Arundhati Roy and America

Booker Prize winning author Arundhati Roy [is she in your list, Jigga?] is publishing another book about critical of the American Empire, brilliantly titled An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire. It follows from her poignant essay "The Algebra of Infinite Justice" (2001):

In the aftermath of the unconscionable September 11 suicide attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre, an American newscaster said: "Good and evil rarely manifest themselves as clearly as they did last Tuesday. People who we don't know massacred people who we do. And they did so with contemptuous glee." Then he broke down and wept.

Here's the rub: America is at war against people it doesn't know, because they don't appear much on TV. Before it has properly identified or even begun to comprehend the nature of its enemy, the US government has, in a rush of publicity and embarrassing rhetoric, cobbled together an "international coalition against terror", mobilised its army, its air force, its navy and its media, and committed them to battle.

The trouble is that once America goes off to war, it can't very well return without having fought one. If it doesn't find its enemy, for the sake of the enraged folks back home, it will have to manufacture one. Once war begins, it will develop a momentum, a logic and a justification of its own, and we'll lose sight of why it's being fought in the first place.

What we're witnessing here is the spectacle of the world's most powerful country reaching reflexively, angrily, for an old instinct to fight a new kind of war. Suddenly, when it comes to defending itself, America's streamlined warships, cruise missiles and F-16 jets look like obsolete, lumbering things. As deterrence, its arsenal of nuclear bombs is no longer worth its weight in scrap. Box-cutters, penknives, and cold anger are the weapons with which the wars of the new century will be waged. Anger is the lock pick. It slips through customs unnoticed. Doesn't show up in baggage checks.

Arundhati Roy's work resonates with a spectacular tendency for the unexpected: "anger is the lock pick. It slips through customs unnoticed..." Beautifully rendered portrayal of the oncoming American reaction to 9/11.

In Ordinary Person's, she continues the line of sharp-witted analysis mixed with sharp, often contemptuous, political advocacy. She loathes the American reaction because it feels hipocritical, ingenuine, severely lacking, manipulative, against the global citizenry and against America's own citizens. Go check it out.