January 26, 2007
One would not want to use this space to underscore the state of a union located thousands of miles away from the lands that must remain the continuous focus of our hearts and minds at a time when their very existence as viable political, social, and cultural entities is at risk, but one cannot say anything about Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and indeed the entire Middle East, without saying something about the state of that union which now controls much of the traditional lands of Islam. If one could read between the lines, one can clearly see in the 2007 state of the union address by President Bush many symptoms of the rapidly approaching fall of that state.
If one were to examine the main concerns of the President more carefully, it would become clear that his description of the state of the union is not any different from his predecessors. There are certain perennial problems faced by American society which no government has been able to resolve, yet the roots of problems are never acknowledged; only their outward peripheral dimensions are described and the nation is assured that their government is taking steps to solve them.
A short list of these problems would include the following: the budget deficit, a dysfunctional and inadequate healthcare system, a differential economy which allows the rich to become richer and forces the poor to plunge further into poverty, immigration issues, the energy crisis, environmental degradation, and the unsettling Middle East. These are not new issues; every American president has faced them since the rise of a global ambition in American leadership. The state of the union described by President Bush is, therefore, not very different from how it was before his arrival on the scene. What has changed is merely the order and intensity of the problems faced by America, not their inherent nature.
This inherent nature of the problems faced by America stems from the very foundations on which the social and economic life of this country is built. It is country that has been living beyond its resources for so long that it can no more remember how to live differently. Its energy needs, the greatest in the world on per capita basis, stem from the lifestyles cultivated by an orchestrated consumer economy. Because it cannot sustain such lifestyle within its own resources, it has an inherent need to draw on the resources of other lands and people. Because it has to use resources of other lands and people, it must invade them. Invasions have become much more costly, both in human and economic terms, hence in order to support these costly invasions, it must usurp more resources. And the cycle goes on.
These are obvious facets of the American society; everyone knows them, yet there is no official recognition of these critical dimensions of the United States of America; no state of the union address has ever acknowledged these basic flaws in the state. Only the so-called left-wing, the academicians whose prognosis changes nothing, and the helpless disgruntled elements of the society can publicly admit these foundational problems.
Had these been merely the internal problems of America, they could be ignored by others, but the unfortunate reality of our times is the suffering this iniquitous system has caused to other people around the world. From Latin America to the heartland of Islam, there is no place on earth that has remained safe from the inflictions and sufferings brought to people by an aggressive state which cannot live within its own resources.
President Bush admits that America must decrease its reliance on the Middle East oil, not because he is ready to acknowledge the immoral and unethical footprint of the American way of life on the global ecology and resources, but simply because the price America must pay for this oil has been sharply increasing. There is no admission of the fundamental failure of the state; there is no admission of the basic problems with the infrastructure, the lifestyles, the consumerism whose demands cannot be satiated with state’s own resources. There is no admission of the fact that the American footprint on global resources is far higher than any other state in the world and this rampant consumption causes suffering to other people.
There is an ideological baggage to what Bush had to say about the state of the union. These covert and overt ideological commitments of the President of the United States are not very different from the commitments of the previous Presidents; they only differ in intensity, and perhaps verbal expressions. What has remained constant in the state of union and what continues to determine its policies at home and abroad are the fundamental patterns of life in America.
No American leader has the moral courage to acknowledge these basic problems. All they can do is to attempt to hide these unethical, immoral, and aggressive facets of the state through appeals to patriotism, through invoking real and imaginary dangers to the state, by raising the level of fear, through a black and white description of the supposed enemies of the union.
Those who recognize these devices to be mere camouflage which must be used to increase the size of American military, to fund more aggressions, and to perpetuate the state of a union gone mad, cannot do anything to the overall direction of this state. They are the silent spectators of a great human tragedy. The world has become so accustomed to these terrible realities of our time that now no one can really imagine a different world safe from American aggressions.
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