OUR COUNTRY AND OUR CULTURE
289
In World War II, most Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Amer–
icans felt that they could not fight in good conscience alongside
Stalin's Red Army unless they found merit in the political system,
culture, and social arrangements of Stalin's Russia. Similarly, any
questioning of the wisdom of all-out war, in partnership with Stalin,
for the total annihilation of both the Reichswehr and the Reich
was interpreted as proof of sympathy with the Gestapo, anti-Semit–
ism, and death camps.
Today, the typical European intellectual finds that America
is Coca Cola, supermarkets, soda fountain lunches, comics, Milton
Berle, and
Life.
These he does not like (from a distance, at any
rate-sometimes he becomes rather fond of them on direct acquain–
tance). He identifies them as part of what he calls "materialism"
and "regimentation." The Soviet work camps, about which he is
better informed than our official propagandists imagine, are
also
expressions of materialism and regimentation. Therefore, he reasons,
the hell with it. He equates the Polituro with American Big Busi–
ness, and supplies rational fuel to the neutralism which he feels
with respect to any struggle that features Moscow
vs.
Washingt0n.
Are we going to reply to him : You've got things twisted,
brother. Culturally, you people over there are washed up. Wait
until you get one of the new Super-supermarkets in Rome or Paris;
and as for Coca Cola, it's the most effective symbol yet of One
World. Berle is a little crude, but anyone who makes that much
money must have something the people want.
Life
is bringing
modem Art and Science to
20,000,000
readers, or lookers, and
even publishes pieces on Sartre and Kafka. There may have been
gaps up to now in our music, painting, literature, sculpture, philoso–
phy, and that sort of thing, but everyone admits the Great American
Promise.
The editorial statement introducing this symposium reminds
us that twenty-five years ago Messrs. Dos Passos, Wilson, and Van
Wyck Brooks condemned American culture root and branch. Today
they discover "democratic creativeness" and "a remarkable renas–
cence of American arts and letters." What, and who, have changed?
If
during the past twenty-five years there has been a qualitative
change in our arts, philosophies, and letters, this does not seem
to have been for the better from the point of view of the traditional
