Imperial America

"Who can doubt that the United States is an imperial power?" This is James Chace in the New York Review of Books dated Nov. 21, facing up to the situation. Of course the U.S. has been an imperial power for many, many decades, but when Teddy Roosevelt used to blare out the summons to imperial duty like a Roman matron admonishing youth, there was a certain embarrassment at his bluff speech. Congressmen bridled at the thought of ladling out too much gravy to the Army and Navy. Woodrow Wilson substituted more palatable pieties about burdens and duties. Then FDR founded an even more appealing rhetoric with which to cloak imperial expansion: fighting other empires, a mission that conveniently brought an ever-burgeoning but unacknowledged empire in its wake, some of the most valuable oil-yielding portions ruthlessly excised from the British imperial cadaver after World War II.

In the 1960s only the most daredevil Marxists accused the U.S. of being an empire. In the academies it was a forbidden word. Officially, the only empires on display were those in the museum (the old colonial powers) or headquartered in the Kremlin. After 1991 there was no more Soviet Union, and today all the folks in Congress are safely bought, forever silenced about costs of the military-industrial complex. So America can stand forth, an unashamed empire at last.

Of course, the Europeans don't like the new, raw language. The Democrats quaver that proprieties about "our allies" must be preserved, though within distinct limits. In Foreign Affairs for Sept./Oct. 2002 Michael Hirsh, seeking this balance between deference to NATO and exaltation at America's unchallenged might, rolls out these rotund phrases: "US allies must accept that some US unilateralism is inevitable, even desirable. This mainly involves accepting the reality of America's supreme might?and, truthfully, appreciating how historically lucky they are to be protected by such a relatively benign power."

Distraught Democrats

We're now in that period following stinging Democratic defeat when comes the traditional haggling session over "the soul of the Democratic Party," a fugitive essence usually linked to the initials FDR. Journals like The Nation will sag under the weight of appeals for the party to return to its roots, rouse its core constituencies, promote its central values, hunker down, reach out.

Then, down the road a few months, will come a New South, or New North candidate humming an equally familiar chantey: the old Roosevelt coalition is dead. A Democratic Party focused on "special interests" (i.e., blacks, labor, NOW) and with its flag nailed to an antiwar platform will be permanently exiled from the mainstream, and from any rich trove of campaign cash.

And so on. You know the tune, you know the words. Once Democratic House leader Dick Gephardt duly fell on his sword, the focus was on a successor, tasked with raising the party from the dead. So here comes Nancy Pelosi, ex-Baltimore, married to a San Francisco real estate mogul, fragrant with West Coast cash, also with the dubious credentials of San Francisco liberalism. Republicans said they could scarcely wait to feature photographs of Pelosi campaigning with leather-clad gays from the Castro.

Her defenders said far better Pelosi than some conservative Democrat from the South furthering the widespread impression, soundly based in reality, that the Democratic Party is now a pro-choice adjunct of the Republican National Committee.

My view: Pelosi won't be good for the Democrats. She's part of the leadership that has been running the party, adept at raising millions from Hollywood, anchored to the belief that big contributions will buy the party success at the polls. The same leadership disdained any effort to organize around issues. Result, the swing voters either stayed at home or voted Republican.

And yes, across the country a San Francisco liberal Democrat will be an easy target, even though Pelosi is not particularly liberal by instinct, and has already made haste to dump her opposition to war on Iraq.

Preferable would have been someone who could excite precisely those for whom the Democratic Party has become a turnoff. Who are these people? We're talking here about mostly working-class white voters who are rightly suspicious of an intrusive federal government. For them the essential Pelosi platform, abortion and gun control, lacks appeal. On the other hand, they're suspicious of corporate power, of big money, banks, insurance companies and of Ashcroft's crackdown on civil liberties. They may be pro-gun but they're not pro-cop.

Who would appeal to them? The old Texas Democratic populists, like Wright Patman or Henry Gonzalez. These days it would be someone like Dennis Kucinich of Cleveland. But of course Kucinich is anathema to the Democratic Party liberals because of his lifelong opposition to abortion. They'll never accept a libertarian populist of a sort that could make mincemeat of fatcat Republicans and their Christian cohorts.

Secluding themselves forever from this only promising option the Democrats will always seesaw between the candidates of the Democratic Leadership Council, or of the embalmed Kennedy liberalism that took just as much of a trouncing on Nov. 5 as the relics of Clintonism. The results of the last election confirm something I thought at the time. Nader's run in 2000 did Democrats a huge favor. He generated political electricity that sent juice into the lifeless body of the Democratic Party. This time around Nader wasn't a big presence and the Democrats suffered in consequence. There were no jumper cables, nothing to give them the needed charge. They'd better pray for a strong radical, hopefully of the sort sketched in above, to send a little light into their tomb.

Empire of Smoke

Maybe it was the new sense of imperial national mission that gave marijuana legalizers a bad day around the country on Nov. 5. Arizonans defeated a ballot proposition that would have required the state to give away marijuana for free for medicinal use. They also passed another measure toughening penalties. By a 2-to-1 margin, Ohio voters defeated a proposed state constitutional amendment that would have required judges to prescribe treatment instead of jail time for drug-possession offenses. The campaign to make Nevada the first state with legal marijuana failed overwhelmingly as 61 percent of voters rejected the ballot's Question 9. The crusty Nevada voters also voted to add a ban on gay marriages to the state's constitution.

Here in the Emerald Triangle of Northern California, these setbacks for decriminalization or legalization haven't made much of a dent in apparent satisfaction over a good crop. In many a shanty industrious young women are busy clipping bud at handsome rates of remuneration. To my south, in Mendocino County, prosecutors aren't harassing small growers at all, reserving their sparse energies for the Mexican gangs now cultivating extensively in Mendocino National Forest. Unless they are linked to Al Qaeda, they won't be bothered much and soon we'll be back where we were at the start of the war on drugs, when marijuana cultivation on federal lands made it dangerous to go too far off the established trails.

Gandhi or Hitler?

Norman Finkelstein tells us that recently he was visiting his German publisher, who also handles Tariq Ali. Tariq's historical novels are wildly popular in Germany and fans muster from near and far to touch the hem of his garment. The publisher invited local notables to a lunch whose finale was a talk by Tariq. At one point, reviewing the great issues of peace and war, Tariq imparted the news that in 1938 the Nobel committee had been bitterly divided on whether to give the peace prize to Gandhi or Hitler. The warring factions couldn't agree, and in the end they chose the path of compromise and gave the prize to the Nansen International Office for Refugees instead.

After the lunch Norman told Tariq that he was pretty well informed on the subject of Hitler but had never heard he had been in line for the peace prize. What was the source? Tariq said he'd been waiting for his plane at Heathrow, had gone to the Gents and the fellow in the next stall had said, "You're Tariq Ali, aren't you?" Tariq owned up and the fellow said he'd been studying the history of the Nobel committee and thought Tariq would like to know how close Hitler had come to being a prince of peace. Then he dashed off, so Tariq can only cite his source as a pisser.

Of course you can see the way the pro-Hitler faction were thinking. Munich? "peace in our time?" and so on. If they'd put up a Hitler-Neville Chamberlain joint ticket for the prize they probably would have gotten it. And since you asked, the peace prize was suspended in 1939, started up again in 1944 and given to the International Committee of the Red Cross. The prize is given out in Swedish crowns. In 1938 it was worth 155,007 crowns; 10 million crowns today.

Savio's Memory

Mario Savio goes down in history as the great orator of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in the late 1960s, a galvanizing figure in the antiwar campaigns of that time. Savio died a few years ago, and last February I happened to meet Lynn Hollander, his wife. The widow Savio told me she was organizing an annual event in his memory, tied in with some award for journalistic enterprise. This all seemed fine. Then she imparted the information that the guest lecturer was to be Christopher Hitchens. Startled, I asked her whether the best way to commemorate Mario the Antiwar Organizer was to whistle up the deliriously pro-war Hitchens.

Hollander seemed surprised at my surprise. The months passed. Hitchens redoubled his war cries and then, yes, earlier this month in came a news release proclaiming that on Thurs., Nov. 21, Hitchens is scheduled by Hollander and the Free Speech Movement Cafe to lecture in Savio's memory on the UC campus in Berkeley. Also present on the podium will be Adam Hochschild. I wrote a note to Hollander, once again deploring her choice, and she responded with a note defending the decision to water Savio's memory with Hitchens' "controversial views." To me it's like getting an impenitent FBI veteran of the Hoover era to keynote an evening honoring Martin Luther King. Poor Mario.