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the sheer power of sex into consideration, to transform it from inert
idea to abiding presence:
Adams [writing about himself in the third person] began to ponder,
asking himself whether he knew of any American artist who had
ever insisted on the power of sex, as every classic had always done;
but he could think only of Walt Whitman; Bret Harte, as far as the
magazines would let him venture; and one or two painters, for the
flesh tones. All the rest had used sex for
se~timent,
never for force.
The dynamo was, thus, the perfect American symbol, a way of giving
to force an inhuman, altogether mechanistic face. Its orgasms were
belches of steam or smoke, wheels turning ever faster, and at the end
what it produced in great abundance was the very power that an Indus–
trial RevolutIon requires. As for history, it was, in the words of assem–
bly line maven Henry Ford, so much "bunk," something that Europe
had far too much of, and that America could do well enough without.
The coming attractions that the Internet promises are part of the
same "faster is better" mentality that has always been our country's
blessing and its curse. Computers, I am told, are out of date at approx–
imately the same moment they leave their respective packing cartons.
Indeed, one often gets the uneasy sense that bells-and-whistles currently
on display are destined to be replaced, and in the blink of an eye, by
even snazzier bells and whistles. What matters most, of course, is speed,
a phenomenon that science writer James Gleick explores in his latest
book entitled, appropriately enough,
Faster.
Gleick's book is a fountain
of "factoids" out to make the point that our culture is moving along at
warp speed. But from my vantage point on the far right lane, the
real
race
seems to be between the various causes of heart-stopping stress and
the pills one can pop to keep anxiety under control.
In
The Souls of Black Folk
(1903),
W. E. B. Du Bois confidently
asserts that "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the
color line." His prophecy (sadly enough), turned out to be true, and,
sadder still, some would argue that the problem Du Bois spoke about in
the early years of his century will continue well into the next one, if not
beyond it. But
a
problem, however (seemingly) intractable, is not the
same thing as
the
problem; and it is here that I am forced to disagree not
only with Du Bois, but also with Adams. Why so? Because there are any
number of other, equally worthy candidates for the dubious honor of
defining the twentieth century: totalitarianism, environmental suicide,
the atomic bomb, gas chambers, and ethnic cleansing. Even this
