This is my reply to Soonergrunt, who wrote me a most thoughtful and honest reply on
this thread.
please read on.
please also note that I may not reply for 12 hours from posting because of the time difference.
Hi Soonergrunt,
First I want to thank you for your long and thoughtful reply, and let you know I have read several of your diaries and many of your comments, and hold you in high regard.
Second, none of this is an attack on you, or your country. I hope I have managed to state without inflection enough for you to forgive me the "your" references. I just found it too stilted to write of the USA in the third person the whole way.
First up, you are incorrect on several fronts. I have lived in the USA, albeit for a short time, and I know far more than just what filters through the Australian media. I began corresponding with Americans over the web in 2000, and have continued to do so since 9-11. I was living in Switzerland when it happened, and talking regularly to over half a dozen Americans I intended to visit over that subsequent year. I came to America to meet my 3rd generation Californian partner, who I fell in love with from a distance of several thousands miles.
I lived in the USA for 6 months with her from June 2002-New Years Day 2003, in Northern California, and traveled through over 25 of your states. My partner now lives with me in Australia, as the USA has no visa that a same-sex couple can apply for so that I could have tried to stay, and the only other option was the greencard lottery. I could happily live in New Mexico.
At the tertiary level, I've studied Asian Studies, environmental sustainability, geography and twentieth century history. I have many, many sources on the USA, from academic to personal experience to anecdotal. I have lived and worked or studied in 5 countries from Asia to Europe to the USA. I read from a multiple of news sources, from the Economist to the New Internationalist, to a major daily on every continent. I know enough to appreciate and understand much of what is written on Kos here, and enough to know I don't know everything by half. I'd humbly wager that through study & circumstance, I know far more about the USA than most Americans know about Australia.
So it's on this basis, not on a view filtered via your media and entertainment and my biased news at home that I say, most emphatically, that the USA is a profoundly militaristic society. It's just not goose-stepping in Red Square style.
Your nation invented the modern military-industrial complex. It has fuelled it's truly phenomenal success from it. A significant proportion of your technology that is developed and used to drive the American economy comes from military research. I can't remember where, I admit, but I read about 10 years ago that just over 1/3 of your science graduates are working in field and for companies involved in military research & technology - not sure what it is now. The USA controls just over 50% of the world's "defence" market.
Your military is one of the largest youth employers in the world. You have foreign bases in over 1/3 of the world's countries. Everyone in the USA is connected either directly or indirectly to the military - either by living in a state that benefits from huge military bases that bring in large amounts of cash, to people they know who serve, through to people they know who work for companies that are involved in one contract or another, indirectly or directly, to your military.
None of this of course means that the actual bodies who sign up on the line for the military are treated well. Far from it. The veterans anyone can see in any part of the USA, many of them who lived near us in Northern California because it has a Repat hospital, are a shocking site. I'm also familiar with the kind of people who sign up to your military because my hometown - Hobart, Tasmania - is visited at least three times a year by US vessels, including 2 aircraft carriers (although it has ceased since the Iraq war began). So I've met plenty of sailors on shore leave, most of them polite, ignorant as all get-out but sincere ("we're here to protect you [in the nuclear powered boat that you have no say about whether it comes into our port] ma'am - can I take you out to dinner?"), and nearly all black or Latino. I've met the basic cadets and the ones with MBAs on the diplomacy gun-ship, and some I've taken out on day trips, because they are so desperate for stimulation off the boat (If I were to meet you back in my early 20s when I did this, I don't doubt I would have gladly taken you sight-seeing, and enjoyed talking with you).
Overall, these young men and women are not who your government invests in, especially not now.
No, your massive military budget goes into high-end technological advances, that can be spun off in civilian profits, and used to keep you ahead of everyone else. The working poor are merely a handy cannon fodder source to run the machines. The technological edge gives US soldiers a frequently, tragically now in Iraq, fatal sense of superiority, which also undermines your code of honour by promoting an ugly sub-culture of racism and hyper-masculinity (It's a sad fact that I can't think of a single time that one of your aircraft carriers left out port without several incidents of rape being reported).
The USA has engaged in more wars (most by another name) since WW2 than any other country - it has to test, market and sell new merchandise after all. Hence picking on weaker nations like Grenada, where the effectiveness of new weapons can be concentrated on without the distraction of a real opposition. People in developing nations know this: no wonder, not that I believe it is at all true, many Africans believe HIV was unleashed on them as a biological weapon by US fundamentalist white supremacists.
This is what I mean by a highly militarized society. One where wars and aspects of them are insidiously ingrained through your culture. Your entertainment industry reflects this & Hollywood in particular glorifies it.
I know how your military is being used now is deeply disturbing to millions of Americans. For just one eg, I've been on Kos since 2002 (I think). It is not supplying troops with armour to keep them alive I am speaking of when I speak of militarism. Everyone in the USA is acutely aware right now of someone's son or daughter that they know serving in Iraq. I've seen the calculations of the troop rotations - if I remember correctly somewhere around 500,000 Americans have already served over there. Then there are all the people who someone who's son has been called by conscriptors. Everyone is being touched. I understand that strong identification.
It's the unquestioning support for the military as an institution, a system., even while it sends someone's son and daughter off to permanent mental scarring, maiming, monster-making or death that is the cognitive dissonance many non-Americans see. Because the military is a hierarchy, a system, with people making decisions all along the long, long chain of command, and there are many who are colluding with Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Cheney, Bush.
I lost many American friends because of 9/11. They simply had a meltdown. They couldn't handle exactly what you identified, the psychological impact of that event. They turned from rational, kind people into vengeance-seeking monsters who argued strenuously to me why it was perfectly reasonable for an American soldier armed with a machine gun to kill a 10 year old boy attempting to collect munitions in no mans land. They told me there was nothing wrong and everything justified about dropping daisy cutters on 7 million starving Afghanis with nowhere to flee, destroying what pitiful infrastructure had survived the last 20 years in doing so. Kos became my sanctuary of thinking Americans.
The rest of the world understands the terror and anguish of 9/11. Many European countries have been living with continuous terrorism acts for years. It's like choosing between watching someone die of cancer, or someone killed by a hit and run. Either way, they know the fear, the suffering. We all prayed that the USA would respond in a just way. You didn't.
Finally, I would like to say that much of what I see in the USA, around the revitalization and organization of the grass-roots progressive movement gives me great hope. I come hear as much to learn, and take the lessons I see at Kos back to my own country, which is also having its own internal breakdown, as a satrapy of the American empire. From our very own mandatory detention centres where we lock up asylum seekers and throw away the key and punish them with solitary confinement, to an all-out assault on workers rights, to attempts to deregulate our media so Murdoch can own more, to the beginning of the rise of right-wing Christian fundamentalism and the abandonment of secularism, to fiddling while our environment beings what seems like an inevitable collapse. So much is happening here I can hardly bear to look, I get sick and dizzy. Where to make a stand? Where to focus my energy? Why the hell am I spending so much time talking to Americans?!
I get very angry some days because I can't seem to find an American here who honestly cares, or who can forbear from the hubris "you think it's bad there, you should try here". You don't know. And this is my country.
So I understand why you said to me, "you don't know". You're right, there is a hell of a lot I don't know. But there's also a lot an informed outsider can see that is hard to see from the inside. Perhaps this is why I would give my eye-teeth for an informed progressive American view on Australia, because we desparately need a harsh light shone in right now, and I just can't seem to find someone who cares enough, and half the time I struggle to find enough Australians who have woken up to talk to.
In spite of this and because of this, I feel a solidarity with a huge swathe of the American population, epitomized by those on Kos, that if you'd told me I would feel 7 years ago, I would have laughed hysterically. And I still miss the canyon country and high desert of New Mexico & Arizona, and the rolling oak chaparrals of northern California. Plus intelligent Americans are irritatingly charismatic. I should know; there's one curled up in bed waiting for me now.
I don't know how to end this, but to say thank you once again for your time and interest and honesty. You have my deepest respect.
Peace, and stay safe and sane,
Imogen