Mormons and Marines - the American way of life

I’ve just returned from a week in the US. The real US, not the one that appears at the extremities. I’ve done New York, San Fran, La, Seattle and New Orleans/Texas before – but those aren’t really the US. Those cities are melting pots of different cultures from around the US, but the US is very very big. Very big.

No, I was in Virgina, which required a flight from Dublin to Atlanta and then on again to Roanoke. It was an interesting trip and I had some of my comfortable prejudices challenged. I expected . . . well, I dont' know really. More unreasonable people I guess.

I spent a week hanging out with republicans, fundamentalist southern Baptists, mormons and marines, and to my surprise the majority of them where actually really cool people. Some of them took for granted a world view which horrifies me in its complacency, but most of them were quite open to meeting me, and would probably say the same thing about meeting a dirty filthy European liberal media type.

Anyway, before going I decided I would do my best to avoid getting into discussing politics and of course, I found myself doing exactly that. Many of the people I talked to brought up the topic themselves, and were really curious to understand how America’s actions are perceived by a European and the wider world.

An amazing number of people in the US (and in Ireland, for that matter) seem to have adopted the ‘if you’re not with us, you’re against us’ mentality and have real difficulty with the idea that you can be pro-America and anti-war on terror very easily.

I love America. When it's cool, it's very cool, and its people are on the whole charming, its culture welcoming and its national character upbeat and optimistic. However, America has changed since I was last there and not for the better, in my opinion. US flags hang out of virtually every house and I can’t help but ask why? Patriotism is a laudable thing in any culture, but we are dealing with a nation in which 70 per cent of the population will never own a passport, and so will never experience another culture but their own, unless they serve in the military or perhaps spend time in a significantly different city in the US. So it's not national pride, at least not in the sense of national pride in a community where other nationalities are prominent.

So why the flags? Why are these powerful symbols being hung out and who for? It can’t be for lily-livered western media types who happens to wander through their neighbourhood – no, obviously they are for themselves, so that they can express their pride in their American-ness and probably also so that they can show solidarity with the young men and women who have gone off to war in the Middle East.

Whatever my personal feelings about the war, I have nothing but respect for the people who actually go and fight it. They are very brave and I believe once committed to the action shouldn't personally have to deal with the debate that ensues on the issue once they have made the commitment to do a job where they may lose their lives.

I have difficulty imagining that many of them really appreciate the bigger picture at work here, but that’s a secondary issue next to their willingness to risk their lives for something they believe in. (The chief tragedy here is that they think this is required, but they trust their leaders and think it’s the right thing to do.) On my way home from the US, I flew through Atlanta where I watched a plane load of uniformed soldiers board a flight for Shannon, and to a man they looked about 18. Perhaps I am patronising these intelligent human beings, but when I was 18, I really didn't have a clue about ANYTHING, let alone the correct way to play a part in international policing.

However, I have no doubt whatsoever that these soldiers believe in what they are doing, as they should. This is all the more reason why the middle aged men in expensive tailored suits that are responsible for putting them there should be hung out to dry in the effort to examine their motivations and the ideals they are pushing.

I had a conversation with a nice man one evening last week who is a card-carrying Southern Baptist Bush-supporting Republican about the role of journalism in the media there and he was firmly of the opinion that the Abu Ghraib photos shouldn't have been published in a time of war. He thought the people involved should have been privately disciplined severely, but that given the extenuating circumstances of an ongoing war, the media should have supported the boys at the front line and not made their families at home wonder if what was going on was justifiable. I just couldn't agree, so being adults, we agreed to differ.

While in the US I happened to pick up a US army recruitment flyer, and it uses the kind of trite rhetoric all armies recruiting everywhere uses – “take your place at the front line of defending the American way of life.” But what is that?

These flags flying all across the States represent the fact that the wagons are circling and that this culture is building a wall between what it perceives to be itself and everyone else. This will be George Bush’s legacy, and it’s a shameful thing – he has created, through his ‘war on terror’ a thing we haven’t before seen in the modern history of America in its interaction with the rest of the free world.

The idea that Americans need to defend the ‘American way of life’ as if you can say what that is in any meaningful way that is unique to the US in the modern world. The American way of life is also the Irish way of life, and the British way of life and the European way of live and the Japanese way of life – truth, justice and liberty for all. Liberte, Egalite et Fraternite – the republican ideals.

But by giving the people at the heartland of America in the biblebelt and elsewhere the impression that these ideas aren’t respected ideals in the rest of the world and that they are (not were, but are – a crucial difference) somehow intrinsically American, the current administration has driven a wedge between America and it’s friends, and it’s very hard to see what has been gained. To be clear, I'm not talking about deposing Sadaam Husein, or even the decision to invade Iraq, but rather the atmosphere that has been deliberately and cynically created to make criticism of these acts almost impossible in a meaningful way. In the US today, the French are ranked just behind the Iraqi insurgent as a threat to the American way of life. Does that make sense?

(By the way, apologies to any mormons reading this, as it's not really about mormonism, although the title does make for good turn of phrase.)