Big

By Crispin Sartwell

With regard to arms, economics, and culture, no nation has ever been as powerful as the United States is now. Ironically, for that very reason, few nations have ever been so vulnerable.

First of all, people hate those who wield power over them. Power is not an abstract concept, it's a concrete set of relations in which some people are subordinated by others. We are in the process of crushing cultures all over the world - in particular traditional religious cultures - with or without the willing participation of the people whose ways of life we are replacing with our own.

We would like to think of ourselves as the representatives of liberty, and that is obviously a real and important part of our heritage. But oppression and cultural annihilation are also a real part of our heritage, and they are increasingly the central feature of our present identity. That makes it possible for people all over the world to dehumanize us or indeed satanize us, and to justify in their minds any atrocity against any American.

Great consolidations of power necessarily bring with them a syndrome we might call "gigantism." I was in a huge airport the other day, and the recording came over the loudspeakers: "We are at homeland security threat level orange. Please do not leave your baggage unattended," etc. But it struck me that a facility of that size could not really be secured. Its perimeter is too large. There are too many people with too many tickets and bags and badges wandering in and out. Even when the thing bristles with weapons, security devices, and guards, it can't be made safe.

No matter how rudimentary your skills as a pilot, it is relatively hard to miss the World Trade Center or the Pentagon: two of the largest human structures ever perpetrated. Their hugeness, which speaks of wealth and power and determination and pride, is intended to intimidate and overwhelm, facts which make them symbolically powerful both for those who love and for those who hate what they stand for. You might as well paint a target on the thing. It's huge; it's got a thousand vulnerable spots; it's completely immobile.

The vulnerability of our huge structures and systems has a telling relationship to the style of our current war. We prosecute our invasion with overwhelming technologies of destruction. The explosions that rock Baghdad display power, wealth, and expertise beyond what the Iraqi people could have imagined. The troops advance in armored columns. The idea of all this is a display of consolidated force that Iraqis are supposed to gaze upon and despair.

If you are responding to such a force, you can confront it directly and face destruction. Obviously, you're likelier to be much more effective with hit-and-run guerilla attacks that take advantage of your knowledge of the terrain and the people, your light armaments, your extreme mobility, your ability to improvise. Our gigantic force is obvious; it's slow; it has an elaborate command structure; it depends on supply lines, awaits orders and follows procedures; it's overwhelmingly powerful, but it's also stuck.

As huge, wealthy bureaucracies instigate war abroad and tighten security at home, it becomes more and more obvious every day that our size and our power are incompatible with our own liberty and the liberty of everyone else. That is why the traditionally American rhetoric of the administration ("Operation Iraqi Freedom," "they hate our freedom") sounds so deeply false or even sarcastic.

In the true and fundamental conflict of our own desires between power and freedom, I wonder which we will choose.