4. The Shattered Self of the West

The coinages belong to: George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society (1993), Benjamin Barber, Jihad versus McWorld (1995), Time magazine (1961), Alan Bryman, The Disneyization of Society (2004). The American variant of the suffix -ization has been preserved in the text on purpose.

Allegedly, the domination is manifest politically and military through the North Atlantic Treaty, economically through the World Bank and the IMF, and culturally through Hollywood, the pervasiveness of American English, pop culture, and the media.

A few examples of traumatic representations of 9/11: American Widow (Alissa Torres 2008), Everyman (Philip Roth 2006), Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Jonathan Safran Foer 2005), The Good Life (Jay McInerney 2006), The Things They Left Behind (Stephen King 2003, short story), and, of course, Falling Man (Don DeLillo 2007).

‘The distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world […] inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-reviling, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment’ (Freud 1917, 244, digitised).

New York Daily News documents the existence of this small universe in an article published in 2013: ‘There’s a Little Dhaka in East New York. A tiny portion of the Queens-Brooklyn neighborhood called City Line—long an African-American neighborhood—is booming with Bangladeshi immigration, filling vacant shops with South Asian markets and, on Fridays, streets with Muslims bowed in prayer. The population of Bangladeshis remains small, but it has tripled in the last 10 years. And Census figures show that 83% of the new residents of the five-block area surrounding Baitul Mamur Musjid and Community Center on Glenmore Ave. near Conduit Ave. are from Bangladesh’ (Mayara Guimaraes, 15 September 2013).

‘Le premier grand problème concerne en premier lieu le rôle et la place des États-Unis et leurs relations avec l’Europe. Pour ma part, j’estime que depuis 1992 le terme de “superpuissance” ne suffit plus pour décrire les États-Unis. Terme trop connoté à la guerre froide et trop exclusivement militaire, alors que la suprématie américaine d’aujourd’hui s’exerce aussi bien sur l’économie, la monnaie, la technologie, les domaines militaires que sur les modes de vie, la langue et les produits culturels de masse qui submergent le monde, modelant les pensées fascinant jusqu’aux adversaires des États-Unis.’ [‘The first major issue concerns, firstly, the role and the place of the United States and their relations with Europe. As far as I’m concerned, I think that, since 1992, the term ‘superpower’ has become insufficient to describe the United States. This term is too connotatively related to the cold war and too exclusively military, whereas the American supremacy nowadays is exerted on economy, finances, technology, military domains, as well as on lifestyle, language and mass cultural products that flood the world, shaping its thoughts and fascinating even the enemies of the Unites States’] (qtd. in Fraysse 2000, my translation).

This is not intended as a prejudicial stereotype along the lines of ‘all Muslims are terrorists’, which has contaminated the views of the Western public sphere starting with the 9/11 moment. Nonetheless, it would be hard to point out a more extreme/-ist manifestation of anti-Americanism than that sprung from the Middle East. Nor is it a contest on the topic ‘who hates America the most?’

Due to the fact that organisations such as Al-Qaeda or ISIS are multinational and sectarian, any reference to nations and nationalities would better be avoided, which is the reason why the more neutral term ‘communities’ has been preferred.

Though inexact, this death toll was in circulation in the American media during those days along others, which vary from a few thousands to tens of thousands. According to CNN.​com, 29 October 2003, ‘the city’s original estimate of victims exceeded 6700, due in part to the large volume of mistaken missing persons reports’.

‘All revolutions in art, said someone, are a return to realism. Given that most art forms, in the hands of metropolitan elites, tend to drift away from reality, what could be more bracing or healthy than occasionally to offer authentic news of overlooked thought and feeling? […] What a welcome corrective to the cosy art-for-art’s sake racket which theatre all too easily becomes! Theatre using real people has become a fabulously rich and varied strand which, for many years, has been pumping red cells into the dramatic bloodstream’ (David Hare in The Guardian 30 April 2005).