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would be to accept the values of the contemporary world. Americani–
zation does offer a cure but only on its own terms which are the
contemporary ones. This cure
is,
from the point of view of Mauber–
ley, the disease. The alternatives are the past which has become the
European illness and the present which
is
the American cure. It
is
understandable then that some American contemporaries of T. S.
Eliot - notably William Carlos Williams - thought of Eliot's work
from
The Waste Land
onward as a betrayal of American new life
to European death and destruction. Nevertheless, it
is
also under–
standable that Europeans, confronted by the dissolution of their
whole past tradition into the American contemporary consciousness,
agreed with Baudelaire that Americanization signified the end of
civilization.
IV
Spiro Agnew, the American vice-president, touring Southeast
Asia, pronounced that
it
is a characteristic of Americans to believe
that all problems can be solved. By
this
he means that traditions,
customs, rituals, together with social injustices, hunger and diseases,
can all be put into a package, and analyzed as "problems," to be
restated in such a way that they can be met by American sociology,
psychology, medicine, material aid and expertise. Having reduced
them to question-and-answer procedures, they become American
problems, for which American solutions can be found.
This,
in South–
east Asia, would mean replacing bazaars with drug stores, and con–
verting young Buddhist monks, who wear saffron robes and
carry
begging bowls, into hygienic, go-ahead American youths with a
standard of living.
But no! One can well imagine that the anthropologists and
sociologists might send in a report from Chicago to say that the
temples, religious rituals, priests, Thai princelings, etc., should remain.
Indeed they should be encouraged, helped to survive by studies
link–
ing up rituals with national psychology and "the pattern of the cul–
ture." Yet if this happened, the culture, though it might continue,
would be undermined by the fact that that which had continued for
centuries without a reason was now being provided with a rational–
ization: that the continuance of the culture was encouraged because
it
helped provide American solutions to the problems of that part
