The Eagle's Shadow: A Review

Title: The Eagle's Shadow: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World 

Author: Mark Hertsgaard

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Year of Publication: 2002

Number of Pages: 259 

What does one make of a guy who has grown so confident in his own powers of engaging taboo subjects that he is even willing to advocate a regime change in Washington?

Do we simply dismiss him as a cheap sensationalist intent on selling books, or do we take him seriously? 

Given room to cast a vote, Mark Hertsgaard, the author of The Eagle's Shadow, would certainly go for the serious bit. After all, he suggests strongly that the timing of his book, still being put together when the 9-11 attacks took place, makes it doubly important. Even auspicious. 

But exactly what is The Eagle's Shadow about? When I picked it up from the shelf at my local Book Trust shop earlier in the week, the cover didn't strike me as anything but another of the agitprop being churned generously by global Capitalism's fawning praise-singers. The cover design was bad enough. And then there was that Uncle-Samesque guy waving the American flag to make matters worse. 

I thought I'd give it a try partly because Nadine Gordimer--herself a serious critic the various manifestations of the cultures of impunity--thought the book was "a strikingly original analysis of the American Dream at home and the ways it haunts the rest of the world." An initial look through the table of contents suggested that all America's sacred cows were up for some serious sniping at, and that too was quite a lure...

All in all, Hertsgaard's exposé on why America fascinates and infuriates the rest of the world did not turn up any major surprises, especially for those of us outside of America. The concentration of material wealth in America especially over the past half century would have reached our ears, even if Hollywood had not done such a wonderful job of over-emphasizing it. After all, American travellers around the world, like the big Texan in Hertsgaard's book, always find interestingly awkward ways to downplay what others have done by reminding us about how they've got "bigger and better ones" in Austin, San Antonio, New York, Chicago, and so on. 

Some call it arrogance, but there is also a lot of truth in the author's claims that part of the problem is that those to whom these material acquisitions are flaunted are partly peeved because they do not possess these possessions. Or do not possess them in such abundance.

On a lighter side, perhaps Hertsgaard's odd anecdotal suggestion that   there might be some people out there who think Americans are enjoying better--and more democratically spread-out---sex than the rest of us might carry some weight. Who knows?  

The book does a decent job of discussing America's excess consumption patterns, the insularity of its citizens--and this is directly related to how much influence that nation wields around the world--,  its quixotic religious habits, and finally, its hypocritical stance as far as acknowledging widening internal class differences  and  the reality of being an empire  extremely hostile to democratic values around the world (and increasingly at home). Hertsgaard's mining and deployment of current data out there on the various sub-issues are an added draw.

For instance, while most of us would know or would have met Americans who ask us whether Spain is in Mexico or would ask us to deliver a message to their friends in J'Burg when we get to Accra--since the two happen to be neighbourhoods in the same village called Africa--the hard stat that only 14% percent of Americans have passports, and only a fraction of that ever gets to use them, was juicy. So too were the stats about religious affiliations, publications of books, and the numbers of politicians who have to bow to powerful elements in the Religious Right in order to win power, and the terrible fates of those who dare to run afoul of the same establishment or their allies among the corporate elites.

Obviously, others have done similar work, and packaged it perhaps more eloquently. The greatest value of Hertsgaard's oeuvre is that he provides a timely reminder--circa 2002, but still relevant today-- which, sadly enough, would not be televised on Fox News/CNN/NBC/MSNBC and and the rest of the corporate media where the real America that needs to hear what he has to say lies, and is lied to.  

But having said that, we should also be willing to critique the major failings of The Eagle's Shadow. Although Hertsgaard occasionally makes passing references to it, he could have done a better job of showcasing the  reasons that make people angry with America and its foreign policy decisions.

We of the rest of the world of both the retired terrorist--the author's expression--and ordinary citizen varieties do not appreciate the glories of America so much so often because we feel, with overwhelming hard evidence to support our feelings, that America is abusing its power and influence around the world. 

It is not Americans' pursuit of their legitimate dreams of happiness, etc. and even their attainment of that that infuriates  us. It is the insistence of the American elite classes on building their so-called happiness on the immiseration of others that gets to us.

We don't like it when American politicians go about overthrowing or even killing our legitimately elected leaders.

We don't like it when they empower and strengthen all kinds of dictators who work against us and for the American elites' greedy interests.

We don't like it when they build their military bases on our soils and insist that they need to "destroy our towns and cities in order to save them."

We don't like it when they form criminal cartels like the WTO and use them to bully us into becoming hewers of wood and carters/cutters of stones meant for their edifices of arrogance. 

We may not be Americans. And some of us don't even want to be. But we think we have a right, like all humans on God's good earth, to pursue happiness. Strange as this may seem/sound, we have our dreams too. And often, American interventionism makes the pursuance of those dreams impossible.

And yes, we don't like it  when American leaders who are some of the most illiterate concerning what happens outside the borders of their nation presume to preach to us about whom we should associate with, or how we should be organizing our lives. 

Those of us in Africa, especially, are thankful to God for the beautiful things that ordinary Americans have been able to do for themselves. We admire the great and wonderful people that they have produced over the years. We read and enjoy/admire their Lincolns/Jeffersons/Paines/Thoreaus/Emersons/Whitmans and Twains/Steinbecks/Ellisons/Steins/Sontags/Dreissers/Faulkners and the longer cavalcade of the so-called minority writers.  We admire ordinary Americans' work ethic, and we are happy for the many inventions they have blessed the world with.

But we aspire to add our own bit to the world heritage in our own ways. We don't need the avuncular pretensions of Uncle Sam to make that happen. 

Now, to my final verdict on Hertsgaard's book: In spite of all its shortcomings, The Eagle's Shadow is still worth all the two or three hours one may need to put into it because it redirects us to the debate about America's role in the world, and the consequences of that role. 

A Friday Homage: Pablo Neruda

Today, I am thinking of  Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. The man all of them call Neruda.
I mean Pablo the African who was born in Parral/Chile and took up a Czech pen-name that stuck.

But I shall lack voice and verbal skill. The words of Pablo must not be approached lightly.
Or carelessly.
They must not be play-hoisted on whimsical rant-spots without consultations with the multiple radiances of the multiple celestial forces whom he opened up to.
The gods of songs that filled and flowed through him with all that painful/joyful eloquence.

Maybe I should let the man do his own talking, while we sit back and watch/read:

How many of us, petty mortals, have not lived our lives in perpetual quests for that time/age of which it was said:

...Poetry arrived

in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where

it came from, from winter or a river.

I don't know how or when,

no, they were not voices, they were not

words, nor silence,

but from a street I was summoned,

from the branches of night,

abruptly from the others,

among violent fires

or returning alone,

there I was without a face

and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth

had no way

with names

my eyes were blind,

and something started in my soul,

fever or forgotten wings,

and I made my own way,

deciphering

that fire

and I wrote the first faint line,

faint, without substance, pure

nonsense,

pure wisdom

of someone who knows nothing,

and suddenly I saw

the heavens

unfastened

and open,

planets,

palpitating plantations,

shadows perforated,

riddled

with arrows, fire and flowers,

the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesimal being,

drunk with the great starry

void,

likeness, image of

mystery,

I felt myself a pure part

of the abyss,

I wheeled with the stars,

my heart broke free on the open sky.

Those are his words. But they are believable in the same way as a prophet drunk on his god's power can be believable. Must be believable.  
Here was a man drunk with the great starry void who became the very image of the mystery.
Touched by the pure fire of the divine muses, he could also become a pure part of the abyss. 
He was so free he could wheel with the stars. Wheel with the stars, just like that...

And that freedom-seed, having found a home in his bosom, would turn him into a chanticleer for redemption songs every where the shadows of fetters dared to show up.

In Spain of the fascist storm-tides, against the norm of hypocritical yea-saying, he would set up his untameable/barbaric yawp against what many of us pretend not to see today on the streets of Tripoli/Damascus/Tikrit/Baghdad/Kabul/Istanbul/Mexico City/Medellin/Bogota/La Paz/Mogadishu...He would shake his rattle of uncomfortable words-as-weapons against the hypocritical lie that sought/seeks to veil:


Come and see the blood in the streets. 
Come and see
                      the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
in the streets!


But Neruda could hate so much because he could also love so well. Love so well and paint love so well. In his hands, all the rough diamonds came out sparkling and all the abandoned bundles let out their treasures:  


I have named you queen.
There are taller ones than you, taller.
There are purer ones than you, purer.
There are lovelier ones than you, lovelier.


But you are the queen....


And when you appear
all the rivers sound in my body, bells 
shake the sky,
and a hymn fills the world.


Only you and I,
only you and I, my love,
listen to it. 


He could be desperate too; sending pleading moans into the vertiginous doubtfields...carefully sculpted gems akin to those we maimed on the cusp of our first orgasmic spurts when we neither knew the old/real names for the experience, nor dared to speak too loud lest we make the magic glow go:


Take bread away from me, if you wish,
take air away, but
do not take from me your laughter.


Do not take away the rose,
the lanceflower that you pluck,
the water that suddenly
bursts forth in your joy,
the sudden wave of silver born in you...


And he could be the freaky romantic we dare not speak for at day and yet wet-dream of at night: The wild untamed beast-as-it-should-be-in-love, free from all the fetid/fickle/feckless/foolish moralities that drive us into stale prison-cells of the conventional missionary position and other such boring-dos. The ultimate poet-laureate of Naked-Town and Succulent Breasts and Erect Nipples and Wet Armpits and Heaving Arses and Shining Foreheads and Glistening Teeth and Seductive Eyes. Of the bloody/fiery mutual fuck; the taboo that we must all endure/enjoy at least once...and then again and again and again: 


I am the tiger.
I lie in wait for you among leaves
broad as ingots of wet mineral.


The white river grows 
beneath the fog. You come.


Naked you submerge.
I wait.


Then in a leap
of fire, blood, teeth, 
with a claw slash I tear away
your bosom, your hips.


I drink your blood, I break 
your limbs one by one...




Talk again of the untranslatable barbaric yawp. The ultimate prophet of the cannibalistic orgy who compels our admiration.  But also a supremely secure man at the height of his powers who knows just how on top of things one could be if one touches the right sacred spots and tickles the right nerves:


Facing you
I am not jealous.



Come with a man
at your back,
come with a hundred men in your hair,
come with a thousand men between your bosom and  your feet
come like a river
filled with drowned men 
that meets the furious sea,
the eternal foam, the weather.



Bring them all
where I wait for you:
we shall always be alone,
we shall always be, you and I,
alone upon the earth
to begin life




Alone. Alone with the Stars. Alone with the Celestial Fires that forced their blazes through his pores and made him the timeless/restless chanteur of joys/hopes/fears/desires we still have with us aplenty. 


And as he loved so much, let his beloved Matilde Urrutia have the final say on the final journey he made in order to join the stars/oceans/constellations/divinities he sang so well: 


As we pass the streets, people pour out from them and join the procession. Military vehicles appear carrying soldiers who have their machine guns pointed at us. But they hold back; they only want to scare us. It doesn't work. At every turn, more and more people join the procession and they raise their voice together, shouting:


"Pablo Neruda! Present! Now and Forever!"

Pablo, our own Don Pablo, always present, with us, now, and forever!!!

Why I Don't Go to Church

Into the refuge of my office space, today, flowed a specimen of the despicable debris of the religious charlatan who, true to type, strides in with the confidence of a know-it-all intent on saving threatened souls from looming damnation and the terrors of hell. And he luridly captures it in terms that constitute a vastly inferior imitation of  Jonathan Edwards' "Sinners in the Hands of An Angry God".

Would he even know that others like him, before him, have also tried to use the cheap tactic of psychological terror to woo the weak and take their  possessions/collection as a reward? Perhaps no. Perhaps that doesn't even matter.

Mayhap by the special dispensation of his merciful divine Justifier(?), the jambs of eternity have held, one more month, to allow me and people like me to change our minds and subscribe to the wonderful insurance plan that ultimate pays with romps on the gold-plated streets of the Heaven he and only he sees. Or punish with the bonfire of the vanities recast in eternal frames by pitch-fork wielding demons who so gleefully help out the eternal Holy Terror of God-his God.

Some metaphors hatched in infantile fantasies...
Some laughters grown too thick to sustain 
Against the insistent ardour of jokes out-covering their terms of reference... 

And some of us have thought all this while that in all matters unseen and spiritual, each one might be allowed to follow their own daemon/ genius/guardian angel, etc etc.

Well. To all my good-intentioned neighbours of the now and the future who would try to save my soul and bring me "back home to the church where I belong," this is my simple answer to you:

I don't go to church because I love my God so much and I love to be where he is.And my God-my God, he does not live in a church. 'Does not live in cheap, imported, mass-brand fantasies that spur purblind fools into prisons of mind/body/soul/spirit.

Why would he?
How possibly could he?

When would all the pseudo-salvationists come to understand that it takes an extremely narrow-minded conception of the divine to limit him to some obstreperous contraption of cantankerous two-penny con-artists? And that some, at least, can see how obvious that is?

My God is big. Big enough to hold court in the entire universe without the constraints of narrow national orthodoxies and blabbers of racist bombast. And like Him/Her, I like to give wings to my spiritual strivings; I allow them to soar and explore in all the places where my awesome destiny compels me.

My God and I, we are doing so well without the constraints of the cheap materialist faggots. And we mean to continue our Romance that way. And I am glad Tsali/Jesus/Mohammed/Anokye/Buddha and all them other cool guys agree with me.

Exactly WHAT is NATO doing in Libya?

And who asked them in? And for whose interests are they killing the thousands they will kill tonight?

Sometimes one can't help but ask, amidst all the hypocritical sound-bites that the international corporate media seeks to crowd minds and eyes with.

Exactly who asked for tens of thousands of ordinary African  citizens to be murdered by European and American arms/mercenaries under the guise of freeing the "benighted natives from their savage kinsmen"?

Could it possibly be that some people are still worried about how it came to be their their oil is still in their soil? And how it is that the oil of Texas came to nestle uneasily under the presumptuous soil of Tripoli/Benghazi/Sirte?

Could be it that some newly minted statesmen who need high-heel shoes to boost what little self-esteems they have  think that murdering defenceless civilians would finally make up for what they lack in stature?

Could it be that some mongrel folks with "questionable allegiances" need to prove just how faithful they are to the cause of Empire by wreaking bloodbaths in spaces where the political cost is likely to be zero and the gains for their Texas/Wall Street masters tantalizingly good?

What is America doing, once again killing African citizens indiscriminately after the sordid history of the past five hundred years?

And what is Europe, its day in the sun at last done and its fantasies of former glory no more than dying embers of a fire stuttering into well-earned oblivion... what is Europe doing sponsoring mayhem on my continent?

And do they presume that we shall always say--in a lame nod to the gods of lame stupidity--that "God forgive White Europe"?

These are initial questions. But we shall seek more...and more...if we need to.
Euro-America, we are counting your sins.
We may not forgive when you shall finally find the courage to live up to basic human obligations.

I Can't Go On, I Will Go On

Between the radical swagger of Amiri Baraka and the existentialist gyrations of Albert Camus, one finds, if one looks deep enough, useful parsings of the imponderable mystery of death...especially death by suicide.

And why should death by suicide be an interesting subject?

Simple: On the evidence of all the glories of life as is, suicide presents itself as the most heroic choice of our age.

To hear Camus tell it, it is that which you take up, gloriously, on the bright morning when you ran out of reasons for going on; the act that heralds the day when "you can't go on".

Baraka's complication puts it slightly differently: Suicide is great and worthwhile, and all the smart ones of our generation must consider it, at some point. Of course, with the catch: One must write a twenty-volume suicide note first. You know, something to explain to those who must of necessity poke rigor mortis for its secrets. A twenty-volume note, and then a preface too.

Moral? It is not really about dying. We have died before. We die everyday. We may be already dead, even.

It is the consciousness of the reality of death, and our consciousness as active participants in the process that makes makes discourses about death and suicide potentially redemptive. Even revolutionary.

To Beckett's words, and my title, now:

The palpable atmosphere of despair that rules so large has the habit of making most of us give in too soon, convinced that we can do nothing, must do nothing.

But the human will can and must transcend. We can transform the death cry that threatens to atrophy the will if we , like Amiri, can see that even the inevitability of suicide is nothing nothing but a golden opportunity to write one, ten, twenty, even a hundred volumes of what we want life to be.

In the darkest night, life needs affirmers to re-assert itself. And we can choose to be those affirmative action-eers.

Or simply go silently into the dark night without so much as a whimper.

Like Soyinka's man of the dark jails who died. In silence. Because he kept quiet. In the face of tyranny.

We can go on.

We must go on.

We will go on.

Propero Remix: Or, New Faces of Friends Whose Loves Strangle/Smother

So they say Mrs. Hilary Clinton, herself a scion of a famous C-family, has finally spoken truth to power, and given voice to her serious worries about the threat of the re-colonization of Africa? She is worried about the return of the C-word to virginized Africa?

Ain't that cute? Real romantic cute?

Clinton cares. Cares so much about Africa, she has to raise alarm about the insidious outflow of Red China and Brown(?) India into the sacred fields of African freedom.

And what do the Africans themselves think about this so-called threat of colonization looming large and about to sweep them and all of their own far away from the familiar tentacles of old civilization-christianization-commerce/capitalism lore?

Would somebody want to create a clowning space akin to BBC's  vaunted "Africa Have Your Say" and ask the neo-Tarzans what they think about "how bad China and India and Brazil and South Africa are going to be for the interests of Africa, especially given that God has long ordained that all African resources be vetted through the familiar traffics of London//New York/Paris/Brussels/Lisbon" etc etc. for ever?

Or they would rather ask the self-ordained "experts" of Africa over in right-wing think tanks in Washington exactly what they want to echo from their message-masters about these gooks/untouchables/kaffirs/miscegenated brats of the BRIC trying to steal that which others better than themselves have worked hard for five hundred years...to  "destroy so as to save"?

Maybe, even today, the subaltern African cannot/mustnot/shouldnot speak. What could he possibly know about the real meaning of colonization and where/how it manifests?

Yea, what could he know, apart from throwing up a mish-mash of Fanonian rants and Bikoan grumps out of turn when the real lords of this world are expressing intellectually sound and politically astute opinions?

Anyway, who cares for what Africans think when better and more caring spokespersons have risen and spoken?

Some folks said it well a while ago, we can only imitate them awkwardly now:

Uncle Sam Locuta, Causa Finita Est!

Hilary. Great Uncle's Darling Girl. Hilary. A name that's so close to that other word: hilarious.

Maybe we should laugh at this "care" of hers for Africa's salvation from colonization.

Maybe we should dismiss it as a hilarious hell of a trickster tale from Hilary.

But then, to live in the triumphant arenas of  "freedom and democracy" in  Libya and Somalia and Ivory Coast circa June 2011 and to  know that these too, rose from the concerns of caring/knowledgeable/anti-colonialism gurus like our heroine of the hour...

To know all these and more and more and more....

With friends like Hilary, who really needs enemies?

Hilary, with friends like you, who really needs to worry about how worse enemies might get?

We Return...Fighting

To hear David Levering Lewis tell it, this is how it started:

"On a clear, sharp February morning in 1919, on New York's Fifth Avenue, the men of the Fifteenth Regiment of New York's National Guard marched home to Harlem...

These men and others like them had gone and bled on the major theatres of World War I for the  cause of democracy and freedom, and somehow thought that the rewards of that sacrifice would be extended to them. To them especially.

It didn't happen. 

They demonstrated.

Nothing changed.

They sent delegations to city fathers and political heavyweights.

It still didn't change a thing. 

A young man--yes, at the time he was still relatively young--taking the ironic trajectory of the events in, decided to give vent to his angst via the dual vehicles of poetry and prose. He wrote in the Crisis:

The faults of our country are our faults. Under similar circumstances, we would fight again. But by the God of heaven, we are cowards and jackasses if now that the war is over we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unending battle against the forces of hell in our own land.
   
        We return.
        We return from fighting.
        We return fighting. 

Make way for democracy. We saved it in France, and by Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why.

The writer of the immortal lines above is, of course, W.E.B. Du Bois. And man, did he fight...amidst the circles of gloom, right to the end. If indeed his story ever ended. Because over at that silent grave of his in Accra, even today, it is the insistent voice of struggle that bursts through for all those with ears to hear.

Nadine--sweet Nadine Gordimer--tells us that a writer is selected by his subject, that subject being the consciousness of his era...and how he deals with this is the fundament of commitment..." Nadine spoke of writers. She may as well have been talking of all humans. Especially humans of our era. This early 21st century. An era in which many still insist on abusing on our wills to be human in the pious confidence that we won't know.

We cannot know.
We are not conscious of drawing the lines.
 Between what we want, and what they claim we want...

Sometimes I think of Nadine, or Kenzaburo, or Minh, or Rosa Parks, or Father Romero, Yaa Asantewaa, or Neruda, or Nkrumah, or Malcolm, or King, or Nelson...Any number of the men and women who, like Du Bois at the beginning of the 20th century, saw the tall odds in stark relief, and yet kept to the spirit of the fight. The good fight which must go on so long as injustice still exists anywhere.

And in thinking of these good fighters, I am inspired to re-member why we, too, must:

          Return.
          Return from fighting. 
          Return to fighting. 

For  we will to retrieve our humanity. At all costs. By any means necessary.