Land of the Free…

I’m in the States at the moment. While negotiating the San Diego freeway I passed a monster SUV, populated by a single lycra-clad, Super-Size fed woman. The tailgate was festooned with Stars and Stripes stickers – and one saying ‘United States of America – Land of the Free’.

Of course one should not slag off one’s hosts and I am first in line to affirm that the US has – on aggregate – been a tremendous force for good in the world. But they do live in a dream world. No wonder Obama gets away with spouting such a vacuous load of bollocks.

For one thing, hasn’t it struck the SUV toting masses that there is a direct correlation between the number of bloated four-wheel-drives clogging America’s freeways and the rise in the price of petrol, together with the huge increase in the power of Putin’s Russia, Chavez’s Venezuela – not to mention the Middle East?

Monster vehicles empower Americans – and leach power overseas

Those monster vehicles, which apparently make Americans feel so empowered, are in fact leaching power to countries and regions which by and large oppose both America and freedom.   

Not that the United States is a particularly free place. Sure, they have a sort of plutocro-democracy and free speech. But even in freaky-deaky, in-your-face liberal California, gay marriages don’t have the same rights as the regular variety. God knows what they still do to gays in Texas.

Oh I know that the freedom for gays to marry doesn’t appeal to every person of the Right. So how about affirmative action programmes which in many cases force employers and universities to take on people from minorities, where a white candidate might have been better? Hardly freedom.

Then there’s the economy. Supposedly free-market Americans have in recent years subsidised and protected from foreign competition their steel, car, textile and aerospace industries, not to mention farmers. The trade barriers erected for the benefit of American dairy, meat, citrus, sugar, wheat, corn and cotton farmers are every bit as restrictive as the EU’s – and every bit as damaging to the Third World.

The Columbians claim that US restrictions on citrus imports have impeded attempts to wean their farmers from coca production into other crops. The ethanol added to American petrol has to be made from American maize, adding to the cost, damaging the environment and South American producers into the bargain.

Now those right-on liberals Obama and Hillary are getting in on the act, promising to protect American jobs against the nasty Chinese who have the temerity to produce cheaper and better products than American workers, just as the Japanese and Koreans did a decade or two ago – and still do.

My country right or wrong

My country, right or wrong is the prevailing wisdom here, and that’s part of the problem. There is a massive national self-myth. So let’s deflate a few of those dearly held misconceptions.

The American War of Independence was not about the right to representation – that was offered by the British. It was primarily about the colonists’ desire to break Crown treaties with the Indians which protected their land against further land grabs by the colonists – and to call on British protection when things went wrong, without paying for it.

The Boston Tea Party was not about free-spirited colonials protesting against British tariffs – it was smugglers, who had benefitted indirectly from the tariffs, protesting their removal and the loss of their illicit livelihood.
 
The nasty old Brits had abolished slavery half a century earlier

The American Civil War was not about ending slavery, but significantly to do with the industrialising north wanting protected access for their goods in the cotton exporting South, which had an interest in freely trading higher quality industrial goods from Britain. The northern Union states did not abolish slavery until half way through the war – and then only in the Confederacy. States allied to the North kept slavery until later. The nasty old Brits, meanwhile, had abolished slavery in the whole Empire half a century earlier.

The United States played itself as an anti-imperial nation in the first half of the twentieth century. Yet the US was itself an empire – most of the modern United States has been grabbed either from the native Indians or the Mexicans (the south-west US including California).

I could go on about how the United States declared war on Spain in 1868, ostensibly to free Cuba, but then effectively occupied the island, grabbing Guantanamo as a base, shooting rebelling former slaves and taking the former-Spanish Philippines, Puerto Rico and Pacific islands for good measure.

Or how US military intervention in Mexico, Venezuela, Honduras, the Dominican Republic and Guatemala turned many Latin Americans against their neighbour.
Or how America’s Federally-sanctioned policy of discriminating against hard-working Japanese immigrant farmers in California was instrumental in turning an ally into a sworn enemy, who felt so bullied by the much bigger US that they felt the sneak attack on Pearl Harbour was a reasonable response.

Or how far from standing by Britain in the Blitz, as President Bush would have it, the US only entered the conflict after the Nazis declared war on the US – and then they made Britain pay in gold and technology (jet engines, nuclear) for everything they sent us.

OK – so some of these little forays into US history are a little one-sided. But they are all at least as broadly correct as the opposite preconceptions held so dear by most Americans.

America is far from Land of the Free. It is a bossy, over-regulated country, just like most others. Everywhere you go – on the trains, in airports, on the roads – there’s some hectoring, gutty, polyester-clad functionary, yelling after you: “Sir, I need you to…”

It’s as if Patricia Hewitt, Jacqui Smith, Ruth Kelly and Tessa Jowell had all turned into a country.  

Well, maybe not quite that bad. But I’m glad I got that off my chest. I feel a whole lot better now.

Phillip Oppenheim