Even the sports scene has been mixed; the cricket World Cup final was a bore, and golfer Jean van der Velde’s collapse in the British Open wasn’t even funny. Sure, there have been bright spots, like Lance Armstrong’s victory over cancer and the Tour de France (though the French press did its best to ruin that), and America’s triumph in the women’s football World Cup, which did wonders for sports bras. And there’s always the amazing success of Harry Potter. But just as one starts to hope that we can get out of July with no more misery, some young backpackers die needlessly on what should have been a wonderful vacation in Switzerland, and along comes a sad madman in Atlanta, killing 12 people in a few days of carnage.
In the United States, we have become sadly inoculated to events like the Atlanta killings. Of course, some mass murders really do provoke a sense of national soul-searching–the shootings in the high school at Littleton, Colorado, earlier this year are a good example. But by and large, America’s political leadership takes a world-weary attitude to mass murder. Hey, these things happen.
Not in other rich, democratic countries they don’t; at least, not with the regularity that they do in the United States. The point here is not, I think, that America is an especially violent country; where I grew up, ugly fights broke out in the pubs every Friday night, something I’ve never seen in an American bar. The distinctive truth about the United States is that it is an armed nation; or to put it more precisely, a nation where arms are easily available. Every place in the world has men who for one reason or another tip over the edge of sanity, teenagers who feel lost and confused. Only in the United States, among the developed nations, can such people easily vent their deadly rage with firearms. To the rest of the world, America’s seeming inability to even start the long process of gun control is an indictment of a political system that can’t get its priorities straight.
Does this old critique of America matter? Or is it just the usual smug condescension about Uncle Sam that has always tempted non-Americans? I think it does matter. For the safety and prosperity of the world, it is vital that the democracies learn how to live together and work together. No nation, however strong, can do everything on its own. That was one of the many important lessons of Kosovo, and it is a lesson that will have to be learned again as we deal with the crises of the next century. Because the United States has a preponderance of power–military, economic, political and cultural–it is indeed indispensable to the solution of any of the world’s problems.
Yet indispensability does not automatically translate into either respect or affection. Indeed, for many outside America’s shores, the nation can still seem satisfied with social conditions that elsewhere would indicate a crisis of the soul. As the French commentator Dominique Moisi–a firm friend of America–wrote in the Financial Times last week, “There is a growing sense of distance between Europe and the U.S.” America, said Moisi, “must avoid defining its priorities solely in relation to its immediate domestic calendar, and must not impose its legal mentality and religious vision of politics in complete indifference to the sensitivities of others… It will progressively alienate itself from the rest of the world if it sticks to policies ranging from carrying out death penalties to neglecting environmental concerns.” Or, I might add, if it appears helpless to do anything about the widespread availability of deadly firearms.
Oh well; enough of these gloomy thoughts. I’m off to Devon, to watch the total eclipse of the sun. And read “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.”
