Commencement Speech to Graduates of the Bush Years: Empire Continues in the Obama Era

By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com. Posted June 12, 2009.

And it wasn't that he hadn't come up against the dangers of the Cold War either. Like most Americans, he had found himself right at the edge of world's end on October 22, 1962, the night President Kennedy appeared on radio and television to announce that the Soviet Union and the United States were facing off over nuclear missiles to be emplaced in Cuba, and the world was at the brink of destruction. The Cuban Missile Crisis, it would be called.

He was then 18 years old. Like many Americans at that moment, he thought he might be toast by morning; that his life, which (as far as he could tell) showed no sign of having begun, might well be over. Of course, that world of ashes and cinders never came to be, and as you know he made it to graduation. By then, he had taken his first modest steps toward opposing an American war in Vietnam, signed his first petition, and gone to his first demonstration, ever so hesitantly because he really was a good American boy and these were not things you were then brought up to do, or did thoughtlessly.

He was living in a city, New Haven, where young people wore jackets with CIA emblazoned on the back. (It stood, believe it or not, for the Culinary Institute of America.) And he knew graduate students, returning from far-flung places like Indonesia, where, in 1965, at least 500,000 communists had been slaughtered, who were regularly debriefed by the CIA. But no one he met thought such things out of the ordinary. He knew people who had been garrisoned in Japan, Germany, and elsewhere. There were hints galore of what world we were really living in. But you couldn't have proved it by him. American Empire? No way, not in those days. It didn't go with George Washington, the Revolution, the Pony Express, or the Civil War.

It wasn't an American word. There was, of course, the Soviet Empire. And there had been the British and Roman Empires, which were huge but nothing to brag about, and then there was us, and what we were committed to was, as everyone still said then, the Free World. As at least a partial explanation for what he didn't grasp, let me point out that the United States was surfing the crest of so much wealth, was so dominant and powerful that, no matter the imperial stupidities and crimes of its agents, overt and covert, committed in its name or not, blowback was slow to come. As with the Iranians, blowback could then take 26 years, not as now months, weeks, or days. It was, in a sense, easier not to notice, though evidently not so much easier given how few seem to notice today.

While he could, then, see flaws in the Manichaean version of our universe that surrounded him, he still considered Vietnam at worst a tragic blunder or error, and he still hoped someday to be an American diplomat or, via the United States Information Agency, to be able to explain to confused foreigners what was best about our country.

If you had claimed that he lived in an imperial garrison state in 1966, he would undoubtedly have sat you down and explained to you, in all seriousness, why that couldn't be so. Despite President Dwight D. Eisenhower's farewell address in 1961, he paid little attention to the military-industrial complex and might not, then, even have known the term.

It has to be said that while, for some, the gift that kept on giving in terms of understanding how our world worked was the Civil Rights movement, for him it was, grimly enough, the war in Vietnam (which, in another sense, might have been thought of as the pit into which you never stopped falling). That never-ending horror would certainly change the course of his life, taking dreams of the State Department or the USIA off the table and, in the end, make the idea that he was living in an imperial state plausible to him. He gained in those years a new language and a new understanding of how the world worked.

Of Graveyards and Empires

Looking out over this crowd today, I find it unbearably strange that, 43 years later, with new and bloody counterinsurgency wars underway in lands once hardly known to most Americans, with our military bases implanted in countless lands, with the Pentagon budget at almost unimaginable levels, with our operatives abroad still involved in assassinations and renditions, "empire" remains MIA and most Americans have no sense -- no conscious sense, at least -- that they are living in an imperial garrison state.

Let me amend that, actually. Americans love the word "empire." Just a dip into Google.news.com tells you that. On a given day, you quickly discover that you can play a revamped version of Empire: Total War on your Xbox (it's set in the 18th century), will someday be able to catch the comedy Soakers, soon to be filmed in Hawaii by the Empire Film Group, and can attend the Empire Ranch Men's Golf Club Director's Cup Tournament in California, or await the $12 million facelift of the Empire ballroom at New York City's Grand Hyatt Hotel in, by the way, the "Empire state." Meanwhile, Empire Resorts, a struggling gaming company, has just gotten a much needed extension to a line of credit "staving off insolvency"; and the word "empire," it turns out, goes remarkably well with trendiness ("fashion empire"), medicine ("Empire medical training"), food ("BT Bistro the latest in Trigg's restaurant empire"), and even the business of sex ("Reports surfaced this week that Hugh Hefner, longtime publisher of Playboy magazine, is considering relinquishing the reins of his bawdy empire…").

See more stories tagged with: bush, obama, united states, empire, imperial presidency

Tom Engelhardt, editor of Tomdispatch.com, is co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The End of Victory Culture.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »