BEYOND THE TWILIGHT OF REASON
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the Western mother countries - no body of ideas, no technological inno–
vations or refinements, no high position in the moral and social discourse,
no deep aesthetic impact.
In
terms of the Negro American, the problem was very different.
Negroes were not like Africans trying to take back land that had been ap–
propriated through imperial means; they were not dislocated colonials
who grew up in countries where economics rotated around a few cash
crops; Negroes were central to the development of all that we consider
American. As participants or representatives of issues, they had been on
the frontline at almost every important turning point in the history of the
United States, from the true moment .of colonial liberation in the Revo–
lutionary War to the arguments over the way slavery repudiated both
democratic purity and Christian morality, to the Civil War, to the win–
ning of the West, to the World Wars, to the evolution of a national
music, a national sense of humor, a national body of dance, and a twenti–
eth-century way of living in urban situations. So whenever Negroes
began thinking of themselves as a "black colony" within America, they
were accepting a blindfold.
Right now, I would say that the blindfold has been accepted by many
of those in categories outside of the province of race. One group after
another seems to have done its own variations on Black Power alienation,
perceiving itself, whether because of its sex or its sexual preferences or its
age or its class, as some variation on a colony at odds with the United
States, feeling good or safe or understood only within its special interest
group, convinced that, in a nearly conspiratorial way, the government, or
the rich or the poor, the men or the women, the immigrants or the for–
eigners are out to get them - lying in wait to take almost all that they
own or give them less than they deserve, for sins as simple as either hav–
ing done a hard day's work or having lasted long enough to get some
retirement benefits, as having done no more than pop out of a normally
or artificially inseminated womb on American soil.
So many have accepted the blindfold, in fact, that we are back to the
blind feeling up the elephant, the donkey, and the marketplace. Almost
every shape that they touch either frightens them or seems much less than
what they were promised by politicians since the end ofWorld War
II. It
is sometimes hot where they expected it to be cold, rough where they
thought it smooth, sharp where they figured on something blunt. Where
they wanted the sensation of paradise, those knotting their own blindfolds
ever tighter find themselves mad as hell and tired of being misled. As
Robert
J.
Samuelson observes in
The Good Life And Its Discontents: The
American Dream in the Age of Entitlement
1945-1995, such people suffer
from what he calls "the politics of over-promise."
