of his bayonet. As propaganda, rape was remarkably effective, more effective than the original German terror. It helped to lay the emotional groundwork that led us into the war. (44) 2 George Creel, chair of the Committee on Public Information instituted by President Wilson, describes in detail the work of his agency in How We Advertised America, (1920). Also see James R. Mock and C. Larson, Words That Won the War: The Story of the Committee on Public Information, 1917-1919 (1939); Harold Lasswell, Propaganda Technique in the World War (1938); and George T. Blakey, Historians on the Homefront: American Propagandists for the Great War (1970). Americans and Their Enemies: Political Rhetoric and Real Politics 215 With much less public rhetoric, the country that sends its soldiers across the Atlantic to “make the world safe for democracy,” over the period from 1898-1925 takes advantage of a Europe torn by nationalist animosities and war, and practices an expanded version of the Monroe doctrine among its southern and Pacific neighbors with military involvements in Panama (1908, 1912, 1925), Nicaragua (1909, 1910, 1912-25, 1926), Cuba (1898, 1906, 1912, 1917-1923, 1933), Mexico (1914, 1916-1917), Haiti (occ. 1915-1934), the Dominican Republic (1904: financial system; occupied 1916-1924), Honduras (intervention 1907), Guatemala (1921 coup against the president), and Puerto Rico (occupied 1898), as well as Guam (1898) and the Philippines (1898). One might argue that World War II is one of the few situations after the American War of Independence in which the dominant U.S. discourse of external danger corresponds to a real historical threat from external enemies. Beyond question is the broad consensus that resistance against the Nazis and fascists in Europe and their allied Japanese imperialists in the Pacific is justified on political and moral grounds. And though in its aftermath a few critical American authors like Norman Mailer, Irwin Shaw, John Hersey and others, while supporting the war goals, point to its potentially dangerous effects for the victors, their voices remain an influential minority. The dominant discourse tells the kind of story that follows the traditional master narrative, as Ward Just ironically sums it up in his study Military Men (1970): Since American wars are never undertaken for imperialist gain (myth one), American soldiers always fight in a virtuous cause (myth two) for a just and goalless peace (myth three). […] American wars are always defensive wars, undertaken slowly and reluctantly, the country a righteous giant finally goaded beyond endurance by foreign adventurers. (7) Historically, the outcome of World War II vindicates this self-image to some degree, but soon the escalation of the Cold War darkens the picture, internationally as well as domestically. U.S. foreign policy at the time includes the standard ingredients of exceptionalism, moral superiority, democratic mission, and The Enemy, now “World Communism.” In 1966, Senator J. Willam Fulbright, then Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, publishes his critical assessment of the U.S. government’s practice of seeing international aid programs as an instrument for maintaining an “American presence” and to spread the “Great Society.” He specifically mentions the then escalating Vietnam conflict and comments: These [aid] programs are too small to have much effect on economic development but big enough to involve the United States in the affairs of the countries concerned. The underlying assumption of these programs is that the presence of 216 W ALTER W. H ÖLBLING some American aid officials is a blessing which no developing country, except for the benighted communist ones, should be denied. I think this view of aid is a manifestation of the arrogance of power. Its basis, if not messianism, is certainly egotism. (236) In the same year that Senator Fulbright articulates his critique of U.S. foreign policy, the European mutant of a classical American movie genre becomes an instant box-office success in the U.S. (as did its European release one year before): Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The film apparently belongs to one of the most “American” genres but leaves few of the key elements of the traditional American Western unturned. The plot somewhat arbitrarily develops the chase of three gunmen after a batch of Confederate gold during the last years of the American Civil War. Individual exceptionality still plays a role but is no longer permanent or absolute. Moral superiority is virtually absent from the movie, the driving forces motivating the protagonists’ actions are greed and power, with occasional sadism thrown in for “emotion.” A democratic mission is nowhere in sight, neither by the few representatives of a civil society nor by the government institution in the movie, the Union Army, whose only two honest representatives are apaprently helpless against corruption in the ranks as well as against an incompetent higher command. The Enemy is practically everywhere - i.e., everyone who competes in the race for money and power. The Good (Clint Eastwood) has the upper hand when the movie ends, but we know that his streak of luck can end any time. There are no real heroes: The Good is only “good” compared to the calculated viciousness of The Bad (Lee van Cleef) and the mindless thuggery of The Ugly (Eli Wallach). The film projects a world torn by war; law and order are either inefficient or virtually absent, corruption is rampant, and individual survival depends on a loaded gun and the whims of fortune. In short, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, while claiming affinity to the genre of Western movies, radically deconstructs it; what we get is a morality play without morals. Though there are no overt political overtones, the film presents a world that must have appeared familiar to its contemporary audiences in the USA as well as in Europe in the mid-1960s. At a time when consensus in U.S. society is violently threatened by apparently unbridgeable differences, Leone’s scenes of senseless death and destruction in the Civil War not only reminds American audiences of the - until then - most painful period of their national history; it also calls to the ongoing war in Vietnam and allows for contemporary references and connotations. The identification patterns available in the movie are multiple and opaque enough to even be contradictory. For example: The battle scenes as well as the corruption and sadistic abuse of power portrayed in the movie speak strongly to those protesting Americans and Their Enemies: Political Rhetoric and Real Politics 217 against government authority, the selective draft, and the war in Vietnam. Because of the allegorical quality of the protagonists and the mythical story line, though, the movie also enables much more intriguing readings: U.S. Southerners can see “The Bad”as a representative of the Yankee North, and his death as poetic justice in the context of the U.S. Civil War. However, supporters of the Vietnam Conflict - which was, we should remember, officially a civil war between South and North Vietnam in which the South had appealed to the USA for help - also can easily allegorize “The Bad” as the cruel North Vietnamese (Ho Chi Minh), and “The Ugly” as the corrupt South Vietnamese regime which is repeatedly saved by U.S. intervention (“The Good”) just in the nick of time before its demise. In fact, in the episode where The Good ends his contract with The Ugly and leaves him out in the desert, contemporaries might establish parallels to the 1963 ‘removal’ of Ngo Dinh Diem by a military coup, with the quiet cooperation of the USA. On yet a different level, critical viewers can understand the shifting alliances between the movie’s protagonists in their pursuit of the booty as suggesting the U.S. foreign policy since the end of World War II, which starts off with a major reversal of the war-time alliance and continues to make liaisons of convenience according to the necessities of realpolitik. There is also a more general element in Leone’s film: it is, as today’s antiglobalization protesters would argue, the disturbing fact that individual existence is rather precariously at the mercy of global economic and power games, and that wars in this system have nothing to do with emotions, morality, religion, or ideology. This aspect is especially of concern to a society like the U.S., where the discourses of individual rights and freedom as well as of moral/ religious obligation have been one of the major pillars of the national cultural fabric and have constituted a dominant rhetorical element in the justification of all wars the U.S. have ever fought. The sociologist R.E. Canjar put this very succinctly in her 1984 essay: War, in short, is neither an emotional, moral, or political aberration; it is the socialized production of violence and its monopoly use by the state. […] Both corporate social life and corporate social death are materially produced by social means. It is for this reasons that such phenomena as the military-industrial complex occur. It has less to do with conspiracies than it is a routine outcome of a production process in which the means, methods, labor, technology and organization simultaneously serve, and often fail to distinguish between, the production of life and the production of death. (435, 437) The emotionally and morally arid world of Sergio Leone’s movie, which in effect suggests that killing is good business, has no place for this high rhetoric and, in fact, corresponds quite well to Joseph Heller’s terse and darkly suggestive alliterative statement a few years earlier in his novel Catch-22: “Business boomed on every battle front.” 218 W ALTER W. H ÖLBLING A response of a different kind to the American situation in the 1960s is Norman Mailer’s 1967 novel Why Are We in Vietnam? His answer to the title is a kind of fictional psychoanalysis of the collective American unconscious, illustrated by the story of a high-tech hunting party of Texan corporate executives in Alaska. But Mailer goes far beyond suggesting easy analogies between this hunting trip and Vietnam; he is looking for the roots of this unbridled joy of killing, of the fascination with high-tech overkill in the collective American psyche. He articulates his belief that at the bottom of it all are the accumulative and mutually reinforcing effects of repressive sexual norms, secularized versions of the Puritan work ethic, business interests of the military-industrial complex, American imperialism backed by an unbroken sense of mission, the belief in “manifest destiny”, and a holy fear of everything that does not conform to the WASP way of life - including the notorious suppression and commodification of the body, human or animal. Mailer’s most irreverent indictment of this American attitude appears in the middle of the novel when Rusty Jethroe, the leading CEO, having failed to prove himself as the top big-game hunter in front of his subalterns, distressedly ruminates about the possible consequences of this embarrassing situation: Yeah, sighs Rusty, the twentieth century is breaking up the ball game, and Rusty thinks large common thoughts such as these: 1 - The women are free. They fuck too many to believe one can do the job. 2 - The Niggers are free, and the dues they got to be paid are no Texan virgin’s delight. 3 - The Niggers and women are fucking each other. 4 - The yellow races are breaking loose. 5 - Africa is breaking loose. 6 - The adolescents are breaking loose including his own son. 7 - The European nations hate America’s guts. 8 - The products are no fucking good any more. 9 - Communism is a system guaranteed to collect dues from all losers. 9a - More losers than winners. 9b - and out: Communism is going to defeat capitalism unless promptly destroyed. […] 12 - The great white athlete is being superseded by the great black athlete. 13 - The Jews run the Eastern wing of the Democratic party. 14 -Karate, a Jap sport, is now prerequisite to good street fighting.[…] 17 - He, Rusty, is fucked unless he gets that bear, for if he don’t, white men are fucked more and they can take no more. Rusty’s secret is that he sees himself as one of the pillars of the firmament, yeah, man - he reads the world’s doom in his own fuckup. If he is less great than God intended him to be, then America is in Trouble. They don’t breed Texans for nothing. (110f.) While Increase Mather’s self-image in my initial quote can still be validated by religious beliefs and the historical situation, Rusty’s view of himself and the endangered state of White America comes across as the compensating aggressiveness of a power elite that tries to hide the lack of an ethical and ideal core of their claim for supremacy behind grandiose appeals to America’s God-given greatness. Americans and Their Enemies: Political Rhetoric and Real Politics 219 Mailer’s critique of 1967 has gained almost uncanny topicality in our days. We may recall that on March 8, 1983, speaking before church leaders in Florida, then U.S. President Ronald Reagan named the Soviet Union as the seat of “evil in the world.” With the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1989, the demonizing Cold War rhetoric temporarily disappears from U.S. public diction, yet it immediately returns in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9-11. For his 2002 “State of the Union Address” on January 29, President George W. Bush’s speech writers coin the term “axis of evil; ” apart from the fact that the two terms are “four-letter words”, they are a clever choice of phrase that evokes the Axis powers of World War II as well as the Cold War, and also suggests an American moral superiority of the fundamentalist kind. This rhetoric places the U.S.A. once again on the side of God in a primeval show-down against the forces of darkness in which American soldiers’ bodies - and their electronic and high-tech extensions - are the primary weapons. However, fairly obvious similarities may be misleading and can distract us from looking at more interesting aspects. Public statements like the “State of the Union” addresses have over the years developed their specific rhetorical conventions, and certain formulas have become an absolute necessity. (Cf. Goetsch and Hurm Rhetorik der amerikanischen Präsidenten seit F.D. Roosevelt). Especially in times of crisis or war, a depiction of “us” versus “them” in black and white has become part of the standard repertoire, as have oppositions like rational/ irrational, good/ evil, just/ unjust, freedom/ oppression, peaceful/ aggressive, brave/ cowardly, etc., together with the emphasis on the role of the USA as victim of aggression and/ or defender of a threatened. Likewise, and quite independent of the actual state of affairs, speakers traditionally confirm American strength and determination (“Yet the state of our Union has never been stronger …”), point to the uniqueness of this particular historical moment, and express their conviction that the nation will emerge victorious. In this 2002 State of the Union address, the combination of “war against terrorism” and “homeland security,” with the envisioned beneficiary effects of “safer neighborhoods” resulting from “the sacrifice of soldiers, the fierce brotherhood of firefighters […], stronger police […] stricter border enforcement […]” and America’s dependence on “the eyes and ears of alert citizens” convey connotations which for many European ears have an ominous ring. Let us situate this rhetoric in the context of recent American events: Major business malpractice (like the Enron, WorldCom, NYSE, etc. scandals), neglect of environmental concerns (the unsigned Kyoto agreement, oil projects in Alaska natural reserves, cutting of federal detoxification funding), blatant violations of civil liberties in connection with people detained indefinitely without legal assistance following 9-11, the creation of the Homeland Security Agency, the Patriot Acts, the decision to dramatically 220 W ALTER W. H ÖLBLING upgrade military weapon systems (the Pentagon budget is four times that of our annual Austrian state budget), and the recent revelations in testimonies before the Congressional 9/ 11 Commission as well as U.S. and British intelligence agencies reports on the actual state of information in regard to Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. What emerges looks like the profile of a society that is threatened domestically by a combination of political favoritism and ruthless business interests, and also besieged by an overpowering external enemy, and is determined to protect itself with the help of a superior military and all-out information surveillance, electronic as well as personal, appealing to values like “service,” “sacrifice,” and “fierce brotherhood.” Rusty Jethroe’s Jeremiad, the high-tech weaponry of the Alaska hunters, as well as the lethal “brotherhood” of D.J. and Tex, the two alter ego-like adolescent heroes of the novel who volunteer for Vietnam, come readily to mind. To make it clear - I am not commenting here on the pragmatic effectiveness of policies adopted by the current U.S. administration, nor do I intend to draw superficial analogies. What strikes me as worth contemplating are the structural and thematic affinities to Mailer’s satirical fictional analysis of U.S. society in 1967, then in another state of crisis. They seem to imply - and some people might find this a bit alarming - that conceptual changes in the mind of American leadership over the past 39 years have not been very significant. The “Domino Theory” and the “weapons of mass destruction” share a certain ringing rhetoric. The current structure of the G.W. Bush - Osama bin Laden - Saddam Hussein scenario, the “coalition of the willing” versus “the axis of evil,” “rogue states,” and global terrorism of the Islamic fundamentalist kind sounds very much like the biblical scapegoat ritual, about which James Aho in his 1981 study on Religious Mythology and the Art of War says the following: As a rule, in Judaism, Islam, and Protestantism, responsibility for the world’s sin is projected onto minority populations, strangers, and foreigners; those with tongues, customs, and pantheons alien to God’s faithful. In collectively objectifying evil and positing it upon this external enemy, a sense of cleanliness of His “remnant” is created symbolically. Analogous to the Levitical rite of the scapegoat (Lev. 16: 20-12), the projectors can “escape” from acknowledging the possibility of their own blemish. […] Thus, mythologically, the holy war will be fought between the absolutely righteous and the equally absolute incarnation of Evil. Insofar as it exorcises the objectified evil, the ferocity of the violence in the war must reflect the enormity of the crime against God and man. […] The Hebraic, the Muslim and Christian holy wars, both in myth and enactment, are among the most ruthless in human experience. (151) It conveniently allows both sides to “escape” from acknowledging the possibility of their own blemish by creating a Manichean system of absolute Americans and Their Enemies: Political Rhetoric and Real Politics 221 good versus absolute evil. This also seems to have become an increasingly accepted view in pop culture products, e.g. Lord of the Rings and similar recent box office hits. [Or, a rather quotidian - almost banal - example to illustrate the contemporary “official spirit” in the USA: In January 2005 I walked into a New Jersey Post Office, and while waiting in line I studied the display of the four latest special editions of stamps: one was against breast cancer, the other three featured John Wayne, a Purple Heart, and the National War Memorial. Coincidental - or not? Like they said in the 1960s: “Just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean they are not out to get you.”] On the U.S. side, the somewhat arbitrary shift in scapegoats - from the elusive Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda network to the more targetable Saddam Hussein - also provides the latest example of the aforementioned asynchronicity of dominant public discourse, whatever political, economic, and strategic motivations might be behind that move: The actual new historical causes of the contemporary danger - Islamic fundamentalist terrorism growing out of poor social, political, and economic conditions - are ignored in favor of a familiar threat (Iraq) that can be easily identified and attacked, though in historical reality it has not been a real global danger since 1991. Given the current situation, it is likely that the attitude of Europeans towards America will see yet another turn of the critical screw; but as European scholars we might do well to also make greater analytical efforts to understand what on the surface comes across as rather irreconcilable American opposites, e.g., fundamentalist religious beliefs and a free democratic system; or the claim that in U.S. elections “every vote counts,” though the actual voting/ counting of votes (mechanical or electronic) is subject to procedures that leave many Europeans stunned. I also think we should look even more closely at the extremely mediated and visual quality of everyday U.S. life, as well as on the impact this has on our understanding of democracy and its processes. Currently, for example, thanks to the rhetoric of the U.S. administration around the Iraq War, 50% of Americans actually believe that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein co-operated, though serious evidence for that has not become public. America’s claim of exceptionality, and for leadership in the democratic world, increasingly has to defend itself against the charge that there is nothing special about the USA, that they, e.g., like any other imperial power in history, use military force whenever necessary to secure their interests, and only co-operate with the international community when it is expedient for American interests do so. In short, a reassessment of the role of America in a post-Cold War world will center on whether the USA can convincingly act as the leader of democratic nations, or rather come across as the global bully. It remains to be seen whether the official rhetoric will stay in sync with actual American realpolitik. 222 W ALTER W. 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