“There’s a Bosnian saying: If you plant pumpkins with the devil, they will be smashed against your head,” says Aleksandar Hemon, expressing his doubts about a new partnership between the National Endowment for the Arts, the Defense Department, and Boeing aimed at recording the experiences of American soldiers in Iraq. “I have not stopped being suspicious of any project that is blessed by Paul Wolfowitz or any state agency.”
AH: Absolutely. One of the ways to diagnose this is “American nationalism is on the march”–a nationalism in all its pathology, all these years of training citizens in terms of seemingly benign nationalism: pledging the allegiance, tearing up in front of the flag, worshipping the uniform, repeating the best stories about founding fathers and George Washington never telling a lie, singing the anthem before any goddamn sports event.
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This whole logic of nationalism unites the nation, but it also means weeding out all those who are disloyal. This catastrophic notion that if you criticize your president and the army you’re helping the enemy implies, at the very least, democracy is something worth protecting only when there is no war. And there’s always war. When is this going to stop if you can’t criticize it? So there’s us and there’s them, and you have to choose your side. In the meantime everybody gets excited over this and thinks in terms of abstractions, and the nation’s united and it’s one big fantasy world.
AH: No. I think Osama bin Laden, whatever he represents, is my enemy. Too bad they’re not fighting him. But I also think that Bush and the class and forces he represents are my enemy. They want to undo the life that I have. They’re attacking what I believe in. They are undermining everything that constitutes my life. They are fighting against the world as I would like it to be. It’s that simple, really, and I’m not going to unite with them at any fucking point. I might be a bad American, which is very possible since I’m a foreigner anyway.
AH: I read the Tribune, and if their editorials are judgments of reality then they’ve completely failed us. It completely disqualifies whatever facts they have presented journalistically. They don’t give a flying fuck–I mean, they never have, really–about Chicago and people who are vastly Democratic. It’s a suburban paper.
MT: Why is it not an issue?
AH: Two things: one is the fantasy of greatness, which is persistent in American ideology–
