The long arm of American power allowed for most Americans to remain completely isolated from the foreigners they were in denial of ruling; there would never be any guts to splay with a bayonet. For many of us, there may not even be a bayonet. We would not know them, and therefore, as Baldwin said, could not love them, could not care so much for their deaths. Distance, distance, distance was the American way, a frigid, loveless distance, a kind of power and violence that destroyed intimacy in all its other manifestations, that destroyed empathy in all of its imperial citizens, in us, in me.
