THE MEDIA AND OUR COUNTRY'S AGENDA
601
tic avant-gardists, for example, have failed, in the midst of their self–
scrutiny, to make distinctions between self-criticism and self-condemna–
tion. An example of injustice becomes evidence of absolute injustice. On
the international scene, both among the radicals of the anti-globalization
movement and among seemingly far more moderate commentators on
the left, American democratic culture itself is treated as a form of totali–
tarian culture, a form of fundamentalism seeking absolute power. Speak–
ing in the name of the West, the West is named as one of the greatest
violators of its own principles. Western imperialism becomes a variety of
original sin; the idea of universality or democracy becomes what one
scholar has called a "strategy of imperial control." In such a world, any
act
against
the West by a postcolonial nation can be seen as a reaction to
an act
by
the West. The ideology of democracy is also at work. Who is
to judge villainy or value? Western imperialism is seen as the root cause
of terrorism, the evil of the former leading to the evil of the latter, thus
creating a symmetry demanded by democratic ideology.
This is not the time to fully examine the flaws in this set of ideas-or
to show how, after weakening in the wake of
9/II,
it is now being mis–
applied with a brutish and brutal vengeance to the Middle East. It is
enough to suggest that with its attempt to assert equality, reason, and
universality, it is itself a child of the democratic culture it attacks. Is it
too much to hope that if this war continues-as I believe it must-that
it will also lead to a transformation of these aspects of democratic cul–
ture? The avant-garde impulses of democratic culture will remain, but
the nature of its dissent may change. The nature of the ideology of
democracy may change as well, particularly as it is applied internation–
ally. Is it still possible to insist that one culture cannot and should not
judge another? Can cultural symmetry and its aesthetic counterparts be
so confidently upheld as we learn more and more of the extent of inher–
ent differences? The statue being planned for the World Trade Center
site may be one of the first realistic and heroic statues mounted in
decades. There are ways all of this can go awry-and the world's reac–
tions to the Middle East based on sentimental models of thought worry
me-but democratic culture may very well change.
It
won't change its character-its raffish ignobility and excesses, its
frenetic amusements and demotic insistences, its intoxicating pleasures
and strenuous dissents, and its sometimes profound aspirations. But the
democratic self-scorn and the widespread refusal to admit difference
and distinction may weaken. Whitman dreamed of an American culture
that was based on "the average, the bodily, the concrete, the democra–
tic, the popular." Perhaps all of that will remain unchanged. But Whit-
