From: Kharin (hidden@lucifer.com)
Date: Tue Jul 01 2003 - 02:59:45 MDT
Perhaps taking a step back might make for a suitable reply:
Only in America
By ERIC HOBSBAWM
http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i43/43b00701.htm
Looking back on 40 years of visiting and living in the United States, I
think I learned as much about the country in the first summer I spent there
as in the course of the next decades. With one exception: To know New York,
or even Manhattan, one has to live there. For how long? I did so for four
months every year between 1984 and 1997, but even though my wife, Marlene,
joined me for the whole semester only three times, it was quite enough for
both of us to feel like natives rather than visitors. I have spent a lot of
time in the U.S.A. teaching, reading in its marvelous libraries, writing, or
having a good time, or all together in the Getty Center in its days in Santa
Monica, but what I learned from personal acquaintance with America was
acquired in the course of a few weeks and months. Were I a de Tocqueville,
that would have been quite enough. After all, his Democracy in America, the
best book ever written about the U.S.A., was based on a journey of not more
than nine months. Alas, I am not de Tocqueville, nor is my interest in the
U.S.A. the same as his.
If written today, de Tocqueville's book would certainly be attacked as
anti-American, since much of what he said about the U.S.A. was critical.
Ever since it was founded, the U.S.A. has been a subject of attraction and
fascination for the rest of the world, but also of detraction and
disapproval. However, it is only since the start of the cold war that
people's attitude to the U.S.A. has been judged essentially in terms of
approval or disapproval, and not only by the sort of inhabitants who are
also likely to seek out "un-American" behavior in their own fellow citizens,
but also internationally. It substituted the question "Are you with the
U.S.A.?" for the question "What do you think of the U.S.A.?" What is more,
no other country expects or asks such a question about itself. Since
America, having won the cold war against the U.S.S.R., implausibly decided
on September 11, 2001, that the cause of freedom was again engaged in
another life-and-death struggle against another evil, but this time
spectacularly ill-defined enemy, any skeptical remarks about the United
States and its policy are, once again, likely to meet with outrage.
And yet, how irrelevant, even absurd, is this insistence on approval!
Internationally speaking, the U.S.A. was by any standards the success story
among 20th-century states. Its economy became the world's largest, both
pace- and pattern-setting; its capacity for technological achievement was
unique; its research in both natural and social sciences, even its
philosophers, became increasingly dominant; and its hegemony in global
consumer civilization seemed beyond challenge. It ended the century as the
only surviving global power and empire. What is more, as I have written
elsewhere, "in some ways the United States represents the best of the 20th
century." If opinion is measured not by pollsters but by migrants, almost
certainly America would be the preferred destination of most human beings
who must, or decide to, move to a country other than their own, certainly of
those who know some English. As one of those who chose to work in the
U.S.A., I illustrate the point. Admittedly, working in the U.S.A., or liking
to live in the U.S.A. -- and especially in New York -- does not imply the
wish to become American, although this is still difficult for many
inhabitants of the United States to understand. It no longer implies a
lasting choice for most people between one's own country and another, as it
did before the Second World War, or even until the air-transport revolution
in the 1960s, let alone the telephone and e-mail revolution of the 1990s.
Binational or even multinational working and even bi- or multicultural lives
have become common.
Nor is money the only attraction. The U.S.A. promises greater openness to
talent, to energy, to novelty than other worlds. It is also the reminder of
an old, if declining, tradition of free and egalitarian intellectual
inquiry, as in the great New York Public Library, whose treasures are still,
unlike in the other great libraries of the world, open to anyone who walks
through its doors on Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street. On the other hand, the
human costs of the system for those outside it or who cannot "make it" were
equally evident in New York, at least until they were pushed out of
middle-class sight, off the streets or into the unspeakable univers
concentrationnaire of the largest jail population, per capita, in the world.
When I first went to New York, the Bowery was still a vast human refuse dump
or "skid row." In the 1980s it was more evenly distributed through the
streets of Manhattan. Behind today's casual mobile-phone calls on the
street, I still hear the soliloquies of the unwanted and crazy on the
pavements of New York in one of the city's bad decades of inhumanity and
brutality. Human wastage is the other face of American capitalism, in a
country where "to waste" is the common criminal slang for "to kill."
Yet, unlike other nations, in its national ideology the U.S.A. does not
simply exist. It only achieves. It has no collective identity except as the
best, the greatest country, superior to all others and the acknowledged
model for the world. As the football coach said: Winning is not just the
most important thing, it is all there is. That is one of the things that
makes America such a very strange country for foreigners. Stopping for a
brief holiday with the family in a small, poor, linguistically
incomprehensible seaside town in Portugal, on the way back from a semester
in New England, I still remember the sense of coming home to one's own
civilization. Geography had nothing to do with it. When we went on a similar
holiday to Portugal a few years later, en route this time from South
America, there was no such feeling of a culture gap overcome. Not the least
of these cultural peculiarities is the U.S.A.'s own sense of its strangeness
("Only in America ... "), or at least its curiously unfixed sense of self.
The question that preoccupies so many American historians of their own
country, namely, "What does it mean to be American?," is one that rarely
bothered my generation of historians in European countries. Neither national
nor personal identity seemed as problematic to visiting Brits, at all events
in the 1960s, even those of complex Central European cultural background, as
they seemed in local academic discussions. "What is this identity crisis
they are all talking about?" Marlene asked me after one of them. She had
never heard the term before we arrived in Cambridge, Mass., in 1967.
Foreign academics who discovered the U.S.A. in the 1960s were probably more
immediately aware of its peculiarities than they would be today, for so many
of them had not yet been integrated into the omnipresent language of
globalized consumer society, which fits in well with the deeply entrenched
egocentricity, even solipsism, of American culture. For, whatever was the
case in de Tocqueville's day, not the passion for egalitarianism but
individualist, that is anti-authoritarian, antinomian, though curiously
legalistic, anarchism has become the core of the value system in the U.S.A.
What survives of egalitarianism is chiefly the refusal of voluntary
deference to hierarchic superiors, which may account for the -- by our
standards -- everyday crudeness, even brutality with which power is used in
and by the U.S.A. to establish who can command whom.
It seemed Americans were preoccupied with themselves and their country, in
ways in which the inhabitants of other well-established states simply were
not with their own. American reality was and remains the overwhelming
subject of the creative arts in the U.S.A. The dream of somehow encompassing
all of it haunted its creators. Nobody in Europe had set out to write "the
great English novel" or "the great French novel," but authors in the United
States still try their hand (nowadays in several volumes) at "the great
American novel," even if they no longer use the phrase. Actually, the man
who came closest to achieving such an aim was not a writer, but an
apparently superficial image-maker of astonishingly durable power, of whose
significance the British art critic David Sylvester persuaded me in New York
in the 1970s. Where else except America could an oeuvre like Andy Warhol's
have come into being, an enormously ambitious and specific, unending set of
variations on the themes of living in the U.S.A., from its soup cans and
Coca-Cola bottles to its mythologies, dreams, nightmares, heroes, and
heroines? There is nothing like it in the visual-arts tradition of the old
world. But, like the other attempts by the creative spirits of the U.S.A. to
seize the totality of their country, Warhol's vision is not that of the
successful pursuit of happiness, "the American dream" of American political
jargon and psychobabble.
To what extent has the United States changed in my lifetime, or at least in
the 40-odd years since I first landed there? New York, as we are constantly
told, is not America, and, as Auden said, even those who could never be
Americans can see themselves as New Yorkers. As indeed anyone does who comes
to the same apartment every year, a vast set of towers overlooking the
gradual gentrification of Union Square, to be recognized by the same
Albanian doorman, and to negotiate domestic help as in years past with the
same Spanish lady, who in her 12 years in the city has never found it
necessary to learn English. Like other New Yorkers, Marlene and I would give
tips to out-of-town visitors about what was new since the last time they had
landed at JFK and where to eat this year, though (apart from a party or two)
unlike the permanently resident friends -- the Schiffrins, the Kaufmans, the
Katznelsons, the Tillys, the Kramers -- we would not entertain at home. Like
a real New Yorker, I would feel the loss of a favorite establishment like
that of a relative; I would exchange gossip at the regular lunches of the
New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University, with the
mixture of writing people, publishers, show persons, professors, and United
Nations staff members that makes up the local intellectual scene -- for one
of the major attractions of New York is that the life of the mind is not
dominated by the academy. In short, there is no other place in the world
like the Big Apple. Still, however untypical, New York could not possibly
exist anywhere except the U.S.A. Even its most cosmopolitan inhabitants are
recognizably American, like our friend the late John Lindenbaum,
hematologist in a Harlem hospital and jazz-lover, who, sent to Bangladesh
for a project of medical research, had traveled there with a collection of
jazz records and his ice-cream scoop. There are a lot more Jews in New York,
and, unlike in large stretches of the United States, more people there are
aware of the existence of the rest of the world, but what I learned as a New
Yorker is not fundamentally at odds with what little I know of the Midwest
and California.
Curiously, the experience, what in the '60s they used to call "the vibes,"
of the U.S.A. has changed much less than that of other countries I have
known in the past half-century. There is no comparison between living in the
Paris, the Berlin, the London of my youth and those cities today; even
Vienna, which deliberately hides its social and political transformation by
turning itself into a theme park of a glorious past. Even physically the
skyline of London, as it can be seen from where I live on the slopes of
Parliament Hill, has changed -- Parliament is now barely visible -- and
Paris has not been the same since Messieurs Pompidou and Mitterrand have
left their marks on it. And yet, while New York has undergone the same kind
of social and economic upheavals as other cities -- deindustrialization,
gentrification, a massive influx from the Third World -- it neither feels
nor looks like a city transformed. That is surprising when, as every New
Yorker knows, the city changes every year. I myself have seen the arrival of
fundamental innovations in New York life, such as the Korean
fruit-and-vegetable store, the end of such basic New York lower-middle-class
institutions as the Gimbel's department stores, and the transformation of
Brighton Beach into Little Russia. And yet, New York has remained New York
far more than London has remained London. Even the Manhattan skyline is
still essentially that of the city of the 1930s, especially now that its
most ambitious postwar addition, the World Trade Center, has disappeared.
[This seems a little otioise to me. Most European cities are now crowded
with skyscrapers - go to Potsdammer Platz in Berlin and it looks like
Manhattan. Eighties Parisian architecture was rather more esoteric than
that, as are the current developments in London, but these are still
adaptations of American style - Kharin]
Is this apparent stability an illusion? After all, the U.S.A. is part of
global humanity, whose situation has changed more profoundly and rapidly
since 1945 than ever before in recorded history. Those changes there looked
less dramatic to us because the sort of prosperous high-tech mass-consumer
society that did not arrive in Western Europe until the 1950s was not new in
America. Whereas I knew by 1960 that a historic chasm divided the way
Britons lived and thought before and after the middle '50s, for the U.S.A.
the 1950s were, or at least looked like, just a bigger and better version of
the kind of 20th century its more prosperous white citizens had known for
two generations, its confidence recovered after the shock of the Great
Slump. Seen from the outside, it continued along the same lines as before,
though some sections of its citizens -- mainly the college-educated -- began
to think differently about it, and, as the countries of what is now the
European Union became more modernized, the furniture of life with which
European tourists came into contact began to look less "advanced," and even
a bit tatty. California did not seem fundamentally different to me driving
through it in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s from what it had looked and felt
like in 1960, whereas Spain and Sicily did. New York had been a cosmopolitan
city of immigrants for all my lifetime; it was London that became one after
the 1950s. The details in the great carpet of the U.S.A. have changed, and
are constantly changing, but its basic pattern remains remarkably stable in
the short run.
As a historian I know that behind this apparent shifting stability, large
and long-term changes are taking place, perhaps fundamental ones.
Nevertheless, they are concealed by the deliberate resistance to change of
American public institutions and procedures, and the habits of American
life, as well as what Pierre Bourdieu called in more general terms its
habitus, or way of doing things. Forced into the straitjacket of an
18th-century Constitution reinforced by two centuries of Talmudic exegesis
by the lawyers, the theologians of the republic, the institutions of the
U.S.A. are far more frozen into immobility than those of almost all other
states. It has so far even postponed such minor changes as the election of
an Italian, or Jew, let alone a woman, as head of government. But it has
also made the government of the U.S.A. largely immune to great men, or
indeed to anybody, taking great decisions, since rapid, effective national
decision-making, not least by the president, is almost impossible. The
United States, at least in its public life, is a country that is geared to
operate with mediocrities, because it has to, and it has been rich and
powerful enough to do so. It is the only country in my political lifetime
where three able presidents (F.D.R., Kennedy, Nixon) have been replaced, at
a moment's notice, by men neither qualified nor expected to do the job,
without making any noticeable difference to the course of U.S. and world
history. Historians who believe in the supremacy of high politics and great
individuals have a hard case in America. That has created the foggy
mechanisms of real government in Washington, made even more opaque by the
sensational resources of corporate and pressure-group money, and the
inability of the electoral process to distinguish between the real and the
increasingly restricted political country. So, since the end of the
U.S.S.R., the U.S.A. has quietly prepared to function as the world's only
superpower. The problem is that its situation has no historical precedent,
that its political system is geared to the ambitions and reactions of New
Hampshire primaries and provincial protectionism, that it has no idea what
to do with its power, and that almost certainly the world is too large and
complicated to be dominated for any length of time by any single superpower,
however great its military and economic resources. Megalomania is the
occupational disease of global victors, unless controlled by fear. Nobody
controls the U.S.A. today. That is why, as I write my autobiography, its
enormous power can and obviously does destabilize the world.
(Unfortunately, nothing that has happened since the above paragraph was
originally written calls for a revision of the views expressed in it. The
"occupational disease of conquering powers" has been reinforced by the Iraq
war. The policies and strategic ambitions of the global dominators have
destroyed the genuine "coalitions of the willing" on which U.S. supremacy
could rely in the cold war, and even more so in the international
mobilizations of the first Persian Gulf war and after 9/11. They have left
the U.S.A., unable to win a plurality of free votes in the U.N.'s Security
Council, in unprecedented isolation and global unpopularity, surrounded by
fear rather than hope. The world has unquestionably been more destabilized
not only -- patently -- in the Middle East but everywhere: in Europe, where
the European Union is divided and weakened and NATO has crumbled; in East
Asia; in what existed of an organized international system, whether of
states or nonofficial organizations. As the victorious U.S.A. prepares for
the post-Iraq presidential elections, uncertainty surrounds even the public
discourse, which veers between the language of ruthless power politics,
self-delusion, lies, and Orwellian newspeak.)
Our problem is not that we are being Americanized. In spite of the massive
impact of cultural and economic Americanization, the rest of the world, even
the capitalist world, has so far been strikingly resistant to following the
model of U.S. politics and society. That is probably because America is less
of a coherent and therefore exportable social and political model of a
capitalist liberal democracy, based on the universal principles of
individual freedom, than its patriotic ideology and Constitution suggest.
So, far from being a clear example that the rest of the world can imitate,
the U.S.A., however powerful and influential, remains an unending process,
distorted by big money and public emotion, a system tinkering with
institutions, public and private, to make them fit realities unforeseen in
the unalterable text of a 1787 Constitution. It simply does not lend itself
to copying. Most of us would not want to copy it*. Since puberty I have
spent more of my time in the U.S.A. than in any country other than Britain.
All the same, I am glad that my children did not grow up there, and that I
belong to another culture. Still, it is mine also.
[* To be strictly accurate, hardly anyone has copied it, and where they
have, the results have not been a great success. - Kharin]
Our problem is rather that the U.S. empire does not know what it wants to do
or can do with its power, or its limits. It merely insists that those who
are not with it are against it. That is the problem of living at the apex of
the "American Century." As I am 86 years of age, I am unlikely to see its
solution.
Eric Hobsbawm is a fellow of the British Academy and the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences. He has taught at Birkbeck College, University of London,
and the New School University. He lives in England. This essay is adapted
from Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life, to be published in the
United States by Pantheon Books in August. Copyright © 2002 by Eric
Hobsbawm.
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