Americans Adopting Victimized Identity

[Guest guest]

American pie, sliced up

The US threatens to become a nation of victims and contractors

 

"One of the nicest things about America has been, at least for me,

the fact that civic society had the courage to move on to building

for the future rather than looking in the rear-view mirror and

endlessly revisiting the past. That is not what I see today.

Americans seem to be becoming like Indians, at least with respect to

wrestling with the past. Just like there have been 30,000 books and

articles in India on why or how partition could or should have been

avoided, the Americans have inaugurated a new industry churning out

millions of words about what went wrong in New Orleans."

 

JAITHIRTH RAO

Posted online: Friday, October 07, 2005 at 0000 hours IST

I write this from America, from what is today a troubled country

possessed of over-articulate television anchors, a country bombarded

and persecuted by a plethora of inane channels.

 

The devastation of New Orleans has been traumatic. No one wants to

belittle the sufferings of its citizens. But such tragic events have

happened in the past. Mount Vesuvius erupted and Pompeii, a glorious

city of antiquity, got covered with volcanic ash. In America's own

not-so-distant history, San Francisco has been destroyed and

rebuilt; Chicago was burnt down and rose again. It is not the trauma

or the horrifying experiences of the residents or the awe-inspiring

fury of nature or even the egregious mistakes of humankind or the

ineptness of officialdom that differentiates this event from earlier

ones. It is the completely silly and jejune responses which, to use

our contemporary turn of phrase, are being played out in real-time,

that sets apart the whining, self-deprecatory present from the stoic

traditions of the past. In a crude world that Orwell had warned

about in his essay on the Spanish Civil War, what happened and can

happen is less important than what is reported to have happened.

Somewhat in line with his prediction there were more television

camera crew in New Orleans than relief workers!

 

 

 

One of the nicest things about America has been, at least for me,

the fact that civic society had the courage to move on to building

for the future rather than looking in the rear-view mirror and

endlessly revisiting the past. That is not what I see today.

Americans seem to be becoming like Indians, at least with respect to

wrestling with the past. Just like there have been 30,000 books and

articles in India on why or how partition could or should have been

avoided, the Americans have inaugurated a new industry churning out

millions of words about what went wrong in New Orleans. Local

government corruption, racial discrimination, discrimination against

the aged, federal government ineptitude, a president who represents

greedy insensitive plutocrats, insufficient money for construction

over 40 years, poor quality control in civil engineering processes,

concrete walls that were not high enough, wicked developers

destroying the fragile environments of river-fronts and sea-fronts,

hungry persons who justifiably stole, terrible persons given to

looting on account of innate evil tendencies, the fraying of the

safety net, a reminder that the social contract is fragile, a direct

result of engagement with Iraq rather than with the domestic poor...

the verbal diarrhea is unbelievable.

 

And a direct result of this loud media over-reach is that everybody

has instant and grandiose prescriptions. The government wants to

spend 60, 70, or is it 600 billion dollars, with each actor adding

to the mountain of pork. The president cannot talk of sober

reconstruction. Doing so would only provide ammunition to political

opponents. The essence of modern spindoctoring is that every

disaster, man-made or God-ordained is a PR opportunity. So let us

launch a great American urban homesteading new deal, whatever that

may mean. We have not had the time to think through anything. But

that does not matter. The media demands not action, but a semblance

of action. The Moloch of today will not be denied. It is not only

easy, it is obligatory to measure everything in short-hand. Money is

the best short-hand.

 

So we all need to put a few billions of dollars on the table. Where

there is honey, there are bees. Where there is money, particularly

government money, there are contractors, consultants, more

contractors and more consultants. And in this day and age there are

lawyers and lawsuits, malpractice judgments and punitive damages,

juice and more juice. The lackadaisical and fiscally irresponsible

throwing of money at the problem will not only not solve the problem

but will be seriously corrosive of the civic landscape. A vested

interest will develop in exaggerating the impact of natural

calamities in the future and reinforce the already growing

tendencies of self-indulgent victimhood. A nation where

entrepreneurship is defined by the production of goods and services

demanded by ordinary people by the private sector, can easily

deteriorate into a nation where the most successful entrepreneur is

the contractor who lives off government largesse and who develops an

ability to manipulate public opinion to force the government to

spend more and more in the pursuit of its new-found role of

providing insurance against the acts of God. Alexander Hamilton must

be turning in his grave!

 

My perceptive friend Pinto said to me: "Jerry, they have a horoscope

problem. Their stars are ill-placed. They are going through a hard

time." Pinto may, in an uncanny way, have hit upon it. For what is a

horoscope problem, but a matter of character. And character, as the

ancient Greeks knew, determines destiny. Americans can become

whiners and complainers on the lookout for doles and relief

payments, asking their government to do for them what their

forefathers would have done for themselves. They can abandon their

belief in individual initiative and enterprise and make government

contractors their new heroes. They can paralyse themselves with

inquiries, commission and committees in endless blame-games. They

can even fall into the trap of totalitarian promise-makers that the

state can insure its citizens against nature itself. Or, oddly

enough, they can take a lesson in resilience from the dignified poor

of India who do not whine when earthquakes or tsunamis hit them, who

accept help with grace and carry on to rebuild their lives with

calmness and courage.

 

Will America continue on this slippery path of a media-induced world

where everyone is a victim and is in search of a nanny-state to bail

himself or herself out? Or, by a supreme effort, will they go back

to their traditions of self-help and civic action and recover their

heritage? New Orleans has posed these questions starkly. Those who

wish America well must be concerned as to whether the prognosis will

indeed be a sanguine one or not.

 

 

The writer is chairman and CEO, Mphasis. Write to him at

jerryrao

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ims