1l0ADSIDE ARCADIA
sustains the freedom of the uprooted individual while restoring his heri–
tage of basic human sentiments.
At the same time, however, the small-town idea locks the Ameri–
can mind in opposition to its own vanguard experience as the originator
of new social powers and possibilities. Under its influence the builders of
cosmopolis live
in
suspicion of the city and a nation of technicians and
organizers kowtows to the inanities of "grassroots."
Repelling the radical implications of American practice, the nos–
talgia for the village weakens the nation by forcing every policy to come
to terms with the rural
p~etense.
Second thought of people who
have
migrated-their first was for what works-it transforms the American
Dream into a reverie of seclusion and rest that cannot fail to affect as
reactionary peoples in other continents who are just starting out. Thus,
for all its actual innovations, America plays a part against itself in the
revolutionary drama of the century.
To enrich The American Dream with an historical self-consciousness
and the conception of a new human scale, the fiction of the small town
must be dissolved. Instead, there is systematically erected upon it The
American Lie. A ceaseless propaganda exploits the floating sentiment
for the recaptured community to consecrate the American small town
as the habitation of a unified and contented Folk in exclusive possession
of the secrets of "real life." Defending these verities against big-city
artifice and subversive ideas, The American Lie replaces the ambiguities
of The American Dream with a rigid ideology and solidifies its delu–
sions into a code of mass-belief.
The power of this process is comically demonstrated in Spectorsky's
account in
The Exurbanites
of how the professionals who fabricate the
glamor of the whistle-stop Utopias are themselves seduced by it into a
charade of tractors and split rail fences. A still greater triumph of The
Lie is its ability to delude actual small-towners into mistaking their vil–
lages for Cocagne and mimicking themselves as Maw and Paw. Day–
dreams of being King For A Day at the Waldorf do not disturb their
conviction that compared with the satisfactions of Court House Square
the delights of the city are tinsel.
In any case, there is no American so sophisticated or so simple
that there is not laid out
in
his conscience an illusory village where he
stands trial for the superficiality, egotism and eccentricity of modern
existence. To demolish this bogus agrarian authority is one of the first
tasks of intellectual liberation; but one much more difficult to accomplish
today than in the time of Mencken and
Main Street
when America's
small towns still had body.
