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the world before woodrow wilson--so before world war 1--was a very different place. the outlines of the american empire started to be set up after world war 1, mostly because the us was not fucked up physically by the war, not as battered in human terms by it (staying out of the war until 1917 had its advantages) and not as drained financially.
the structures that underpinned the inter-war international system didnt work so well as it turned out: so a different, more powerful system (well, system of systems) was set up during the last years of world war 2 (1944 is a convenient marker--bretton woods---for the start of it etc)..the post-1945 international system was obviously american-dominated--think about the bretton woods order, which pegged international currency rates to the dollar and set up mechanisms largely based in the us for stabilizing currencies.
another index: think about the expansion of automobile usage, when it happened and what it has entailed.
think about the infrastructures that are required for the american transportation model to function.
i could go on and on about this.
the point: there's no going back.
it's pointless to even dream about it.
it isnt even a pipe dream. it is nothing.
think about what would be required for the americans to try it.
there's have to be the magical growth of huge domestic petroleum production. which means there'd have to be a fuckload more oil within the us than there presently is. which means either (a) magic or (b) some other way of bypassing the millions of years required for oil to happen or (c) some functional alternate fuel. and lubricant. and a substitute for plastic and all the other materials that are based in or rely on petroleum by-products.
or
an abandonment of the automobile as the primary transportation option.
but there's more, even in a messageboard: consider how tightly linked are the illusion of class mobility in the states and individual physical mobility in a car...
and consider the total inflexibility of the dominant ideology in the state on this correlation alone. just think about it. and this is on ONE issue (transportation) and there are a LOT of such issues (think food supply).
it aint happening, this isolationist turn.
this sure as hell doesnt mean that therefore the present systems are coherent or sustainable--it just means that running away into rerun of the pre-1914 order aint happening.
and even then (pre-1914), there was an international system--always has been something like that at one level or another (long-distance trade is a very old phenomenon, dontcha know--far older than the nation-state idea, which is a 19th century production)--but the americans didnt run it--and given that the way american history is taught would lead you to believe that such global interactions only started when the americans woke up to them, it follows that (despite all evidence, despite all reality) americans who understand the past through the ideological frame of us history alone can actually believe that transnational trade is something new and that they invented it.
this turns into one of any number of arguments against the idea of nationalist history. but that's another matter.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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