PARTISAN REVIEW
173
listening toO him because many of those present thought that what
he said was true and that they might learn from it.
At the end there is in America some quality of genuineness which
underlies the "phoniness"; which even may be the cause of it and
which may result in Americans recognizing what
is
"phony." For
example, it might be said that the sending of food parcels to people
all
over the world after the war was, like so much other American
charity, and like the Marshall Plan, in some respects a not completely
disinterested exercise in public relations. Yet what
is
redemptive
about such American national gestures is firstly the willingness to
admit that they are not all they pretend to be and secondly the fact
that underneath it all, they are simple expressions of an American
generosity which astonished the rest of the world and which cannot
be
explained except as something new which emerged together with
the American national character. There is something then
in
Amer–
ica which cannot be explained away and which
is
not just some form
of commercialization in terms of which all problems are analyzed
and provided with answers. Americans feel critical of the motives and
methods of their own society, their own existence even.
This
feeling
seems entirely lacking in the rest of the world and enables America
to retain its newness, its innocence and even, at the end of the huge
tunnel of the vulgar and factitious, its mystery.
