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Waltons
and Simpsons—Allegories of Consciousness
June 8, 2002
By Luciana Bohne
A few days before the arrival of George W. Bush in Berlin
-- protected by 10,000 police ("the largest security operation
since the Nazi era," wrote London's Mirror with spiteful
relish), whisked off in an armored limousine, delivered to
the sealed-off area of the Brandenburg Gate, housed in a hotel
off-limits to ordinary guests, the sky above him off-limits
to commercial flights, bundled off to meetings via underground
labyrinths -- a Berliner Zeitung editorial anticipated
the planetary sheriff's visit unambiguously, "Never has a
president of the United States been so foreign to us and never
have German citizens been so skeptical about policies of their
most powerful ally."
Gee whiz, what could have made them so bitter after just
under eight months of delirious expressions of sympathy for
9/11, when 100,000 Berliners spilled out in the now sealed-off
area of the Brandenburg gate proclaiming they were all Americans
in solidarity with US grief?
As European born, I am tempted to reflect on this reverse
turn.
More than a decade ago, then-President George Bush Senior
pontificated at large, "We need a nation closer to the Waltons
than the Simpsons." By which I take him to have meant a politically
obtuse and therefore compliant citizenry, exclusively absorbed
by work and the daily challenges of private relations and
their sentimental upkeep; committed to a vapid, feel-good
ideology that sees in neighborliness, not laws, the cure for
racism, sexism, and poverty; parochially sequestered to lives
of mind-boggling disengagement from the fate of the empire
they don't know they have.
In Italy, in the 30's, we had a word for this political quietism,
the backbone of Mussolini's fascism -- "qualunquismo." It's
a made-up noun from the adjective "qualunque," meaning "anyone,"
and it signifies the compelling desire to be like everybody
else (Bernardo Bertolucci directed a great film in l970, "The
Conformist," adapted from Alberto Moravia's novel, on the
fascist-era's neurosis to want to lead assembly-line-constructed
lives). Anti-intellectual to a fault, this citizenry would
be obsessed by sameness, down to the pettiest last detail
of fashion, morality, and thought -- the better to spot who's
with them or against. This citizenry would be paranoid because
difference would be criminalized. The paranoia, in turn, would
be reinforced by media propaganda -- back then, fascist-controlled
radio.
Since 9/11, under the son's usurped rule, Father Bush's wish
has come true: 90 percent of Americans have gone to live on
Walton Mountain. There, they seek their obsessive security
at the expense of civil liberties, the rights of minorities,
and the right to dissent. There, they buy Hallmark cards to
send consumer love on Father's Day and Christmas. There, they
see, hear, and speak no evil. There, they watch television
and think they are free. They cannot consider that the US
media reports the news from the perspective of power and not
of people. There, they do not hear of a new study of ABC World
News, CBS Evening News, and NBC Nightly News which reveals
that 92 percent of all US sources interviewed are white, 85
percent are male, and 75 percent are Republicans. They go
on internalizing the values of this elite American ruling
minority that denies them health care, a modern, useful education,
affordable housing, a safe environment, job security, and
a secure old age.
The Europeans have been there and done that -- the unity
thing, the patriotic scam. It landed them in the bloodbath
of World War II. Those Europeans not yet stricken by neo-fascist
nostalgia still remember the rubble of their cities in which
their flags burnt to ashes -- the hunger, the orphans, the
skeletal survivors of the ovens and the prison camps -- the
death. They have nightmares of Hiroshima. They remember, above
all, the admonishment of the Nuremberg trials where they were
instructed that human beings have international duties which
transcend national borders.
They remade their world in the image of capitalism, but they
thought they could remarry it with a dowry of treaties, international
law, and human rights resolutions. No people were more zealous
than the Americans in de-nazifying Europeans (while giving
protection from prosecution to select Nazi criminals, to be
sure, but all in the service of the Cold War and the guarantee
of capitalist survival). At Bergen Belsen, General Eisenhower
made sure that the camp's outlying populations would be forced
to view the remains of the carnage so that they would not
be able to deny the responsibility of their collusion by silence.
No one preached to Europeans more insistently than Americans
that modern nations were built on a free press, participatory
democracy, civil rights, international law, and respect for
treaties.
Being willing and apt pupils in gratitude for the bounty
of the Marshall Plan (which, they didn't know made America
even richer), Europeans embraced this grand international
liberal rhetoric and never thought they would see a day (in
spite of the evidence of US actions in Korea, Guatemala, Iran,
Vietnam, Indonesia, Chile, and the incessant meddling of the
CIA in their own backyard) when the US would be misled by
a know-nothing, accumulative megalomaniac, a throwback to
one of their own destructive crowd spellbinders, illusionists
of invulnerable power, murderous demagogues. They didn't know
that capitalist history, in fact, must repeat itself in order
to stay in history.
They woke up on January 29, 2002, on hearing the Texan say
"axis of evil." It is hard for any European to explain exactly
why this admittedly gross and lurid overstatement would sound
the alarm bell that the fate of the world rested in the hands
of a spoiled and stupid American child. At best, they can
say that they remember an "axis" -- Berlin, Rome, Tokyo --
of which at least two members had the best-stocked, readiest,
and most modern military death machines in the world. They
were not ragged states at the periphery of power centers like
North Korea (suspected to have been added to the list to disarm
charges of racism against the Arab and Muslim world). The
smartest US president since Abraham Lincoln used a diction
that showed no consciousness of history or, indeed, of the
proportions of reality.
Then, too, there was the questionable, cheap use of the word
"evil." The Europeans had spent a generation after WW2 thinking
about evil and the silence of God, as the true horror of the
massification of death became known. We need only turn to
the films of Ingmar Bergman, the essays of Albert Camus, and
the plays of Jean Paul Sartre to gauge the monumental postwar
cultural engagement with the thematics of evil. Evil, for
Europeans, is something more frightening than the infantile,
self-promotional murderous mayhem of a man with a vintage
beard, making a fashion statement in traditional Arab-desert
garb -- a movie villain whose evil announces itself unmistakably.
Evil does not begin and end with a single, individual man.
As Hannah Arendt pointed out, and Stanley Milgram verified
in his famous obedience experiments in the 60's, evil is ordinary,
even banal, men and women, whose moral equipment is too weak
to resist following orders, doing their unquestioning duty,
deferring moral responsibility to experts and leaders.
Evil, at any rate, cannot be reduced to a conveniently simplistic
Satanic caricature for the consumption of right-wing, underdeveloped
and superstitious minds. Europeans rejected the religious
view of the world in 1789 -- not all of them, but enough to
reaffirm the secular state after World War II. Today, only
5 percent of Spanish, 4 percent of Italians, and 12 percent
of Britons attend church. The Vatican calls it the de-Christianization
of Europe. By contrast, 45 percent of Americans attend church
regularly.
The bourgeois democracies the Europeans reinvented would
be civil societies -- free of the obscurantist stranglehold
of churches. Their capitalism would be tolerant. The parliaments
would work with the socialist and communist parties, allow
them to have seats, co-opt them, of course, buy them out when
possible, but certainly not send them to the electric chair
or hammer them with questions of "Are you now or have you
ever been..." Until recently, European states would support
the welfare state so that the masses could be tolerable to
live with. Bourgeois Europeans gave up a lot of the profit
cake to create a credible, sustainable capitalism (at least
in their own minds).
And after all their sacrifices and efforts, the Exxon King,
Earl of Enron, Duke of Yucca starts babbling of axis and evil
and unilateral nuclear strikes -- revealing the underbelly
of the beast they had so carefully shrouded. He was spoiling
it all with his return to the rhetoric of open imperialism
and the most base jingoism. It's a question of form and decorum,
always with the Europeans of the higher orders.
For people protesting in the streets, none of this is news.
They are the Simpsons -- long pointing to the economic and
moral fallout of the crisis of overproduction and the problem
of the rate of profit of a senescent capitalism slouching
toward the third world to be reborn, to recolonize, to pauperize
here and abroad. They are irreverent: "Peace for the world
and pretzels for Bush," their banners proclaim in Berlin.
Also, "Bush the Warmonger" and "You Are Not A Berliner." If
you ask them, they will spit out a litany of US-led policies
that destabilize the world and make it hell for most people
to live in: scrapping the Kyoto Environmental Protocol, the
tariffs on steel, the unsigning of the International Criminal
Court, the denial of the independence of Palestine, the treatment
of Taliban and al-Qaeda prisoners in Guantanamo, the death
penalty, the Cuban blockade, the Iraqi sanctions, the bombing
of Yugoslavia, the Nuclear Posture Review, globalization,
the poverty of the Third World and insufficiency of aid, subversion
of democracies across the globe, including the latest in Venezuela,
the appalling US record on human rights, and its phony "war
on terror."
The guardians of these disenchanted Simpsons, worry about
their reelection. They hope against hope that the most popular
president in US history will not make war on Iraq. Even the
conservative challenger to Chancellor Schroeder, Edmund Stoiber,
says that Germans in general do not see Iraq as a threat.
Members of Schroeder's coalition, the Greens, were hissed
and booed off the streets by protesters accusing them of hypocrisy
for supporting the bombing of Afghanistan and now wanting
to cash in on votes by denouncing the transatlantic warmonger.
These days, a politician can't be too careful. Eighty members
of the Bundestag refused to be present at Bush's speech, and
they were replaced by eighty retired politicians to fill in
the empty spaces.
Christopher Patten (UK), Tory self-confessed yanko-phile
and commissioner for EU-US relations, exemplifies the perplexity
and impotence of European rulers, "An abyss is opening between
the Western allies. They disagree on an increasing number
of issues, from the Middle East to the death penalty; from
the environment to international justice. Are they still allies
when one of the partners acts increasingly unilaterally?"
Good question. And while the Simpsons in Europe rattle the
cages of their masters exposing the joke of the "war on terror,"
the good folks on Walton Mountain look forward to the Fourth
of July when they can hang out more flags.
Luciana Bohne teaches film and literature at Edinboro University
in Pennsylvania. She welcomes comments at lbohne@edinboro.edu.
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