A few years ago I came across a few paintings in a weekend section of a newspaper depicting a fictional future war between Las Angeles and San Francisco. I seem to recall that the Friscans were all wearing hemp sweaters whereas the SoCallers were all botoxed and had painted cosmetic surgery smiles. I’m sure a few minutes on google would confirm or deny my recollections, but I prefer my own memories. What was it that William Faulkner said? Memory believes longer than knowing remembers... something like that.
It was funny, because this was back at the fin-du-20th-siecle, a time that seems frivolous and devil-may-care compared to our own fraught age. It wasn't that the so-called “culture wars” which are plaguing America and which the yanks are trying to export to Europe were just metaphorical in the same way that war on obesity is. Since then, the last two American elections have revealed how deeply divided America is and how little love is lost between the progressive states in the North-East and the conservative ones in South and Centre.
I don't live in the US and I have no plans to visit while George W Bush and his junta of mendacious ideologues are running the country. I rely entirely on newspapers, TV and the Internet for information about the country, so I’m not going to stick my neck out and predict that there’s going to be a second civil war. I’m aware that there are those who claim that the divisions between the two Americas are a fiction dreamed up by the media. In last Saturday’s Irish Times Conor O Cleary pointed out that the state with the highest murder rate was solidly republican, “family values” orientated Louisiana. Well, hold the front page, Conor, dontcha know that the moral majority all have shitloads of guns to protect them from the immoral minority and it’s much easier to kill someone with a gun than with a knife or by slowly clogging their aorta with fatty foods.
It’s not as if things were particularly clear-cut in the first American Civil War. Robert E Lee, the leading general of the confederacy, was actually quite a humane man who’d freed his own slaves, while the psychotic federal general William Sherman, who later said that the only good Indian was a dead Indian was as big a racist as the likes of Tom Metzger.
The funny thing about the real, historical civil war and the hypothetical one that’s looming hypothetically on the horizon is how similar the two sets of antagonists will be. Clearly, it’s going to be North versus South again, though the Western States that emerged in the years became more like the defeated South than the victorious North, full of big ranches farmed by cheap immigrant labour rather than the Jeffersonian small holders that Lincoln had envisaged. Today, the whole country has become like the Ante-bellum South in many ways, with Small farmers being forced out of business while the government massively subsidises big ranchers, who rely largely on immigrant labour from Mexico, one of the major causes of resentment between the richer coastal states and the poorer central states.
So while it’s easy (but dangerous, as Howard Dean found out) to ridicule Southern Hicks in Pick-up trucks claiming that the South will rise again, in some very real ways they are turning out to be right. There’s a certain German economic philosopher ,the mention of whose name would probably bring up firewalls for AOL users who was watching the first American civil war from Europe, rooting for the union to win as he believed this would accentuate the development of the South from feudalism to capitalism. It’s possible to argue that with low taxes and a poor welfare net the southern states are about as capitalist as you can get, but when you consider how power and wealth are concentrated in the hands of such a small number of people, it’s easy to see the big corporations as feudal barons, particularly as it’s so easy to buy political influence in the US that they can enjoy power without responsibility.
I’m sure I could draw out this historical analogy a bit more but I know you’re all busy people so I’ll move onto the next one. Find a map of Spain at the start of it’s civil war and then one of the electoral college map of the US and twist the latter round 90 degrees clockwise. (If you’re looking at it on a computer, it’s better to turn your head round anti-clockwise, or else save it onto your hard drive and rotate it using some photo editor software. Or just visualise, like I’m doing now) Notice how, in each case, the bits on the top and bottom coasts, the more outward looking areas where there was more connection with the outside world, whether France or Canada and Europe, or Africa and Asia-Pacific, were the ones that supported the left in the War/Election. In contrast, the inward-looking centre was full of religious zealots who supported the right, with the cosmopolitan Madrid in the position of Chicago. Worringly for people who live in areas like San Diego, the Spanish Army immediately seized Northern ports like San Sebastian and Santander in their civil war.
Some other Spanish analogies are also pertinent. Many of the Spanish fascists were army men dissillusioned with defeat in the Spanish-American war a generation earlier, just as the Washington neo-cons were angry, not that they’d killed 3 million people in South-East Asia, but that they’d ended up losing the war, though none of them had actually been to Vietnam themselves. The Spanish civil war took place as modern media was just developing and had the attention of the world. During the American Civil War military theorist Carl von Clausewitz got some sketchy reports from places like Manassas which led him to speculate that American battles were scrappy, ill-organised affairs (European Snobbery’s not a new thing). By the 1930’s, people were so aware of what was going on that American armchair generals were advising Franco to move on from Toledo to Madrid before the international brigades arrived.
This is where my analogy starts to break down, as while writers like Hemingway and Orwell fought for socialism in Spain, it’s hard to imagine the likes of Martin Amis or Michel Houellebeque going to fight in the Battle of Orange County. The other thing is that in Spain the bad guys won, as they had the guns but the socialists only had the numbers, which is ominous for the next US Civil War. The encouraging thing is that while the fascists were helped by Germany and Italy while England stood idly by, worried that the socialists would nationalise sherry production, it’s hard to see who might come to the aid of an American right, though Saudi Arabia and, Worringly, China might have a stake in their success.
One more analogy. Ah, C’mon, please, it’s my last one, I promise.
Thanks, dude.
Back in ‘00 I read a piece that argued that the American political divide was ethnically based. I thought it was specious, as the real divide appeared to be urban-rural. Now I’m not so sure. Recent figures reveal that there are more people of German than English descent in the US today, which is why I laugh when I hear Americans boasting that we’d all be speaking German in Western Europe if it wasn't for them. While generalising about such a big, ethnically diverse, country is dangerous, there does seem to be some truth in the notion that people in the North-East are often of Either Anglo-Saxon or Irish Catholic heritage, many in the South and West are of either German or Ulster Protestant stock. Marshall McLuhan points out that while Southern Landowners aped the style of English aristocrats, most of them were actually of Teutonic or Scots-Irish progeny. Later on in the Nineteenth century many Germans fled to places like Iowa and Indiana to escape the country’s rapid industrialisation.
The battle between these two Germanic tribes isn’t a new one. The Roman Historian Tacitus points out that Germans were freedom loving peoples, but historical circumstances seemed to dictate that the more freedom-loving ones in went to England, where their freedoms became enshrined in the Magna Carta, while Germany became the so-called Holy Roman Empire, a conglomeration of repressive states which were eventually all conquered by the most repressive and militaristic, Prussia.
This led inevitably to war. For the first time in it’s history England joined a war that it wasn't sure to win. It would have been so easy for England to ally itself with Hitler and carve up Europe between them, which is what the Anglophile Nazis wanted, but unlike the ostensible majority in the US today, they weren’t willing to give up freedom in return for power. (If England and Germany had been on the same side the US wouldn't have gone anywhere near Europe, though you could walk from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine without finding a single American who’ll admit this).
World War II was a battle for the soul of Europe not unlike the battle for the soul of America that’s being fought today. On one side are fanatical nationalists who believe that they are the Super Race and that they have the right to bully the rest of the world, the other pragmatists who realise that their continent is no longer the world’s economic powerhouse and that conflict will only accentuate this decline.
In World War II the bad guys lost, but only after 37 million died. There’s a part of me that thinks that the population of the US needs to decrease, as they use so much of the world’s resources, and many in the South and West are getting married earlier and not using contraception, so war may be the only malthusian check in this most prosperous of countries.
But I’d be a hypocrite if I condemned the US for what they’ve done in Vietnam and Iraq and then wished the same thing on them. (I did so in an earlier piece, but I was just joking). There are signs of hope that America can find a peaceful solution to it’s problems, many coastal states are dealing with global warming independently, for example.
If there is a war, will I join in the progressive side? Naw, I’m Irish, I wouldn't know to do with a gun. I think I’ll just sit back and watch the whole thing on CNN.
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