Building Mountains from Saudi Sands - A Book Review

In 2002, just as Washington was firing up the media machine, and cranking out newspapers full of headlines about why the U.S. public should consent to another war against Saddam, activists from all around the world were out in the streets shouting, “No blood for oil!” University of Pennsylvania political science professor Bob Vitalis had long been composing his thoughts, adding to the cacophony of voices which President Bush, with jesting temerity, designated a ‘focus group’. Today with over 75% of the U.S. public decidedly against Bush and the war in Iraq, pundits mire the political discourse with mud slinging “I told you so’s!” If they had asked Bob Vitalis or any other political scientist with expertise on the modern Middle East for advice, the pedal pushers in Washington may have gotten a battle of the bands, but at least we would all be listening to something fresher than John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero.” In traditional, yet readable, political science prose America’s Kingdom takes us through the histories of U.S.- Saudi relations, multi-national firms, organized labor and the struggles against what Vitalis refers to as the ‘racial wage’. America’s Kingdom hopes to “reverse-engineer” the myth of American exceptionalism by exposing one instance of American corporate malfeasance and then posing the question, “what is this an instance of?”

America’s Kingdom builds its indictment of exceptionalism from a process of identifying some central yet particularly potent strands of exceptionalist theory. In his introduction, “Captive Narratives” Vitalis identifies these strands in three succinct and related arguments. The first critique Vitalis asserts concerns the nature of exceptionalist histories, stressing that opportunist arguments often conflate the specificities of difference with the characteristics of exceptional circumstances. Exceptionalist theory thus contends that there are no universal threads linking, for example, the history of ARAMCO’s oil enterprise in Saudi Arabia to the history of the Panama Canal Zone. Vitalis exerts a lot of effort to demonstrate why this sort of exceptionalist theory is not only unpersuasive, but irresponsible. America’s Kingdom is devoted to exposing the particulars around ARAMCO’s own exceptionalist history (readily available on eBay in Wallace Stegner’s Discovery!), and linking this history to other examples of colonial states and exploitative business practices. Vitalis provides two examples, one relating to states and the other to firm-labor relations, that were particularly compelling and worth mentioning here. The first example concerns one of Vitalis’ main characters, Tariki Abdallah, an exiled Saudi oil geologist who said, “We are the Sons of the Indians who sold Manhattan. We want to change the deal.” Vitalis wants his American readers to relate U.S. expansionism to European style colonialism, and thus compares the devastating effects of Jim-Crow style segregation in ARAMCO working camps to proverbial colonialist dealings detailed throughout modern Middle East history. The other two arguments which Vitalis’ credits to historian David Rogers, are concerned with the way U.S. history has been written about in the academe, and how recent trends toward alternative histories have helped to re-envision U.S. history in vastly more complicated ways.

What is at stake in Vitalis’ book for the activists of the American anti-war movement (after all Vitalis claims his book is about America not Saudi) is the reengineering of its own political delusions; commencing with the narratives about blood for oil, and how the policies that reign under “Bush & Co.” come to us via the ‘exceptional’ political progeny of the Reagan years. Vitalis’ work is also about the need to build populist politics focused on redistribution, ownership and inclusion that can build transnational alliances and expose Jim-Crow style segregation policies from Mississippi to Dhahram. America’s Kingdom credits a turn in exceptionist rhetoric with thanks to the labor of Black theorists (in Vitalis’ case W.E.B. Du Bois). What America’s Kingdom does is lay out the socio-political reality of race on which class hierarchies are contingent in the racialized state. Since racism is so vital to the continuance of the modern socio-political system, white beneficiaries with liberal politics may deconstruct this radically impoverished system, but they do not have to imagine a model for collective self-actualization. This is precisely my critique of Vitalis’ work. Those of us whose identities are not beneficiaries of a hierarchical system based on race must push for intellectuals like Vitalis to do more than expose the central reality of modern hierarchy. We must demand that racism is not taught merely as a tactic used by transnational firms to bust unions, but as a working political system that is the fundamental feature of the global economy in a globalized world.

What Vitalis recommends in America’s Kingdom is not that we throw out our parent’s old Lennon records. Rather, he suggests our efforts for solidarity be fashionably savvy. In other words, Vitalis might have us watch last season’s finale of American Idol where Green Day performs a remix of Lennon’s classic, which inspired millions of American’s not only to purchase Instant Karma, but also to contribute to the efforts to save Darfur. Like the CD, Vitalis’ book nudges us to take our solidarity efforts further than superficial gestures, and to re-examine the intersecting lines of race and class that have helped put blinders on our collective notions of American exceptionalist history. America’s Kingdom would like us activists to realize finally, that the policies of the Bush years were drawn in the 1990’s (under Clinton) not the early 80’s, and that “it is still not too late” to take off the rosy colored glasses.