Amerika Psycho: Behind Uncle Sam's Mask of Sanity
By Richard Neville
Ocean Press, 2002
126 pages, $18.95 (pb)
REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON
"The wounded Goliath" (the US after the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001) "is on a rampage armed to the teeth, adored by the polls, unfettered by law, answering to no one and licensed to kill", writes a fuming Richard Neville in Amerika Psycho.
The veteran hippie musters all his flowerpower against the firepower of a US military machine on the loose, having gorged on the "limb-torn children" of Afghanistan and seeking its next sacrificial victim in Iraq. What is needed, says Neville, is an outbreak of peace, love and harmony as President George Bush marshals the awesome maiming and killing power of the US armed forces in a "belligerent imperialism ... that is prepared to ravage the whole of Earth in order to foster, for its spoilt elite, a lifestyle of careless opulence" by securing America's "grip on the wealth of the world" including its oil (25% of which is consumed by the US which has just 5% of the world's population).
US bombing sprees both "incubate terror" and feed into a "terror scare", a closed loop which tightens the "psychic gridlock of us/them, good/evil".
Rallying the people behind a War on Terror, says Neville, is a deliberate policy of the Pentagon which feeds news items (some true, many false) to the world's journalists in order to manipulate people's emotions.
Not that a war-lusting corporate media with a missile fetish needs lying to. They know which side their corporate profits are buttered on (a world submissive to the dictates of US capitalism and its junior associates like Australia) just as they know they have to "minimise" the reports of civilian casualties to prevent people losing faith in Bush's crusade.
To the US Marine who felt patriotically abused by such ideas, Neville replies that it is the "ruthlessness of corporate America", US foreign policy and US cultural dominance that he is taking to task, not the American people, in or out of uniform, "most of whom are oblivious to the deeds done in their name".
Neville's splendidly furious essay on the aftermath of 9/11 is not just about the US war on Afghanistan but the war for the "soul of the future". Bush, in gunning for war and mocking the Kyoto treaty on global warming, has joined his former presidential peers who unleashed the rabid dogs of war and gave the two fingers to international agreements on "war crimes, land mines, biochemical weapons, the prohibition of the execution of juveniles, arms controls, test bans and even the Convention on the Rights of the Child (standing alone with Somalia)".
With the refusal (alongside ever-loyal Australia) to ratify the UN protocol against torture in July this year, this is a long-playing record of callous selfishness which has peeled away the mask of Uncle Sam, "revealing him for what he is, in all his savagery and nonchalance a glutton and a psychopath".
At the head of the glutton's table sits Microsoft's Bill Gates (net worth equal to the combined assets of the poorest 120 million Americans) and others of the richest 1% who have as much financial wealth as the poorest 90% (the most unequal distribution of wealth in the world). On their behalf, and with their campaign donations, President "G. W. (Global Warming) Bush" is continuing the policy of Papa Bush who at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit declared "the American way of life is not negotiable". The consumption by the US of 30% of the world's resources, and the voiding of 30% of the world's greenhouse gases, will continue.
The global order is fashioned in the US corporate and political image and, returning to Australia, Neville suffers a "spontaneous acid flashback" (a condition afflicting ageing baby boomers who took LSD in the 1960s) when Neville sees visions not of Lucy in the sky with diamonds but of the Australian hippies' old foes of "military bands and teary, repetitive speeches about the Anzac spirit", "state censorship and cloddish attorney generals", "a timid media and a whipped-up fear of the yellow peril on the high seas", "a beefed-up secret police, random surveillance, a compromised public service", "bubblegum pop, cowed academics, a fossilised labor party and the incessant glorification of greed".
Neville sings the old hippie anthems with feeling. No to war, give peace a chance. No to consumerism, for a "life beyond shopping". For community, not competition. He pleads for a "fairness revolution" to bring his dreams to fruit, to "rescue the future" by evolving towards "connection, collaboration, community and consciousness". Alas, flowerpower (a revolution of values, waged on the battlefield of ideas and counter-lifestyles) was never going to be enough in the '60s and won't be enough now.
When it comes to who, how and with what tools the "bridge to the future" is to be built, a big concrete dollop of socialist politics (class struggle against capitalist economic and state power) would not go astray if we are to turn Neville's sentiments into strategies.
Nevertheless, the journey to a human future of equality and life for all will be seriously enjoyable in the company of Neville whose satirical wit, honest rage and sheer human goodness promise a never-dull joust against the war-mongers and greed merchants of the world's capitalist regimes.
Despite Neville's spirit slumping at the fear that the US-tinted corporate worldview has reached into the hearts and minds, as well as the pockets, of the world's citizens ("students once brooded in fashionable cafes, chatting about poetry, romance and revolution, now they prattle on mobiles about stock options, digital cameras and software solutions"), he doesn't kneel before pessimism for too long.
"Now is not the time to slink back into our shells, muttering that people are brutes, that we never change." Just as history resonates with success (slavery gone; the Vietnam War ended with the defeat of the US; racism, sexism and homophobia shaken and wobbly in the First World), the "future is up for grabs" and Neville's hand is there to help.
From Green Left Weekly, October 16, 2002.
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