AMERICA
51
Perhaps the most obvious result of the war is the feeling of helpless–
ness. Everyone wants the war to end, but it goes on. Optimists become
apathetic, indifferent, quizzical, ironical, skeptical, pessimistic. Frustrated
and helpless, the intellectual turns to cultivating his private gardens:
friends, family, the private arts, the tasks immediately to hand, and, since
we are all embarked on the "Lusitania," we might as well travel First
Class. "What's happening to America?" Better to ask: "What's happening
this evening?"
Susan Sontag
Everything that one feels about this country is, or ought to be,
conditioned by the awareness of American
power:
of America as the arch–
imperium of the planet, holding man's biological as well as his historical
future in its King Kong paws. Today's America, with Ronald Reagan
the new daddy of California and John Wayne chawing spareribs in the
White House, is pretty much the same Yahooland that Mencken was
describing. The main difference is that what's happening in America
matters so much more in the late sixties than in the twenties. Then,
if
one had tough innards, one might jeer, sometimes affectionately, at
American barbarism and find American innocence somewhat endearing.
Both the barbarism and the innocence are lethal, outsized today.
First of all, then, American power is indecent in its scale. But also,
the quality of American life is an insult to the possibilities of human
growth; and the pollution of American space, with gadgetry and cars and
TV and box architecture, brutalizes the senses, making grey neurotics
of most of us, and perverse spiritual athletes and strident self-transcenders
of the best of us.
Gertrude Stein said that America is the oldest country in the world.
Certainly, it's the most conservative.
It
has the most to lose by change
(60 per cent of the world's wealth owned by a country containing 7 per
cent of the world's population). Americans know their backs are against
the wall, that "they" want to take it away from "us." And I must say
America deserves to have
it
taken away.
Three facts about this country.
