Re: [Marxism] Saint Simon Schama's Must See TV

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=10594
The American Future
Book Review by John Newsinger, November 2008

Simon Schama, The Bodley Head, £20

Simon Schama was one of the historians invited by Gordon Brown to meet 
George Bush at Downing Street on 16 June 2008. Attendance at the event 
was not easy, Schama tells us: he had to reconcile his "uneasy 
conscience" by telling himself that if he was in the history business, 
how could he possibly stay away? He was worried that he was being 
somehow "implicated". And, indeed, he was. You cannot play the role of 
courtier, with no matter how many private reservations, to a torturer, a 
mass murderer and a war criminal without being "implicated".

Moreover, what Schama was in pursuit of in Downing Street was not 
history, but celebrity. History would have been made if he had 
confronted Bush with his crimes and repudiated US imperialism. Instead 
he told Bush how much he agreed with his liberal immigration policy!

Schama recounts the inglorious story of his Downing Street visit in his 
new book, The American Future: A History, written to accompany a new 
BBC2 documentary series. It securely establishes him as Britain's 
premier celebrity historian, as history's Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, 
so to speak.

The American Future sets out to reassure those appalled by the Bush 
presidency that there is hope for the US - and its name is Barack Obama. 
"The American future", he tells us, "is all vision, numinous, unformed, 
light-headed with anticipation. The American past is baggy with sobering 
truth. In between is the quicksilver Now, beads of glittering elation 
that slip and scatter, resisting prosaic definition. Obama wants to 
personify all these tenses." Leaving aside the fact that this is 
excruciatingly bad writing, the reason Schama is forced to resort to 
such empty, meaning less rhetoric is because any "prosaic" examination 
of Obama reveals a man wholeheartedly committed to the interests of US 
imperialism, both at home and abroad. Indeed, his most prosaic foreign 
policy statements have, for example, been endorsement of the Zionist 
claim to Jerusalem and a declaration that he will violate Pakistan's 
sovereignty if and when he likes, once president.

On another occasion Schama rubs shoulders with veterans of US colonial 
wars in the Drop Zone cafe in San Antonio. He meets the "good-natured 
General Valenzuela". He, we are told, had "taken on the Farc in Colombia 
and was therefore unlikely to be a pussycat". Unlikely to be a pussycat! 
The US proxy war in Colombia is a history of torture and massacre, with 
many people horrifically put to death for the crime of belonging to a 
trade union. "Unlikely to be a pussycat" is an obscene response to the 
crimes that have been committed there.

To be fair, he does condemn the "unspeakable sadism at Abu Ghraib" and 
there is no doubting his personal opposition to the invasion of Iraq. 
The problem is that anyone reading this book in the hope of finding out 
why the US invaded Iraq will be none the wiser once they've finished it. 
The book does not provide a serious history of the US empire, of why the 
US spends more on arms than the rest of the world put together, of why 
there are US bases in over 60 foreign countries, of how this empire in 
decline is increasingly resorting to military force to maintain its 
international position. Similarly, there is no account whatsoever of 
that great US institution that figures in the history of so many other 
countries, the CIA. On top of this, much of the book is very badly 
written with passage after passage of excruciatingly embarrassing prose 
as Schama strains after the common touch. This is a bad book, regardless 
of any political disagreements. An ideal Christmas present for people 
you don't like.

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