INTRODUCTION: A THOUSAND SHARDS OF GLASS

This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,

Dear for her reputation through the world,

Is now leas’d out – I die pronouncing it –

Like to a tenement or pelting farm.

England, bound in with the triumphant sea,

Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege

Of wat’ry Neptune, is now bound in with shame,

With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds;

That England, that was wont to conquer others,

Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.

Shakespeare, Richard II, II, i

There is another America and it lies just beneath the surface of myth, adrift on a sea of illusions and imprisoned by implacable ideologies that strangle reason and compassion. We are not in this together.

The real America is a place obsessed with religion but not ethics, with law, not justice. It is neither the democracy nor the capitalist society touted by corporations, politicians and the media, who perform their own kabuki dance of pretend objectivity when in reality they’re another cog in the corporate state, dependent on its largesse. What is most disturbing, however, is the willful indifference and arrogance that has now made many Americans comfortable with injustice, both at home and abroad.

In the ‘United States of Salesmen’ it matters little what is in one’s heart. It is the verbal, animated gestures of patriotism and faith, no matter how insincere, which are the measure of one’s ‘Americaness’ today. Straighten your stars and stripes lapel pin, adjust your tie and, no matter what you see and hear, just remain seated. Forgive me but I prefer to stand and I have never much cared for ‘club’ pins on my clothing.

America’s capacity for self-delusion is equaled only by its hypocrisy, which for decades has allowed us, without a hint of irony, to lecture other nations on human rights while torturing people in our custody. America has long spoken of democratic values while working tirelessly during the twentieth century and before to thwart democratic movements and elected governments that have not coincided with our national interests, which has often meant nothing more than forcible corporate access to other people’s property. General Smedley Butler, one of America’s most decorated soldiers, who, I assume, was exhausted by the hypocrisy himself, wrote in his 1935 book War is a Racket: ‘I spent 33 years [in the Marines] . . . most of my time being a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer . . . for capitalism.’

A great many Americans have never fully understood that the past does not reside in some dead history. It is always being retold, passed between sister and brother, from parent to child, creating new resentments about unaccounted for transgressions. Those histories roll in front of us until we run into them again like an unresolved Freudian dream. Far from being something to be avoided in the future, however, in America this repetition of manufactured and unresolved conflict is for some their bread and butter, or as the gangsters in the movies say just before they shoot their fellow Mafioso, ‘This is nothing personal. It’s just business.’ And business is exactly what it is.

We are not who we think we are or, more accurately, we are not who we sell ourselves as. America is a nationalistic state filled with ‘actor patriots’ such as the now deified Ronald Reagan who, along with others like George W. Bush and the draft-averse Dick Cheney, represent the so-called ‘modern Republican Party’ which, by the way, eerily resembles the Mississippi Democratic Party of the 1950s, with all the trimmings such as voter disenfranchisement, shameless bigotry and corruption, and is filled with the type of patriot George Orwell once described as ‘the kind of person who is somewhere else when the trigger is pulled’. In such a patriotic country it seems rather odd that less than 1 per cent of the population would serve.

Our patriotism is all performance of course, bread and circus designed at once to divide and mollify an ever undereducated middle and lower class whose attention span and empathy for others seem to decrease with each new Apple product that is released. For over a half century, America has been a store disguised as a country. As a people we have scarcely moved beyond de Tocqueville’s early description of Americans: ‘The majority lives in the perpetual utterance of self-applause, and there are certain truths which the Americans can learn only from strangers or from experience’. The self-imposed lack of civic evolution has made for model consumers but poor citizens.

I have read some criticisms over the years asserting that the United States has become just a bunch of second-rate salesmen. I beg to differ. The salesmen and women in these United States of Salesmen are astounding. They have refined deceit and trickery to such an art that they are able to convince a large swath of the middle class that it is in their interests to oppose National Health Insurance and instead put their fate, and those of their loved ones, in the hands of health insurance companies who have a ‘pre-existing’ interest in denying coverage once it is sold. These brilliant sales people can even sell additional war to an already economically and, dare I say, spiritually broken nation.

These magnificent hucksters have convinced desperate people that ‘for profit’ universities, which of course are not universities at all, are their best bet to achieve the ‘American Dream’ that always seems just a bit out of reach these days. Once sold, these good people, trying to better themselves, take out guaranteed government student loans to pay the high tuition fees of the so-called universities, thinking that they are on their way to a better tomorrow. At the end of their Oz journey the optimistic graduates leave the glittering malls of learning with nothing more than a piece of paper and a mountain of debt. The desperate are often left more desperate and broken than ever.

These artists of deceit have found a way to preach ‘privatization’ and ‘the free market’ while bilking the student and the taxpayer at the same time. But really they are not so clever. They are just allowed to run roughshod because a percentage of the public money they receive gets recycled back into the political parties, and then, with the compliance of their paid senators, congressmen and congressional staffs, they all work together to weaken the protections that the salesmen find obstructive to their hustle. These are the best crooks around and they are in the business of arms, drugs, communications and banking and in a medical business that is even more rapacious and savage than what I witnessed as a boy in Chicago.

The salesmen I speak of are not benign: far from it. They have long been the soft terrorists among us, the ones who whisper into the ears of politicians and generals, telling them that it is in the country’s interest to invade Chile or back Diem, or kill him. They are the invisible hands that push the computer keys denying a woman with cancer her treatment when they know her claim is valid. They do not wish to tell you what is in your food or water or where the ingredients in the formula that you are feeding your baby come from. They are about secrecy and monopoly and are profoundly undemocratic.

I assume that some of you are bristling at the words already written and I can hear some of you repeating the overused American mantra, ‘Why do you have to be so negative?’ or, the current conversation stopper, ‘Why do you hate America?’ In answer to such questions, I would simply state first, that it is not I who is negative but the evidence itself, and secondly, I do not hate America but I am profoundly disappointed and ashamed of the United States and the American people.

To the more sensitive reader who is saying about now, ‘But surely there are good, decent and enlightened people in the United States, right?’ I would agree, but they are not in charge and they are a minority and it is essential, if we are to evolve, that we first tell the truth about ourselves to each other. Like Caesar’s own ‘point of no return’ we too have crossed the Rubicon, with the tragic consequences of endowing the most corrupt among us power over the essentials of our lives.

No, we are not in this together, but we should be, for John Donne was right: we are all part of the main, whether we know it or not, and the bell finally does toll for thee. Personally, I think it is better to stand together and care for one another than to be a thousand shards of glass that cut and scar for nothing more than a handful of silver.