June 15, 2006
 
COMMENTARY: America’s Preoccupation with Symbols
 
By Cicero
Special to Huntington News Network
 

Cicero

Mankind started surrounding itself with symbols as soon as we became cognitive beings about a million years ago. Much later, roughly 60,000 years ago, our early Cro-Magnon ancestors began painting on cave walls animal figures and mystical creatures that epitomized their fears and wishes.
 
Still later, people in Anatolia (Turkey of modern times) developed various symbols to represent the mother goddess in various forms. The Egyptians painted on the walls of their tombs and chapels signs indicating an imaginary after life, and placed symbols of everyday life inside their tombs hoping they would have servants to bring the beer and bread they relished. The Greeks and Romans continued with the use of symbolic statures of their gods and goddesses into classical times.
 
Early monotheists realized that no one could really portray the infinite so they wrote into their religious texts prohibitions against graven images. These prohibitions were further expressed in the Moslem Koran.
 
However, the development of the Pauline form of Christianity again brought back the Greek and Roman use of symbolic statures and paintings that represented their religious beliefs, making an easy transition from Greek and Roman protocols to early Christianity. Then the Protestant Reformation in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries made renewed efforts to reverse this process of using symbols to define the infinite.
 
The next major setback came around the mid-twentieth century when the split-down-the-middle Protestant/Roman Catholic nation of Germany backed up to use the symbolism of the Nationalist Socialist German Workers Party (Nazi) to build a barbaric culture of hatred against all that were supposed to be non-Aryan even though the “pure Aryan” was genetically undeterminable.
 
Today, many groups around the world have started to view the United States as a symbol of a hegemonic nation bent on remaking the world in its image, a colonial power seeking to drain others of their resources. I believe that most Americans would disagree with this view of our Nation, contending that we are only trying to bring the benefits of democracy to all. To the contrary, in the eyes of the average Americans, our Nation has virtually become the embodiment of democracy itself because of our fearless defense of freedom fighting the two World Wars and the subsequent Cold War with the old Soviet Union.
 
While no one could deny the contributions of our Nation in the past to the spread of democracy around the globe, it seems that the means we employed in a number of cases was no different from those used by the Romans to expand its form of government through the Mediterranean region which they called Mare Nostra or “Our Sea”. What we have done in the Middle East, for instance, has far from brought democracy to the region and actually played a large role in escalation of the crises there. Our support of dictatorships in Egypt and other nations has also made us almost bear the look of the Roman God Janus of gates and doors (ianua), and beginnings and endings, who was characterized by a double-faced head looking in opposite directions – a good illustration of this Nation in many instances. Just as the Romans carried around with them emblems of eagles on their standards, we are bringing our military vehicles and money everywhere as malicious symbols of power.
 
It is important that the United States, our current and future leaders step back finally and quickly from their biased stance to scrutinize the issues facing the world and in particular the Middle East with a more balanced approach. If anything, this Nation should become the symbol of a humanistic country that brings freedom through ideals and actions other nations admire and aspire to duplicate. But unfortunately, we have been making more enemies than peace. And rather than bring the dispersant groups together, such as the Israelis and Palestinians, we have alienated and driven them further apart.
 
Indeed, it has been widely suggested that if the United States had spent as much resources, energy, political capital and effort seeking to resolve the Israeli – Palestinian conflict as we have expended in Iraq, we would have been close – or at least closer – to coming across some workable long term solutions while reducing one of the major underpinnings of terrorism.
 
Now, the American leaders must be asked to take a realistic and impartial standpoint in re-evaluating all the actions we have taken over the last six decades in support of certain regimes while cracking down on some others, and how these actions have impacted the global political landscape modifying the world all nations must co-exist in. Any future decisions must be grounded on a systematic viewpoint of the real interests for the Nation and the entire world, and not be subject to the lobbying effort of any interested groups driven by their own benefits.
 
Also, we must remove the “weaponry” that allows these groups to exert political power on the Administration and the Congress if we are to deflect what our founding fathers had wished the United States to symbolize. Some weapons commonly in use today include abuse of public money, offering of free trips and expensive gifts, promise of lucrative positions after tenure and other means to influence policy and legislation – all having become ugly symbols of the culture of corruption that is corroding the Nation’s political system.
 
Only when such weapons cease to be available will the self-interested groups have to go to the electorate to make their special cases, and make their voices heard in the halls of power only if reckoned by the public. We have every reason to be confident that the empowered public will be able to take a much more balanced approach than any influence groups that are falsely representing us today.
 
The only symbols to which this Nation should be unwaveringly dedicated are those of our Constitution, the freedoms enthroned within it and the Bill of Rights - all others are false gods that must be overthrown to return peace and justice to the world.
 
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Editor’s Note: In the 1952 movie “Five Fingers,” James Mason played the valet of the British ambassador to neutral Turkey during World War II. He was a German spy who went by the code name “Cicero.” His intelligence information – including the date of D-Day – was excellent, but fortunately for the Allies, the Germans didn’t believe him, thinking him a double agent. The film was based on real events. The alternate title of the movie is “Operation Cicero.” The Roman political figure, orator and philosopher Cicero was a champion of the traditional institutions of the Roman Republic and the enemy of autocracy, including the politics of Julius Caesar and Pompey.