Why 100 Ways?
This short note on the new book addresses just why I'm publishing this pungent and challenging commentary.
In the Newsweek interview, I was asked if 100 Ways would be seen as an "anti-American" diatribe, and a television interview later this month is meant to focus on the same question. It's a reasonable thing to ask, and part of the broader self-doubt that has gripped the right wing in recent years.
The tart answer I give is that 100 Ways is "tough love" for America. We have, all of us, habits, prejudices, ideologies, and reactions that produce unfortunate effects on the rest of the world. We don't realize the powerful impacts that the smallest predilections have elsewhere. This lack of awareness of how our appetites create seismic effects across the oceans and continents is remarkable, and largely neglected in American political discourse.
The need for tough love is just as apparent with respect to intentional U.S. policy. Much has gone badly awry in our foreign policy, this much is apparent. The catastrophe in the Middle East is a sad testament to the fundamental errors of American globalism. Unfair economic policies, environmental irresponsibility, cultural domination, bullying, and insistence on rigid and outdated philosophies are evident in every corner of the world.
Is it anti-American to explore such imperfections? I regard this, instead, as a consummate act of good citizenship. Being a citizen is not being a cheerleader. In its fullest sense, it means taking the polity and its people seriously, caring about the way people relate to each other, to governance, and to the values that they share. For people who make their living with their intellect and knowledge, it also means bringing that knowledge and those intellectual skills to the public arena of debate and action. To engage less, and less honestly, would be an act of cowardice.
The charges of anti-Americanism come from a ruling clique that has lost confidence in the persuasiveness of their arguments and values, and seek to turn attention away from the ruins of their governance.
It's not a coincidence that Howard Zinn wrote the foreword to 100 Ways. I have known him for more than thirty years, coming to Boston to study with him and being his friend and admirer ever since. Howard is, ironically, the ultimate citizen. His People's History of the United States is deservedly popular, but I also advise reading The Politics of History and other early works. There he sorts out these nettles of what it means to be a citizen, a scholar, someone who is actually engaged with people and their environments and the state and the world. In his 1970 essay, "Knowledge as a Form of Power," he writes, "we might use our scholarly time and energy to sharpen the perceptions of the complascent by exposing those facts that any society tends to hide about itself: the facts about wealth and poverty; about tyranny in both communist and capitalist states; about lies told by politicians, by the mass media, by the church, by popular leaders . . . In short, we need to become the critics of the culture, rather than its apologists and perpetrators."
That is the spirit of this little book I've written. It is by turns scathing and humorous---because we need to have fun with ourselves and our icons---and it swings from criticism to construction, showing that there are other ways for America to act in the world, ways to be proud of. In this Web site, I take that further by providing ideas and links to the activists who are trying to make better things happen. It is, in this sense, a celebration. Welcome to the party.
-- John Tirman
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