Dumb Americana

After all, when the forces of 8220;good8221; are trying hard to defeat the forces of 8220;evil8221;, the least the forces of 8220;evil8221; can do is be well-dressed! American naivete would be funny if it weren8217;t so worrying.

If America wants to be a good imperialist, perhaps it might turn its attention to the lives and careers of the Great Gamers of the British empire, who, exploitative colonialists as they were, still brought detailed knowledge and human engagement to the imperialist project. 8220;The Great Game8221; is the name given to the period of intense competition between Britain and Russia in the 19th and early 20th centuries, for control of the interiors of Asia.

Charles Napier, Francis Younghusband, Charles 8220;Chinese8221; Gordon among others were all imperialist adventurers of the time of the Great Game. And how different they were were from the hard-faced techno-warriors of the US! For the Great Gamers foreign adventures became journeys of personal transformation.

Sir Charles Napier conquered the tribes of Sindh but he laid down formidable systems of civic administration and produced a voluminous collection of personal letters giving insights into the lives of the emirs. Durand, British agent at Gilgit in 1889-94, set out in the quest for a 8220;natural border8221; for India and established the Durand Line. Durand has left a painstaking memoir where he has described the horses, wild flowers, rope bridges, polo matches and hunting dogs of the area.

By contrast Tommy Franks can barely pronounce Umm Qasar, CNN anchors often say 8220;Kuwait8221; instead of Baghdad and have only recently discovered the phenomenon of the suicide bomber.

The commissioner sahibs of the British civil service were also imperialists. They quelled riots with a glare and silenced subordinates with a word and held down an empire for 200 years. The collective works of India8217;s British officers are, as Clive Dewey has written, 8220;monuments more lasting than brass.8221;

The sahibs measured the mountains, carried out linguistic surveys, wrote directories of castes and tribes and produced gazettes and censuses. By contrast, what do the Americans have? A robot-like Donald Rumsfeld who utters the word 8220;Iraqi8221; as if it means an alien species. Colin Powell who promises to 8220;travel more8221; to find out about the world. Bush, who has travelled out of America only twice in his entire life.

In fact, the wealth of American intellectual life in its universities stands in sharp contrast to the provincial insularity of its leadership. Morris Berman, professor at MIT, writes in Twilight of American Culture that America has fallen into an irretrievable 8220;dark age8221;. The 8220;dumbest8221; president in the history of the US presides over a society where the number of people reading a daily newspaper has halved since 1965. In Berman8217;s survey, 40 per cent Americans couldn8217;t name the US8217;s World War II enemies and 120 million Americans had the cognition of an 11-year old.

In the massively popular television series Cheers, all those who have any intellectual interests are seen as pompous and pretentious, 8220;while folk who don8217;t know their ass from their elbow are seen as warm, authentic, the real grit of America,8221; Berman writes. America is in the grip of the dumbing down epidemic and can8217;t produce any scholar-adventurers.

The 19th century imperialists were rapacious but they fostered some understanding between wildly divergent cultures. Philip Mason echoes the thoughts of British ICS officers in India in The Men Who Ruled India: 8220;Impossible, once the smell of canvas and smoky fires was in your nostrils, a horse between your knees on a dewy morning, impossible to think of Muhammad Khan or Sohan Singh as 8216;a native8217;. No, he was just a man8230; a man far more real than the shadowy abstraction known as the government.8221;

Of course, Victoria8217;s loyal officers ruled a formal empire and the sahibs sat in seats of administrative power for three and a half centuries. American dominance is hardly direct or formal. Yet inbuilt in the British imperial project was a broadening of the mind for the imperialists, an exploration of new vistas. By contrast, the Americans seem only interested in imposing the 8216;Middle America mentality8217; on the world. Listen to the expressionless assistant secretary of defense, Victoria Clarke, with her sterile phrases like 8220;models8221; of 8220;upscaling8221; and 8220;downscaling8221; and her 8220;flow of force8221; and 8220;area denials8221; and it doesn8217;t seem as if there are human beings involved in this war, only an avalanche of strategic-speak and a chilling disinterest in 8220;other cultures8221;.

No wonder Americans have only been raiders of other countries. The transformation of Saigon into a giant R038;R zone for American GIs was about the only positive US legacy of the Vietnam war.

Compare Colin Powell to Francis Younghusband. The latter was an agent of empire who travelled to Lhasa to force the treaty of Tibet on the ruler and weld Tibet to British dominions.

Yet Younghusband underwent a religious transformation and also became a supporter of Indian independence. T.E. Lawrence or 8220;Lawrence of Arabia8221; also served British expansion, but ended up becoming deeply emotionally attached to prince Faisal. Although Lawrence is today criticised for his paternalistic 8220;civilising mission8221; he immersed himself in Arab culture and thought. Can you imagine Powell ever admitting that he is drawn to any part of the world other than the US?

The obvious difference between the Great Gamers of the 19th century and the Americans today is of course the explosion of technology and information. But it seems that excessive information has torn people further apart than bring them closer. The American 8216;foreign8217; project is imprisoned in antiseptic strategic-speak and think-tank theorising.

The Great Gamers, by contrast, were grassroots travellers who tried to learn as many languages as they could. Perhaps Gen. Tommy Franks might learn a bit of Arabic and Rumsfeld could cast off his grey suit and try on a jalabeya.

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