“I fear all we have done is awaken a sleeping giant and fill it with a desire for vengeance” – Isoroku Yamamoto
When Admiral Yamamoto said these words after he lead the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he said a good deal more than even he knew. Granted, the Leviathan America had its destiny suggested in its very DNA: incredible diversity; incalculable resources; an ambitious, upstart populace. But from the ashes of December 7, 1941 emerged not just a powerful and greatly democratic nation, but an embodiment of Nietzschean will-to-power, a nation so completely avaricious and so rigidly moralistic that it would doom not just itself, but much of the rest of the world as well.
Like most Americans, I have a passion for things that are old and inefficient. Unlike most of us, though, my inspiration lies in outmoded objects and buildings, in places and artworks, not in obsolescent lifestyles and ideals. Long past the point of embarrassment, America is stuck in a perpetual adolescence, unable to deal with inevitable change, arbitrarily enraged and sentimental, moody and inflexible. We do not allow ourselves the sophistication and nuance of thought to understand or even be interested in the rest of the world; indeed, we lack the very perspective to do so, yet we sit in constant and ill-informed judgement: the U.N. is evil, the French immoral, the Muslims hopelessly godless and un-Christian. We are vehemently rebellious against our authorities, yet, we parrot all their tired old bromides when asked to explain our God or Law.
I’m convinced that this perpetual adolescence is the result of our success. Western Europe was devastated by two world wars and brought into adulthood by seeing all its cultural and colonial accomplishments explode into the Holocaust. The Europeans, for as frustrating as their realpolitik and slow, discursive decision-making processes are, are at least grown up enough (or grown cynical enough) to know that they cannot possibly hope to fix all the world’s problems or be all things to all nations. They have taken the lessons of capitalism gone wild, through the tulip craze and the paper craze and the spice craze, and reined it in. They have finally decided, for the most part, that perhaps certain moral issues are simply not the business of the state.
Americans, in essence, simply don’t need to grow up politically. Our mythology of a perpetual frontier and our ideology of Horatio Alger, our desperate clinging to the image of the Marlboro Man astride his horse, perpetually young and healthy and fit, perpetually the indestructible Maverick, overpowers the reality: the western U.S. sucked dry by too many people and too little water, the frontier dotted with Big Box stores, the cowboys inexperienced and underpaid and moving on to real work long before they could ever develop cancer of the lung. We buy it like we buy the happy Wal-Mart employees in the commercial, reciting the Wal-Mart cheer, never too broke to pay the gas bill. Americans, even if we have been too broke the pay the gas bill, have always felt rich, or at least felt we could be rich despite our rags. We are forever the 14 year-old kid who still thinks he can be a rock star.
What shame, what devastating shock, will hurtle us into national adulthood? If Europe is any indication, it won’t be anything so small-scale as 9-11. If the Great Depression didn’t do it to us, the only way our myths will be challenged would be through something like a South American-style currency collapse coupled with an indefinite drought of oil. We’ll notice but carry on if prices merely rise, but if cars stop running, look out. What has to happen isn’t some mamby-pamby reconsideration of who we are. What needs to happen is a crisis, a reordering of basic values. If things continue the way they are now, it might happen sooner than we expect.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.