Another Country (an essay on the parlous state of the US)

[Celerity]

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n02/adam-shatz/another-country

‘The very word “America”​ remains a new, almost completely undefined and extremely controversial proper noun,’ James Baldwin wrote in 1959. ‘No one in the world seems to know exactly what it describes, not even we motley millions who call ourselves Americans.’ Is it a dream or a nightmare, a democratic paradise or a bastion of white supremacy and religious intolerance? Is it a geographic territory or a phantasmagorical hyperreality in Baudrillard’s sense – something that is more real than real, a hall of mirrors in which the separation between the world and its representations dissolves? Or perhaps all of the above?

The ‘rich confusion’ of American identity, as Baldwin put it, has given rise to endless attempts at definition, by foreign observers as well as Americans. The French film critic Serge Daney, who loved America’s cinema as much as he despised its imperialism, called it ‘the place that makes it possible to dream, but also the corner of reality that dreams crash into’. Octavio Paz, evoking the country’s immense scale, described it as ‘geography, pure space, open to human action’. In the words of the French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville, ‘America is the sublime and the abominable.’

Critics of American racism, class inequality and foreign policy have tended to focus on the abominable. ‘Two centuries ago,’ Frantz Fanon wrote in 1961, ‘a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States became a monster, in which the ... sickness and inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions.’ George Kennan, the least sentimental of American diplomats, echoed Fanon, describing America as ‘a prehistoric monster’ with a ‘brain the size of a pin’. Yet even Fanon, who saw it as a ‘country of lynchers’, turned to it for inspiration, drawing on the work of Black writers such as Richard Wright and Chester Himes. America is a ‘battlefield’, Simone de Beauvoir wrote, ‘and you can only become passionate about the battle it is waging with itself, in which the stakes are beyond measure.’

Since Beauvoir made this observation in 1947, at the beginning of the Cold War, there has been one battle after another, both inside America itself, and over the idea of America and its role in the world. Currently led, if that is the word, by an infantile would-be king while the future is being forged in Shanghai and Beijing, America may no longer be a serious country. It may even be a laughable one. Yet, as the Swedish diplomatic historian Anders Stephanson writes in his book American Imperatives, ‘the alarming fact’ is that ‘everyone on this earth has an enormous stake in how the United States chooses to be and act in this world.’* Not just enormous, but existential: consider, for example, the recent termination of USAID programmes, which may lead to as many as fourteen million deaths by 2030. Or the kidnapping of foreign leaders in countries with large oil reserves. Or the insistence on acquiring Greenland, even – or especially – if it means tearing up the rules-based order established after the war. Or the creation of a ‘Board of Peace’ in Gaza, designed to replace the United Nations – the list goes on.

snip

[Cirsium]

1. A dream, or a nightmare?

Is it a dream or a nightmare, a democratic paradise or a bastion of white supremacy and religious intolerance?

[leftstreet]

2. DURec