I write in the night, but I see not only the tyranny. If that were so, I would probably not have the courage to continue. I see people sleeping, stirring, getting up to drink water, whispering their projects or their fears, making love, praying, cooking something while the rest of the family sleeps, in Baghdad and Chicago. (Yes, I see too the forever invincible Kurds, 4,000 of whom were gassed, with U.S. compliance, by Saddam Hussein.) I see pastry cooks working in Teheran, and the shepherds, thought of as bandits, sleeping beside their sheep in Sardinia; I see a man in the Friedrichshain quarter of Berlin sitting in his pajamas with a bottle of beer reading Heidegger and he has the hands of a proletarian. I see a small boat of illegal immigrants off the Spanish coast near Alicante; I see a mother in Ghana, her name is Aya, which means Born on Friday, swaying her baby to sleep; I see the ruins of Kabul and a man going home; and I know that, despite the pain, the ingenuity of the survivors is undiminished, an ingenuity which scavenges and collects energy, and, in the ceaseless cunning of this ingenuity, there is a spiritual value, something like the Holy Ghost.
I am convinced of this in the night, although I don’t know why. The next step is to reject all the tyranny’s discourse. Its terms are crap. In the interminably repetitive speeches, announcements, press conferences, and threats, the recurrent terms are Democracy, Justice, Human Rights, Terrorism. Each word in the context signifies the opposite of what it was once meant to. Each has been trafficked; each has become a gang’s code word, stolen from humanity.
Democracy is a proposal (rarely realized) about decision-making; it has little to do with election campaigns. Its promise is that political decisions be made after, and in the light of, consultation with the governed. This is dependent upon the governed being adequately informed about the issues in question, and upon the decision-makers having the capacity and will to listen and take account of what they have heard.
Democracy should not be confused with the “freedoms” of binary choices, the publication of opinion polls, or the crowding of people into statistics. These are its pretense.
Today the fundamental decisions, which effect the unnecessary pain increasingly suffered across the planet, are being made unilaterally without any open consultation or participation. For instance, how many U.S. citizens, if consulted, would have said Yes to George W. Bush’s withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol over the carbon-dioxide greenhouse effect, which is already provoking disastrous floods in many places and threatens, within the next twenty-five years, far worse disasters?
It is a little more than a century ago that Dvorák composed his Symphony from the New World. He wrote it while directing the National Conservatory of Music in New York, and the writing of it inspired him to compose, eighteen months later, still in New York, his sublime Cello Concerto. In the symphony, the horizons and rolling hills of his native Bohemia become the promises of the New World. Not grandiloquent but loud and continuing, for they correspond to the longings of thse without power, of those who are wrongly called simple, of those the U.S. Constitution addressed in 1787. I know of no other work of art that expresses so directly and yet so toughly (Dvorák was the son of a peasant, and his father once dreamed of his becoming a butcher) the beliefs that inspired generation after generation of migrants who became U.S. citizens. For Dvorák the force of those beliefs was inseparable from a kind of tenderness, a respect for life such as can be found intimately among the governed (as distinct from the governors) everywhere. And it was in this spirit that the symphony was publicly received when it was first performed at Carnegie Hall on December 16, 1893. Dvorák was asked what he thought about the future of American music, and he recommended that U.S. composers listen to the music of the Indians and blacks. The Symphony from the New World expressed a hopefulness without frontiers which, paradoxically, is welcoming because centered on an idea of home. A utopian paradox.
Today the power of the same country that inspired such hopes has fallen into the hands of a coterie of fanatical (wanting to limit everything except the power of capital), ignorant (recognizing only the reality of their own firepower, hypocritical (two measures for all ethical judgments, one for us and another for them), and ruthless B-52 plotters. How did this happen? The question is rhetorical, for there is no single answer, and it is idle, for no answer will dent their power yet. But to ask it in this way in the night reveals the enormity of what has happened.
—from WHERE ARE WE? by John Berger, from the introduction to Between the Eyes, Essays on Photography and Politics, by David Levi Strauss, excerpted in the March 2003 Harper’s
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Little Bristling Soul 