GIRILAL JAIN brings into focus the two faces of America.
All countries abound in contradictions but the United States inevitably more than others. Everything, as the Americans love to put it, is bigger and better there. It was the first to place man on the moon and it has so far been the only one to use nuclear weapons on earth. It has been a pace-setter in almost all walks of life from consumerism and assembly line production to the feminist movement, student upsurge, pop culture and even organised crime.
It kills its presidents and it mass produces medicine which save millions of people at home and abroad. It supplies millions of tonnes of free food to hungry millions abroad and it dumps dangerous pesticides often in the same lands. It has the world’s best universities and also the largest number of delinquents and dropouts.
While its scientists work on the frontiers of knowledge, millions of its young men and women are ready to fall at the feet of anyone who promises them escape from the world of reality into the world of fantasy. America’s Christian evangelism can more than hold its own against revivalism and fanaticism of any kind and shade anywhere.
While some call it murderous America, others regard it as the land of liberty and hope. It is both. But is the darker side of America triumphing over the brighter side?
It is one of the greatest ironies of our times that President Reagan should have been the object of an assassination attempt by a young white American who was recently expelled by the Nazi (extreme right-wing racist) group because of his ultra-militancy.
John Hinckley’s political “views”, if they are anything more than the rantings of a mentally unhinged individual, have, of course, had nothing to do with his crime. Even so the fact remains that since America’s ascendancy as the world’s most powerful nation in the ’forties, no other U.S. President has owed his office to right-wing groups as much as he and that the assailant happens to be a right-winger.
Above all, the sad episode once again brings into sharp focus the dark side of America – violence, crime, delinquency and drug addiction on a scale vaster than in any other similarly advanced Western society.
It may not be quite accurate to say that the Americans are more crime-prone than some other societies. But the figures are staggering. Every 24 minutes a murder, every 10 seconds a burglary and every seven minutes a rape. The Time magazine said in one of its recent issues:
“While the rate of increase in violent crimes (murder, forcible rape, aggravated assault and robbery) has varied through the 1970s, the trend in crimes per 100,000 people has been relentlessly upward. The FBI’s figures placed that rate in 1970 at 363.5; it was up to 535.5 in 1979, the last year in which the tabulation is complete.”
A recent study, the first of its kind, shows how pervasive and paralysing has become the fear of crime. It shows that
- Four out of every 10 Americans are “highly fearful” that they will be victims of murder, rape, robbery or assault.
- Residents of big cities, especially women and blacks, are most afraid – 52 per cent in cities across the country.
- Gun ownership has become very common. Fifty-two per cent of the people interviewed have said that they keep guns to protect themselves. In all 150 million guns are said to be in private hands.
Crime is also big business in the United States. An article in an American magazine quoted the Justice Department as believing that the Mafia may own as many as 10,000 legitimate firms generating annual profits of around $12 billion. It said:
“For the Mafia, and indeed for all organised crime, the time may well be right now. Business has seldom been better. As during Prohibition, big-time criminals profit by providing goods and services that are either downright illicit or, where legal, are handled by people who are highly vulnerable to underworld pressures.
“No one outside the tight-knit Mafia organisations knows the full extent of its operations, but estimates culled from a variety of law enforcement agencies suggest that the Mafia takes in at least $48 billion in annual gross revenues and nets an incredible $25 billion or so in untaxed profits.”
The first big ascent in the crime rate in the United States began at the end of World War II in 1945. While the fact is clearly established, the reason for it is not clear. If anything, the crime rate should have dropped. For that was the time of glory and unprecedented prosperity for the American people. However as it happened, the second big spurt in crime began in the seventies when over 3,000,000 U.S. troops were bogged down in Vietnam, the country had begun to run enormous deficits and the mighty dollar had come under enormous pressure. There has been no respite since.
The Mafia has virtually become a state within a state in America. It would, therefore, be idle to expect any administration, republican or democratic, to seek to control its activities. As it happens, Reagan has given it a shot in the arm by rehabilitating Frank Sinatra and allowing him to get back to his casino business in Las Vegas.
But it is truly extraordinary that no serious attempt has been made to place legal restraints on the private possession of firearms. The issue came to the fore in a big way in the wake of President Kennedy’s assassination in 1962. But it was talked out. The attempt on Reagan’s life is not likely to convince a majority of the American people and rulers that the time has come to end this bizarre state of affairs where any lunatic can walk into a store and buy himself a gun or two. Arms in private hands will continue to multiply and with it crime and the all-pervasive fear.
But even legal restraints on the possession of guns may not halt the continuing climb in the crime and violence rate. Americans have a violent history. They virtually exterminated a whole race – the Red Indians – in their bid to conquer the Wild West. And they idolise that history through films and TV. America has violent myths and it fosters those myths. Even Professor Kissinger thought of himself as a lone ranger and in Reagan it has a president who seeks to create the impression that he is ready to shoot from the hip, even nukes (nuclear weapons) if it becomes necessary. Then there are other social causes of turmoil and violence – the high divorce rate, the break-up of the communities, the movement of millions of people year after year from one part of the country to another, drug taking, racial discrimination, rising unemployment, especially among the blacks and the Hispanics, and so on.
America is in torment. There is, as The Times, London, puts it, “some kind of inner failure which is both more difficult to identify and more difficult to cure than aberrations of policy … something could be stepping out of reach of the conventional mechanism of correction.”
But it must be remembered and emphasised that this is only one side of the picture. America is no longer regarded as the El Dorado that it was in the ’fifties and the ’sixties. It is no longer the main hope for both developed and developing countries that it was in the same period. It no longer takes the lead in providing aid to poor countries. It views this issue not from the humanitarian viewpoint as it did up to the ’sixties but from a narrow nationalistic one. Its idealism perished in the jungles of Vietnam with its no-defeat record.
But the United States remains a pioneering society even if much of its industry has ceased to be fully competitive with Japanese and West German industry. Its lead in science and technology, especially science, remains impressive so much so that it bags about one-half of the Nobel prizes year after year.
The world no longer catches pneumonia if America sneezes. But it still does catch cold. The health of the world economy remains dependent on that of the U.S. economy.
In the military field, the United States today does not command the enormous lead it did up to the end of the ’sixties over its only rival, the Soviet Union. But that is the result of the deliberate decision Washington took towards the end of the ’sixties when it felt that the Soviet Union should be allowed to come to near parity so that it could feel more secure and become more co-operative. It also reflected the national mood de-emphasising the importance of external involvement. The mood has changed.
The United States is unlikely to regain its old lead – four to one in the nuclear field, for example, at the time of the Cuban crisis in 1962 when incidentally the Soviet navy, too, was capable of little more than coast guard duties. But there can be little doubt that the Russians will find it extremely difficult to maintain their near parity with, and in certain respects perhaps superiority over, the Americans. The U.S. remains the great giant of our era.
America’s place in the world has depended not so much on its military prowess as on its economic strength. It is, therefore, in that regard that it will need to produce results if it is to recover its decisively pre-eminent position – miles ahead of all others.
Above all, America has been known for its idealism, its willingness and capacity to help others. The capacity has been somewhat impaired as a result of the stagflation of recent years. But it remains enormous. The United States, for instance, produces 110 million tonnes of surplus food without which millions of people will face starvation and death in over a score of countries. It is the will to help that is currently weak. But hopefully it will revive with the revival of national confidence.
American universities would be the pride of any other country. They remain unmatched in the range and quality of their research in both sciences and humanities. They led the rest of the country in the struggle against its sorry intervention in Indo-China and its excessive involvement abroad. They have pioneered the search for social equality among the sexes and races. They may well serve as the principal agency for a renewed upsurge of idealism without which the United States would not be the country we have known as students of history and as beneficiaries of its munificence. In 1965 and 1966 it provided 13 per cent of the food we ate. Without that generous help every eighth Indian would have faced hunger. The social, economic and political consequences can easily be imagined.
It is not impossible that as we get ready to move with the 21st century or move into it, the United States may recapture its youth, dynamism and idealism. It is too young, energetic and endowed in terms of resources, both material and human, to be relegated to the scrapheap of history.
The Times of India, 5 April 1981