An overview of the complexities that make up America in 2003.

The Other America
The Nation is Not United
by Edward Said

Is America indeed united behind this president, his bellicose foreign policy, and his dangerously simple-minded economic vision? This is another way of asking whether American identity has been settled once and for all and whether for a world that has to live with its far- reaching military power (there are American troops now in dozens of countries) there is something monolithic that the rest of the world that isn't willing to be quiescent can deal with as a sort of fixed entity lurching all over the place with the full support of all 'Americans'. I have tried to suggest another way of seeing America as indeed a troubled country with a more contested actuality than is usually ascribed to it. I think it is more accurate to apprehend America as embroiled in a serious clash of identities whose counterparts are visible as similar contests throughout the rest of the world. America may have won the Cold War, as the popular phrase has it, but the actual results of that victory within America are very far from clear, the struggle not yet over. Too much of a focus on the American executive's centralising military and political power ignores the internal dialectics that continue and are nowhere near being settled. Abortion rights and the teaching of natural evolution are still issues of unsettled contentiousness.
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