How much do George W. Bush's hawk-like government and militia members such as Timothy McVeigh have in common?, asks Eddie Holt.
'The chief danger is that he [a US citizen] . . . will think the whole planet is made for him and forget that there are some possibilities left in the debris of the old-world civilisation which deserve a certain respectful consideration at his hands," said the US writer, Oliver Wendell Holmes, in 1860.
Lack of respectful consideration for the rest of the world is not, never has been or will be exclusively American, but Holmes's "chief danger", now alarmingly obvious among George W. Bush and his cronies, is more menacing than ever.
The intensification of US fundamentalism in the past six months is surely the dominant political development of the times. Traditional US liberalism, though presumably not yet dead, lies buried under the rubble of fear, anger and flag-worship. The US, it seems - ironically, in the era where it leads a process called "globalisation" - is determined to behave as a world within the world. At risk of labouring a business analogy (difficult in the case of the current US) the planet's senior management has become dangerously authoritarian.
Their attitude towards the world appears unnervingly close to the attitude Timothy McVeigh and the ultra-right militias held towards the US itself. McVeigh resented "big government" as the hawks of the Bush administration resent any notion of world government that might impinge upon their power and project. McVeigh and his supporters loved weapons, as Bush and his allies love stupendous military hardware. Both are prepared to act in defence of their own notions of "freedom". Both believe in their causes.
The US government seems certain to embark on a massive arms escalation. Like its militias, the US is in love with weaponry - it holds a destabilisingly disproportionate amount of the world's killing machines. Still, it wants more and more. Improved defence against a nuclear, biological or spectacular terrorist attack is understandable. But in a world in which - broken Russia's rusting nuclear missiles aside - the US faces no potential enemy even remotely as well-armed as itself, what can all the new killing machines be for?
The answer partly seems to lie in the deification of technology in the US The country's technology helped to make it supremely powerful and wealthy and the current hawks-in-office clearly believe more technology can make the US even more powerful and more wealthy. Invoking the Bible and the flag - as the militias do too - Bush presents an ideology which means that US liberals, if they publicly oppose it, can be routinely and savagely dismissed as unpatriotic and, though its McCarthyite stench lessens use of the word, "un-American".
But Bush and his cronies - though they could never be described as "unworldly" - are increasingly "unglobal". The rest of the world matters little in their calculations, as their disdain for international law and treaties shows. It's as though a global management locked itself in a flag-bedecked office of bullet-proof glass with intimidating gun-cases on the walls. Under such conditions, the idea of consultation with unions (the Third World) or even pinko middle-management (the rest of the economically developed world) appears almost laughable.
For all our lives - indeed, for the lives of the last three or four generations - the US provided pictures of the future. Even today, people from all over the world rightly look to it for aspects of modernity, principally technological. Separated by oceans from most of the world and vast and dynamic enough to consider itself a world within the world, it became a leader for many nations. Sure, it inevitably became an enemy for others - sometimes morally right, sometimes morally wrong - but never before has it seemed quite so autocratic towards the world at large.
As a result of further detaching itself from the rest of us, the US appears more provincial than ever. It is, as it has long been, the province of technology which has dramatically helped to shape the world, positively and negatively. Most of the world could benefit from more technology - in medicine, industry, communications - but, of all countries, the US needs more technology, especially military technology, least. Everybody, it seems, is going to be increasingly out of step except Uncle Sam.
In Europe, respect for the grievous wrong done to the US last September and fear at incurring the displeasure of mighty America has muted response to the Bush military build-up. But even Chris Patten, EU commissioner for external affairs and former chairman of the British Tory party (Chris is no red!), has condemned the growing US reliance on its already overwhelming military superiority. Aiming to pursue what it wants, when and where it wants it, Patten described the Bush agenda as "absolutist and simplistic".
Of course, Britain has been more compromised in relation to the US than the other leading European powers. Tony Blair's fulsome endorsement of the attack on Afghanistan makes it more difficult for him to extricate himself from an increasingly provincial and belligerent US.
At a high political level, France and Germany have been more critical of Bush's inferred plans to topple Iraq's Saddam Hussein with a massive military campaign. Ironically though, as the British Tories fragmented over Europe, the British Labour party may well explode over unctuous Blairite loyalty to the US.
Hussein is hideous but it might be better that he fade away rather than risk a surge in support for him in the Arab world. As many people feared it would, the US government has become so profoundly conservative in past six months that ordinary American citizens are reluctant to criticise it. They, though it has been built in their name, are not really inside the flag-bedecked office of bullet-proof glass. As the US behaves as a world within the world, its political leaders, in the pocket of its economic bosses, appear increasingly like a state within the state.
UNDER the Bush agenda, globalisation means making the centre vastly stronger at the expense of the periphery. Critics of the process have repeatedly argued that that's what globalisation has always been about anyway.
Certainly, that's a reasonable, albeit incomplete, reading. But throughout the Clinton 1990s and the development of globalisation, there was never such a bullish or contemptuous push for global domination as is happening now.
Indeed, though it seems like ancient history, an essentially progressive president such as Clinton was a target for Bible-bashing and flag-waving conservative America. Given energy by his own sexual excesses, the Whitewater and Kenneth Starr witchhunts showed the unbending and intense determination of ultra-conservatives to destroy him.
Now that those same forces are in control in Washington, American liberals are, hardly surprisingly, cowed and perhaps even bewildered.
Another attack on the US would, of course, be an Allah-send for the Bush project. Waverers from his doctrine would quickly shut-up amid renewed fear and fury. In the absence of such an attack, the obscene military expansion planned by Bush, a $48 billion increase (12 per cent of an already astronomical budget) could come to be seen in all its obscenity. There's an obvious danger in that. Meanwhile, it remains vital to stress that anti-Bushism need not be anti-US. In fact, it's reasonable to argue that it's quite the reverse.
Anyway, back here in, as Oliver Wendell Holmes would have it, "the debris of old world civilisation", it's tempting to consider that the US, the land of consumerism (an ideology which it has successfully exported) could be shaping up to consume the whole world, including the better parts of itself.
With George W. Bush in office, backed by ruthless big business, a fundamentalist conception of "freedom" and monstrous military technology, there are reason to fear that he may become globalisation's Frankenstein monster - the creature who consumes evenconsumerism itself.