In search of democracy.

• Author: Gardinier, Suzanne
• Position: US foreign policy - Column

In the autumn of 1989 I spent the darkening afternoons blackening my fingers with the newspapers and listening to the radio in tears as the citizens of central Europe made their bloodless revolutions, with flowers and keys, candles and anthems, voices and feet. I had listened that way in the spring, as citizens of China gathered in the public square and fed and coaxed the threatening soldiers and spoke the word "democracy" as if it were untainted and whole--as if it were worth dying for. In June, many did. In the autumn, in different tears, I waited in terror for that blow to fall on these new insistents, half a world away. But this time there was a different falling.

I remember the sounds of the huge East German marches, the footsteps and singing, the descriptions of the candles and the cold. I remember especially one report in October, after Erich Honecker had resigned and a man named Egon Krenz was installed in his place, a futile attempt to preserve the system the people were determined to sweep away. Hundreds of thousands marched in Leipzig. In that one voice made of many voices, filled with rage and with the elation of the change begun, they roared, "Egon, Egon, who asked us?"

In November, the Berlin Wall, as indestructible prison, ceased to exist. People surged through it from both sides, greeting each other with cheers and embraces and champagne, as people in my country exulted that "our" values had won some great competition. Soon after, those values were inscribed in the bodies of a household of Salvadoran Jesuits and their housekeeper and her daughter, killed by men trained in Georgia and paid from Washington, and in the bodies of Panamanians fallen before our invading army, buried in layers in unmarked trench graves. Perhaps the new world was not so new after all.

The truth of U.S. responsibility for the murders in El Salvador and Panama was buried in tides of denial and patriotic celebration, from Presidential proclamations to newspaper stories to lunch-counter conversations. In this country we carefully foster makers of consoling fictional identities; fantasy is our most successful national export. I've walked narrow stone streets in an ancient French village where little English is spoken and heard the theme music of My Three Sons waft into the night. When my mother visited El Salvador in 1992, she saw a tent in a remote FMLN encampment painted with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Our fables are often cross-culturally convincing. In the fall of 1993, after the signing of the agreement between Israel and the PLO, Shimon Peres said that, among future historians, "Nobody will understand the United States, really: You have so much force, and you didn't conquer the land of anybody; you have so much power, and you didn't dominate another people; you have problems of your own, and you have never turned your back on the problems of others. Thank you so much for being what you are."

To the Iroquois or Ibo, or the Cuban or Guatemalan, or the European Jew or Haitian turned away from these shores, the nation Shimon Peres describes would be unrecognizable. Yet so many of us are fond of it, this benevolent phantom; the more deeply into our history we reach, the dearer it becomes. Many a radical critic of the United States has looked back with longing to The Sacred Beginning, The True Democratic Republic that has somehow since been lost, but such a foundation does not exist. This country was formed by men who brooked various moral and political differences, but on one issue shared a firm consensus: that the power to guide the course of the nation should rest not with the many, but with the few.

There are several names for this; "democracy" is not one of them. Yet we teach generations of children this fiction--as if...