Fences and Windows (18 page)

This process of universalization is rarely questioned, especially by those who produce global media. It’s assumed that we share a culture now: we watch the same bad movies, we all love Jennifer Lopez, we wear Nikes and eat McDonald’s, so naturally we should mourn the same deaths: of Diana or the New York firefighters. But the transmission is inevitably one-way. The global “we”—as defined by London and New York—now reaches into places that are clearly not included in its narrow perimeters, into homes and bars where local losses are not treated as global losses, where those local losses are somehow diminished relative to the grandness, the globalness of our own projected pain.

As journalists perhaps we would rather not face the effects of our calculations but we can no longer avoid them. Our parochial biases, thanks to global satellites, are there for all to see, and as we globalize our own suffering, “they” get the message that they are not “us”—not part of the global “we.” And they become very, very angry.

Since September 11, I have spoken with friends from South Africa and Iran who are furious about the outpouring of grief demanded of them in response to the attacks. They say it is racist to ask the world to mourn and avenge U.S. deaths when so many deaths in their countries go unmourned, unavenged. I have argued with these friends that this is a moral dead end, that mourning each other’s terrible losses is surely what it means to be human. And yet, I’ve come to accept, with much reluctance, that perhaps I am asking too much. Perhaps from those who have seen so much indifference to the loss of their own loved
ones, so much asymmetry of compassion, we in the West have, at least temporarily, forfeited the right to expect compassion in return.

In Canada, we have just gone through a high-profile scandal because one of the country’s leading feminists referred to America’s foreign policy as “soaked in blood.” Unacceptable, many said, in the wake of the attacks on the U.S. Some even wanted to charge her with hate speech. Defending herself against her critics, Sunera Thobani, once an immigrant to Canada, said she chose her words carefully, in order to make the point that despite the disembodied language of smart bombs, precision weapons and collateral damage, victims of U.S. aggression also bleed.

“It is an attempt to humanize these peoples in profoundly graphic terms,” she writes. “It compels us to recognize the sheer corporeality of the terrain upon which bombs rain and mass terror is waged. This language calls on ‘us’ to recognize that ‘they’ bleed just like ‘we’ do, that ‘they’ hurt and suffer just like ‘us.’”

This, it seems, is the “civilization” we are fighting for: battles over who is allowed to bleed. “Compassion,” a friend wrote to me last week, “is not a zero sum game. But there is also undeniably something unbearable in the hierarchy of death (1 American equals 2 west Europeans equals 10 Yugoslavs equals 50 Arabs equals 200 Africans), which is one part power, one part wealth, one part race.”

As media makers we need to look deeply into our own work, and ask ourselves what we are doing to feed this devaluation of human lives and the rage and recklessness
that flow from it. Traditionally, we are far too used to patting ourselves on the back, convinced that our work makes people more compassionate, more connected. Remember that satellite television was supposed to bring democracy to the world—or so we were told in 1989. Viacom International chairman Sumner Redstone once said, “We put MTV into East Germany, and the next day the Berlin Wall fell,” while Rupert Murdoch said that “satellite broadcasting makes it possible for information-hungry residents of many closed societies to bypass state-controlled television.”

And yet a decade later, it’s now clear that instead of bringing democracy, global TV has flaunted inequalities and asymmetries and sparked waves of resentment. In 1989, Western journalists were seen as allies of liberation struggles. “The whole world is watching,” crowds chanted during the Velvet Revolution and in Tiananmen Square. Now, journalists are used to being shouted down by protesters who see them as part of a system that persistently glosses over inequalities and marginalizes dissenting voices. And this week, tragically, some U.S. journalists are opening letters filled with white powder, suddenly, bewilderingly, subjects in the story they are supposed to be covering.

So much of this conflict is about who and what gets seen and heard, whose lives are counted. The attacks in New York and Washington were clearly designed not just as strikes but also as spectacle, for their theatrical charge. And they were captured from every camera angle, played and replayed, lived and relived. But what about what is going on in Afghanistan right now? The U.S. State Department has
asked TV networks and newspapers not to run bin Laden’s communications because they might arouse anti-American sentiment. And for $2 million a month, the Pentagon has purchased exclusive rights to the entire capacity of the only private satellite over Afghanistan that provides high enough resolution that you can see human beings.

If we could see the images on our television screens— human casualties, refugees fleeing—it might mean that the death and destruction in Afghanistan would begin, in some small way, to take on the same sort of reality and humanity as the deaths in New York and Washington. We would have to confront actual people instead of looking at a sterile video game. But none of the images can be released without Defense Department approval—ever.

This silent war over whose lives are counted, whose deaths are collectively mourned, long predates September 11. Indeed, much of the shock of September 11 had to do with how much global suffering was all but invisible in the mainstream U.S. press, pushed aside by the euphoria of prosperity and trade.

And so, on September 11, America woke up in the middle of a war only to find out that the war had been going on for years—but no one told them. They were hearing about OJ instead of the devastating effects of economic sanctions on Iraqi children. They were hearing about Monica instead of the fallout from the bombing of that pharmaceutical factory. They were learning about
Survivor
instead of the role the CIA had played in financing the Mujahedeen warriors. “Here’s the rub,” writes the Indian novelist,
Arundhati Roy, “America is at war against people it doesn’t know, because they don’t appear much on TV.”

Christopher Isherwood once wrote about Americans that “the Europeans hate us because we’ve retired to live inside our advertisements, like hermits going into caves to contemplate.” This retreat into a self-referential media cocoon goes some way toward explaining why the attacks of September 11 seemed to come not from another country but from another planet—a parallel universe, such was the disorientation and dislocation.

But instead of backing up and filling this gap—of information, of analysis, of understanding—we hear instead a chorus: this came out of nowhere, it is inexplicable, it has no past; “they” hate us; they want to take away our democracies, our liberties, our stuff. Instead of asking why the attacks happened, our television networks simply play them over again.

Just when Americans most need information about the outside world—and their country’s complicated and troubling place in it—they are only getting themselves reflected back, over and over and over: Americans weeping, Americans recovering, Americans cheering, Americans praying. A media house of mirrors, when what we all need are more windows on the world.

October 2001

There are many contenders for Biggest Political Opportunist since the September 11 atrocities: politicians ramming through life-changing laws while voters are still mourning, corporations diving for public cash, pundits accusing their opponents of treason. Yet amid the chorus of draconian proposals and McCarthyite threats, one voice of opportunism still stands out. That voice belongs to Robyn Mazer. She is using September 11 to call for an international crackdown on counterfeit T-shirts.

Not surprisingly, Mazer is a trade lawyer in Washington. Even less surprising, she specializes in trade laws that protect the United States’ single largest export: copyright. That’s music, movies, logos, seed patents, software and much more. TRIPS (trade-related intellectual property rights) is one of the most controversial side agreements in the run-up to the November 2001 World Trade Organization meeting in Qatar. It is the battleground for disputes ranging from Brazil’s right to disseminate generic AIDS drugs to China’s thriving market in knock-off Britney Spears CDs.

American multinationals are desperate to gain access to these large markets, but they want protection. Many poor
countries, meanwhile, say TRIPS costs millions to police, while strangleholds on intellectual property drive up costs for local industries and consumers.

What does any of this trade wrangling have to do with terrorism? Nothing, absolutely nothing. Unless, of course, you ask Robyn Mazer, who wrote an article last week in
The Washington Post
headlined, “From T-shirts to terrorism; that fake Nike swoosh may be helping fund bin Laden’s network.”

She writes, “Recent developments suggest that many of the governments suspected of supporting al-Qaeda are also promoting, being corrupted by, or at the very least ignoring highly lucrative trafficking in counterfeit and pirated products capable of generating huge money flows to terrorists.”

“Suggest,” “suspected of,” “at the very least,” “capable of—that’s a lot of hedging for one sentence, especially from someone who used to work in the U.S. Department of Justice. But the conclusion is unambiguous: you either enforce TRIPS or you are with the terrorists. Welcome to the brave new world of trade negotiations, where every arcane clause is infused with the righteousness of a holy war.

Robyn Mazer’s political opportunism raises some interesting contradictions. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick has been using September 11 for another opportunistic goal: to secure “fast track” trade-negotiating power for President George W. Bush, which would give him free rein to negotiate new trade deals that Congress could either accept or reject but not amend. According to Zoellick, these new powers are needed because trade “promotes the values at the heart of this protracted struggle.”

What do new trade deals have to do with fighting terrorism? Well, the terrorists, we are told, hate America precisely because they hate consumerism: McDonald’s and Nike and capitalism—you know, freedom. To trade is therefore to defy their ascetic crusade, to spread the very products they loathe.

But wait a minute: what about all those fakes Mazer says are bankrolling terror? In Afghanistan, she claims, you can buy “T-shirts bearing counterfeit Nike logos and glorifying bin Laden as ‘The great mujahid of Islam.’” It seems we are facing a much more complicated scenario than the facile dichotomy of a consumerist McWorld versus an anti-consumer jihad. If Mazer is correct, not only are the two worlds thoroughly enmeshed, the imagery of McWorld is being used to finance jihad.

Maybe a little complexity isn’t so bad. Part of the disorientation many Americans now face has to do with the inflated and oversimplified place that consumerism plays in the American narrative. To buy is to be. To buy is to love. To buy is to vote. People outside the U.S. who want Nikes—even counterfeit Nikes—must want to be American, must love America, must in some way be voting for everything America stands for.

This has been the fairy tale since 1989, when the same media companies that are bringing us America’s “war on terrorism” proclaimed that their television satellites would topple dictatorships the world over. Consumption would lead to freedom. But all these easy narratives are breaking down: authoritarianism co-exists with consumerism, desire for American products is mixed with rage at inequality.

Nothing exposes these contradictions more clearly than the trade wars raging over “fake” goods. Pirating thrives in the deep craters of global inequality, when demand for consumer goods is decades ahead of purchasing power. It thrives in China, where goods made in export-only sweatshops are sold for more than factory workers make in a month. In Africa, where the price of AIDS drugs is a cruel joke. In Brazil, where CD pirates are feted as musical Robin Hoods.

Complexity is lousy for opportunism. But it does help us get closer to the truth, even if it means sorting through a lot of fakes.

November 2001

What do you call someone who believes so firmly in the promise of salvation through a set of rigid rules that he is willing to risk his own life to spread those rules? A religious fanatic? A holy warrior? How about a U.S. trade negotiator?

On Friday, the World Trade Organization begins its meeting in Doha, Qatar. According to U.S. security briefings, there is reason to believe that al-Qaeda, which has plenty of fans in the Persian Gulf state, has managed to get some of its operatives into the country, including an explosives specialist. Some terrorists may even have infiltrated the Qatari military. Given these threats, you might think that the United States and the WTO would have cancelled the meeting. But not these true believers.

Instead, U.S. delegates have been kitted out with gas masks, two-way radios and drugs to combat bioterrorism. (Canadian delegates have been issued the drugs as well.) As negotiators wrangle over agricultural subsidies, softwood lumber and pharmaceutical patents, helicopters will be waiting to whisk U.S. delegates onto aircraft carriers parked in the Persian Gulf, ready for a Batman-style getaway. It’s safe to say that Doha isn’t your average trade
negotiation; it’s something new. Call it Kamikaze Capitalism.

Last week, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick praised his delegation for being willing to “sacrifice” in the face of such “undoubted risks.” Why are they doing it? Probably for the same reason people have always put their lives on the line for a cause: they believe in a set of rules that promises transcendence.