What the Future Will Remember About America

8/4/2019 What the Future Will Remember About America

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What the Future Will Remember About Americas Decline and Fall

By Mike Davis

1. Twin Towers

Two years from now the staffs of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker will move into the most

haunted building in the world. There, the elite of American celebrity photographers, gossip

columnists, and magazine journalists may meet some macabre new muses.

Aloft in the upper stories of 1 World Trade Center (where Cond Nast publishing has signed the

biggest lease), they will gaze out their windows at that ghostly void, just a few yards away, where

658 doomed employees of Cantor Fitzgerald were sitting at their desks at 8:46 AM, September 11,

2001.

Not to worry: The Freedom Tower -- the boosters reassure us -- will be an enduring

consolation to the families of 9/11s martyrs as well as an icon of civic and national renaissance.

Not to mention its dramatic resurrection of property values in the neighborhood. (I confess that I

find this conflation of real-estate speculation with sublime memorial unnerving: like proposing tobuild a yacht marina over the sunken Arizona or a Katrina theme park in the Lower Ninth Ward.)

One World Trade Center, in the original design, was also meant to restore vertical architectural

supremacy to Manhattan and to be the tallest building in the world. This global phallic rivalry was

won instead by Dubais Burj Khalifa super-tower, completed last year and twice as high as the

Empire State Building.

In a few years Dubai, however, will have to surrender the gold cup to Saudi Arabia and the bin

Laden family.

Financed by Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, who revels in being known as the Arabian WarrenBuffet, the planned Kingdom Tower in Jeddah -- the ultimate hyperbole for Saudi despotism --

will pierce the clouds along the Red Sea coastline at an incredible altitude of one full kilometer

(3,281 feet).

One World Trade Center, on the other hand, will max out at 1,776 feet above the Hudson.

(Conspiracy theorists can obsess over this coincidence: the number of feet higher the Saudi

Arabian tower will be than the American one almost exactly equals the number of people who

died in the North Tower of the WTC in 2001.)

With little publicity, the initial billion-dollar contract for the Jeddah spire was awarded by Prince

Al-Waleed to the Arab worlds mega-builders and skyscraper experts -- the Binladen Group. It

may keep their family name alive for centuries to come.

2. Collusion

Ten years ago, lower Manhattan became the Sarajevo of the War on Terrorism. Although

conscience recoils against making any moral equation between the assassination of a single

Archduke and his wife on June 28, 1914, and the slaughter of almost 3,000 New Yorkers, the

analogy otherwise is eerily apt.


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In both cases, a small network of peripheral but well-connected conspirators, ennobled in their

own eyes by the bitter grievances of their region, attacked a major symbol of the responsible

empire. The outrages were deliberately aimed to detonate larger, cataclysmic conflicts, and in this

respect, were successful beyond the darkest imagining of the plotters.

However, the magnitudes of the resulting geopolitical explosions were not simple functions of

the notoriety of the acts themselves. For example, in Europe between 1890 and 1940, more than

two dozen heads of state were assassinated, including the kings of Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, and

Bulgaria, an empress of Austria, three Spanish prime ministers, two presidents of France, and so

on. But apart from the murder of Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo, none of these events

instigated a war.

Likewise, a single suicide bomber in a truck killed 241 U.S. Marines and sailors at their barracks

at the Beirut Airport in 1983. (Fifty-eight French paratroopers were killed by another suicide

bomber the same day.) A Democratic president almost certainly would have been pressured into

massive retaliation or full-scale intervention in the Lebanese civil war, but President Reagan -- very

shrewdly -- distracted the public with an invasion of tiny Grenada, while quietly withdrawing therest of his Marines from the Eastern Mediterranean.

If Sarajevo and the World Trade Center, in contrast, unleashed global carnage and chaos, it was

because a de facto collusion existed between the attackers and the attacked. Im not referring to

mythical British plots in the Balkans or Mossad agents blowing up the Twin Towers, but simply to

well-known facts: by 1912, the Imperial German General Staff had already decided to exploit the

first opportunity to make war, and powerful neocons around George W. Bush were lobbying for

the overthrow of the regimes in Baghdad and Tehran even before the last hanging chad had been

counted in Florida in 2000.

Both the Hohenzollerns and the Texans were in search of a casus belli that would legitimatemilitary intervention and silence domestic opposition.

Prussian militarism, of course, was punctually accommodated by the Black Hand -- a terrorist

group sponsored by the Serbian general staff -- that assassinated the Archduke and his wife, while

al-Qaeda's horror show in lower Manhattan consecrated the divine right of the White House to

torture, secretly imprison, and kill by remote control.

At the time, it seemed almost as if Bush and Cheney had staged a coup dtat against the

Constitution. Yet they could cynically but accurately point to a whole catalogue of precedents.

3. Innocence and Intervention

To put it bluntly, every single chapter in the history of the extension of U.S. power has opened

with the same sentence: Innocent Americans were treacherously attacked

Remember the Maine in Havana harbor in 1898 (274 dead)?

The Lusitania torpedoed by a German U-boat in 1915 (1,198 drowned, including 128

Americans)?


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Pancho Villas raid on Columbus, New Mexico, in 1916 (18 U.S citizens killed)?

Pearl Harbor (2,402 dead)?

Same sneak attack, same righteous national outrage. Same pretext for clandestine agendas.

In addition, historians will also recall the besieged legation in Peking (1899), Emilio Aguinaldos

alleged perfidy outside Manila (1899), various crimes against American banks and businessmen in

Central America and the Caribbean (1900-1930), the Japanese bombing of the USS Panay in 1938,

the Chinese armys crossing of the Yalu River into Korea (1950), the Gulf of Tonkin incident in

Vietnam (1964), the North Korean capture of the Pueblo (1968), the Cambodian seizure of the

Mayaguez (1975), the U.S. Embassy hostages in Tehran (1979), the imperiled medical students in

Grenada (1983), the harassed American soldiers in Panama (1989), and so on.

This list barely scratches the surface: the synchronization of self-pity and intervention in U.S.

history is relentless.

In the name of innocent Americans, the United States annexed Hawaii and Puerto Rico;

colonized the Philippines; punished nationalism in North Africa and China; invaded Mexico (twice);

sent a generation to the killing fields of France (and imprisoned dissenters at home); massacred

patriots in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua; annihilated Japanese cities; bombed

Korea and Indochina into rubble; buttressed military dictatorships in Latin America; and became

Israels partner in the routine murder of Arab civilians.

4. Decline and Fall?

Someday -- perhaps sooner than we think -- a new Edward Gibbon in China or India will surely

sit down to write The History of the Decline and Fall of the American Empire. Hopefully it will bebut one volume in a larger, more progressive oeuvre -- The Renaissance of Asia perhaps -- and not

an obituary for a human future sucked into Americas grasping void.

I think shell probably classify self-righteous American innocence as one of the most toxic

tributaries of national decline, with President Obama as its highest incarnation. Indeed, from the

perspective of the future, which will be deemed the greater crime: to have created the

Guantanamo nightmare in the first place, or to have preserved it in contempt of global popular

opinion and ones own campaign promises?

Obama, who was elected to bring the troops home, close the gulags, and restore the Bill of

Rights, has in fact become the chief curator of the Bush legacy: a born-again convert to special

ops, killer drones, immense intelligence budgets, Orwellian surveillance technology, secret jails,

and the superhero cult of former general, now CIA Director David Petraeus.

Our antiwar president, in fact, may be taking U.S. power deeper into the darkness than any of

us dare to imagine. And the more fervently Obama embraces his role as commander in chief of

the Delta Force and Navy Seals, the less likely it becomes that future Democrats will dare to

reform the Patriot Act or challenge the presidential prerogative to murder and incarcerate

Americas enemies in secret.


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Enmired in wars with phantoms, Washington has been blindsided by every major trend of the

last decade. It completely misread the real yearnings of the Arab street and the significance of

mainstream Islamic populism, ignored the emergence of Turkey and Brazil as independent powers,

forgot Africa, and lost much of its leverage with Germany as well as with Israels increasingly

arrogant reactionaries. Most importantly, Washington has failed to develop any coherent policy

framework for its relationship with China, its main creditor and most important rival.

From a Chinese standpoint (assumedly the perspective of our future Ms. Gibbon), the United

States is showing incipient symptoms of being a failed state. When Xinhua, the semi-official

Chinese news agency, scolds the U.S. Congress for being dangerously irresponsible in debt

negotiations, or when senior Chinese leaders openly worry about the stability of American political

and economic institutions, the shoe is truly on the other foot. Especially when standing in the

wings, bibles in hand, are the mad spawn of 9/11 -- the Republican presidential candidates.

Mike Davis teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of California, Riverside. He is

the author of Planet of Slums, among many other works. Hes currently writing a book aboutemployment, global warming, and urban reconstruction for Metropolitan Books.

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What the Future Will Remember About America