Formality can indeed be constrictive, but America’s distaste for it means that dignity is not what it does best. Three young women who appeared on U.S. television recently to plead for the arrest of their brother’s killer seemed like any other young people in the world assigned such a mournful task, except that all three of them were chewing gum. Allusions to slam dunks and home runs are ritually inserted into serious political commentary. Sporting metaphors infiltrate official language far more than they do in Europe. When George W. Bush spoke on television, it did not seem out of the question that he might suddenly pull a toy fire engine out of his pocket and run it up and down his sleeve while making brrmm-brrmm noises. A lack of gravitas is the price Americans pay for their attractive ease of manner. If Barack Obama is an untypical American, it is not because he is a closet socialist or was born on Venus, but because he is able to be relaxed and dignified at the same time.
Soft Cosmos
Forms and traditions, then, cannot be relied upon to unite the nation. They constrain personal choice, and constraint in the United States, except when it comes to locking up child pickpockets for three consecutive life terms, is in general frowned on. It is part of the affirmative spirit of the nation that there are few given restrictions in human life. Some restraints, regrettably, are essential, but for the most part they are limits we impose on ourselves, and thus testify ironically to our freedom. If I handcuff my wrists, lock myself in a sack and hang myself upside down from the ceiling for a year or so, my liberty is not fundamentally affected. After all, I did it all myself.
To the medieval mind, the only truly unconstrained being was God. Yet if God’s freedom was to be perfect, it could not be confined by the world he had created. If it was, he would not be all-powerful. He would be as much constrained as we are by the fact that blood coagulates, or that you can hire a horse and carriage in Luxor. Some medieval thinkers therefore taught that God was no respecter of the logic of his own Creation. Because he made the world, he could do what he liked with it. It was his private property, and he could annihilate it tomorrow, or turn it into an enormous Barbie doll, just as you are free to rip your priceless Rubens to pieces if the fancy takes you. It was this way of seeing, one which made much of the supremacy of God’s will, that was to win out in the modern period. After a while, the divine will was replaced by the human one. The world was now our private property, to be disposed of as we wished.
On this view, there is no necessity to the way things are. If there were, then God would be subject to the laws of his own universe. In fact, however, he suffers no such indignity. If he grows bored with fire being hot, the royal family being cold, or Clint Eastwood being right-wing, he can always take these things back to the laboratory and redesign them. There is nothing necessary about fire being hot. In another of God’s universes it might be freezing. It is like that only because God arbitrarily decided that it should be. He could turn Glenn Beck into a bleeding-heart liberal if the fancy took him. Fox TV does not run training camps for Palestinian guerrillas only because God has whimsically decreed that it should not.
American ideology aspires to this Godlike freedom. There is a sense in which it is less concerned to worship the Creator than to take his place. It is now we, not he, who determine how things are. There is, however, a price to be paid for this privilege. What is valuable is what the will invests with value. But since this is pretty arbitrary, it comes close to admitting that there is no real value at all. Besides, how can we know that the will itself is valuable? We would seem incapable of coming up with some external standard by which to judge it. Another price human beings have to pay for this supreme sovereignty is that things no longer have integral identities of their own. To think so is the thought crime of “essentialism.” Their identities are in constant flux, always on the point of transmuting into something else as the whimsical will may decide. The flipside of a faith in the world’s plasticity is a belief in the dominative mind. If the will is to be omnipotent, reality must be softened up. It is the will, not forms and traditions, which dictates how the world should be. Yet there are many millions of such wills, all with different purposes. So how is the nation to be unified?
On this view, things are what we make them, a article of faith to which some of the early American settlers clung. The belief crops up again in modern-day relativism. I have taught highly intelligent American graduate students who believe that there are as many truths as there are individuals. If you are committed to the view that tapioca is a grain used in puddings, and I think it is a rather beautiful island in the Caribbean, both of us are right from our different points of view. This is simply one example of how postmodernism can addle the brains. Even truth has been privatised. Nor is this a recent American prejudice. As de Tocqueville comments, “each man is narrowly shut up in himself, and from that basis makes the pretension to judge the world.” What you make of the world is not what I make of it. So freedom is at odds with consensus. It is hard to pluck an unum out of this pluribus, as the motto of the United States imagines we can.
The positive aspect of all this is its Protestant respect for individual judgement. My judgement may not be as sound as yours in practice, but it is certainly as good in principle. Beneath this view lies a deeply admirable egalitarianism. Yet if all of us are right in a way that admits of no argument, the only way we can decide the issue may be by fighting over it. Relativism can lead to violence. It is true that Oscar Wilde once described art as a phenomenon in which one thing can be true but also its opposite, but you can get away in art with things you cannot get away with in life, as Wilde was to learn to his cost.
De Tocqueville sees a link between America’s belief in infinite striving and its ethic of equality. In hierarchical societies, your rank defines your limits. It sketches the contours of the possible. The behaviour of an ancient Athenian rope maker was constrained by the requirement that he behave like an ancient Athenian rope maker. Where rank is less of an issue, anything seems conceivable, and the scope of human perfectibility, in de Tocqueville’s words, “is stretched beyond reason.” The typical citizen of such societies is “searching always, falling, picking himself up again, often disappointed, never discouraged.”
As far as rank goes, one might add that though the United States today is a grotesquely unequal society, its everyday culture is a good deal more egalitarian than that of Britain. There is a genuine classlessness about America’s behaviour, if not about its property structure. Like American frankness, pleasantness and sociability, this oils the wheels of social intercourse. By contrast, it is almost impossible for two Britons to meet without each of them instantly picking up the class signals emitted by the other, like animals who send each other messages in the form of low drones or high-pitched squeakings. To be sure after two minutes’ conversation that your companion attended an expensive private school is almost within the capacity of a British six-year-old. To know which school he attended requires a finer attunement of one’s social antennae, but is not out of the question.
Throwing out hierarchies, however, is more than just a political matter in the States. It is also a way of seeing the world. Things do not spontaneously sort themselves into an order of priorities. For some extreme versions of this viewpoint, nothing is inherently more significant than anything else, rather as a duke is not innately superior to a bootblack. In one sense, this is a deeply liberating attitude. It frees America from the gradations and exclusions of old Europe. It can break out of these rigid rankings to revaluate the whole of reality. This takes a degree of boldness and vision, and the United States has both in plenty. At the same time, there are limits to this outlook. Hierarchies of value die hard. It is difficult not to feel that curing leprosy is more important than powdering one’s nose. Much as one may hate being a hierarchicalist, one has to acknowledge a sneaking preference for preventing genocide over promoting the sale of jelly beans. Perhaps it is better to confess that one is sadly unreconstructed and try as hard as one can to find Rod St
ewart as talented as Regina Spektor.
The anti-elitist spirit is part of America’s rejection of the Old World, in which everyone had an allotted place and was expected to keep to it. Against this, the United States believes in a radical equality of being. It is true that the American Dream, with its faith that anyone can scramble to the top, sounds rather more generous than it actually is. Anyone can jump off the Golden Gate Bridge as well, but not many actually do. (It is a sociological fact, incidentally, that those who do so tend to jump off facing the city of San Francisco rather than facing away from it.) “Anyone” sounds excitingly close to “everyone,” but it is also depressingly close to “no-one.” All the same, individuals could now be judged for themselves, not respected simply because they were the nephew of a count.
Once again, however, there are drawbacks to this doctrine. A doorman is as good as an arch-duke, and a piece of paper blown about by the breeze is as good as the end of the slave trade if that is what you believe. Everyone makes their own choices and sets their own priorities. What I say goes, and what you say goes as well, even if the two are mutually contradictory. It is better to be self-contradictory than exclusive. To be selective is to be elitist. This is why the great postmodern mantra is inclusivity. Nobody should ever be left out. Slave traffickers, the White Kentucky Riflemen for Jesus, and people who snatch your glasses jeeringly from your nose and scamper off with them down the street: all have their place in the great disorder of things. To shut out is to be negative, and negativity is among the most heinous of moral crimes. One can be criticised in the States for being critical.
Picking and Mixing
If everything is as good as everything else, then all these things can be exchanged with one another. In economic life, this is known as the market. Nothing is more hostile to hierarchy than the commodity. No way of life is more diverse, pluralistic and transgressive than capitalism. It is as promiscuous as a porn star and as non-discriminatory as the most tender-hearted liberal. In its all-generous spirit, it wishes to exclude nobody and nothing. It treats all doormen like arch-dukes if they are potential consumers. A can opener is as good as a defibrillator if it can reap you as much profit. It is never easy in the United States to draw the line between generosity of spirit and sheer sloppiness, the open-minded and the scatterbrained.
America was originally considered a wilderness. It was a random, chaotic chunk of reality in which there were no established relations between things. You could thus make of these things more or less what you wanted, as God himself could for some medieval thought. They had come loose from any set pattern, and could be permutated as you saw fit. This, no doubt, is one source of the eclecticism of modern American culture, which pitches different bits of reality indifferently together. In this sense, there is a connection between the Puritan world view and surf ’n’ turf. Eclecticism goes a good way back in American history. In American Notes, Charles Dickens describes a meal he had with a number of Americans that consisted of “tea, coffee, bread, butter, salmon, shad, liver, steak, potatoes, pickles, ham, chops, black puddings, and sausages. . . . Some [of the Americans] were fond of compounding this variety, and having it all on their plates at once.”
An even more bizarre compound was recently consumed by an American citizen. It consisted of two chicken-fried steaks with gravy and sliced onions; a triple-patty bacon cheeseburger; a cheese omelette with ground beef, tomato, onions, bell peppers and jalapenos; a bowl of fried okra with ketchup; one pound of barbecued meat with half a loaf of white bread; three fajitas; a meat-lover’s pizza; one pint of Blue Bell ice cream; a slab of peanut-butter fudge with crushed peanuts; and three root beers. This was the last meal of a death row prisoner in Texas awaiting his lethal injection, a demand so outrageous that it led to calls for the custom of tailor-made last meals to be abolished. One likes to imagine that the prisoner in question was a satirist. Perhaps he intended to beat the needle with a carefully timed coronary.
Like a popular singles bar, the United States is a place which teems with infinite possibility. It does not just contain pockets of fantasies like Hollywood and Disneyland, but is in some ways a full-blown fantasy in itself. In America, de Tocqueville remarks, “something which does not exist is just something that has not been tried yet.” Fictions are just facts waiting to happen. The nation does not accept that a shadow may fall between the conception and the execution. Because the mind is what matters, anything you dream up is as good as done. All you need is will-power. This is one of several ways in which America is a godly nation. God, too, is thought to manifest no gap between the possible and the actual. His thoughts are his deeds. He does not sit around biting his fingernails and wondering whether to bring Jack Nicholson down with a nasty bout of flu.
The line between fact and fantasy continually wavers. Fiction can be truer than reality, as the career of Charlie Sheen exemplifies. Sheen, who despite his dishevelled private life is an immensely talented actor, is much more real in front of the cameras than he is in reality. Reality for him is largely fantasy. It is only when he is acting that he can be himself. Only the act of transporting himself into fiction can impose enough discipline and coherence on his personality for him to come truly alive. Otherwise he dissolves into a soggy mess of conflicting moods and impulses. His shambolic off-stage persona is a mere shadow of his genuine, fictional self. Those who have too few restraints tend to fall apart, which is not what the doctrinaire free marketeers want to hear. Some bits of American reality strike an observer as blatantly fictitious. One hears that there is to be a federal investigation into whether Donald Trump is a real or imaginary character. The Dickensian resonance of his surname points to a likely conclusion. One or two celebrities who have been frozen out of Britain for illicitly masquerading as real people have made their mark in the United States.
It is a commonplace that Americans tend to describe what happens in the real world by reference to movies. Life exists to imitate art. An American to whom I once showed the half-timbered Tudor buildings of Stratford-upon-Avon high street exclaimed: “Great shot!” Artistic dreamers try to tell it like it is, while hard-nosed Wall Street stockbrokers manifest a kind of communal madness. Life in the transnational corporations becomes more surreal than a Buñuel film. The world of business was once associated with sober realism, but nowadays it is closer in some respects to a crazed religious cult. From time to time, it acts out the economic equivalent of collective suicide. Corporate executives are admonished to ignore unpalatable facts and disavow inconvenient problems. Mao would have been proud of their delusional zeal. Realism is socialistic and unpatriotic. There are times when self-deception and megalomaniacal self-belief oust rational decision-making altogether. To complete the inversion, religious cults hire teams of chief executives, remove crosses from their churches in case they send too negative a message, and rebrand worshippers as customers.
Scientists who hold that there is an infinity of different universes envisage a situation in which anything that can happen, will happen. Somewhere in the so-called multiverse of the astrophysicists, someone looking unnervingly like you, maybe even endowed with your name, is at this moment reading these words, written by someone looking uncannily like me. Perhaps there are an infinite number of such acts occurring right now. This, to be sure, has some depressing implications. It means, for example, that there is an infinity of Mel Gibsons and Paris Hiltons. There is also an unlimited number of Michael Jacksons, not all of them dead. But it is not all bad news. Somewhere in the cosmos, someone looking suspiciously like Bill O’Reilly is at this very moment wearing a Fidel Castro outfit and arguing the necessity of soaking the rich. On earth, this infinity of worlds is known as the United States. Among other marvels, it contains a world which looks just like ours but where everything is bigger. This is known as Texas.
Whereas Jesus multiplied loaves and fishes, the United States multiplies options. No restaurant in Britain would ask you how you liked your fried eggs, any more than they would ask you what exotic
national costume you would like your waiter to be dressed in. Choice in the States is a paramount value. “I’ve made my choices” is a common American phrase, meaning among other things that one is the author of one’s own existence rather than ignominiously shaped by circumstance. Life is a self-authoring narrative in which, unlike Oedipus or Anna Karenina, you get to decide what happens to you. It is therefore all the more surprising that there is so little political choice in the country. In fact, the United States is a one-party state. There is the Democratic capitalist party and the Republican capitalist party. The diversity of political options hardly rivals the variety of candy bars.
Somewhere at this moment, some American, perhaps several of them in different places, is trying to sell life insurance to a Vietnamese orphan while wearing a false red nose, clown’s flippers and a loud check suit. In the United States, anything that can be imagined, however outlandish, has an excellent chance of existing. “I can think of it, therefore it exists” is the American version of Descartes’s dictum. If you can think of making a new kind of ice cream out of tea leaves soaked in squirrel’s urine, you can be sure that someone in the States is trying to patent it at this very moment. One can imagine a musical in which the staff of a restaurant burst into song every time one of them is tipped, but in the States this actually happens. The country represents a constant translation of the subjunctive (what might happen) into the indicative (what is the case).
If there is no order in the world, and if all its parts are equal and interchangeable, then you can will into existence any combination of these parts you like, and the act of willing makes it acceptable. The United States is the kind of place where one expects to find hairdressers selling sea food, or pastors doubling up as plumbers. In one sense, this is a distinct improvement on Britain, where you might find yourself having to buy a flashlight in one store and a battery for it in another. Americans tend to sling together items that Europeans would keep strictly apart. They do not understand that it has been ordained by a wise, all-loving Creator that while marmalade is acceptable at breakfast, jam (or jelly) is not. If you want to wear canary yellow trousers with an electric blue blouse, there is nothing to stop you. If you want to believe in Marx and the tooth fairy simultaneously, then go ahead. There are no natural fitnesses in things, no given constraints that must not be transgressed. Things that should not be put together, like the Oval Office and persons of low intelligence, sometimes are. Occasionally, things that should be put together are not. Some Americans are ignorant of the natural law that forbids the wearing of jeans without belts. The widespread American use of the word “whatever” indicates that precision and distinction are not held in the highest regard. It betrays how close the indiscriminate is to the indifferent. De Tocqueville thought such eclecticism was also true of American English, which mixed the vulgar and the refined without discrimination. It came, he thought, from the pitching together of social strata which in Europe would stay strictly separate.
Across the Pond Page 15
