W
here was
I?
On the wrong page? The wrong channel? Outside the bandwidth? As building managers here in New York shut down the elevators at 11:30 p.m. on December 31, 1999, so that citizens would not be trapped between floors by Y2K microchip failures—and licensed pyrotechnicians launched EPA-sanctioned fireworks from cordoned-off Central Park “venues” at precisely 12:00:01 a.m., January 1, 2000, to mark the arrival of the twenty-first century and the third millennium—did a single solitary savant note that the First American Century had just come to an end and the Second American Century had begun?—and that there might well be five, six, eight more to come?—resulting in a Pax Americana lasting a thousand years? Or did I miss something?
Did a single historian mention that America now dominates the world to an extent that would have made Julius Caesar twitch with envy?—would have made Alexander the Great, who thought there were no more worlds to conquer, get down on all fours and beat his fists
on the ground in despair because he was merely a warrior and had never heard of international mergers and acquisitions, rock and rap, fireball movies, TV, the NBA, the World Wide Web, and the “globalization” game?
Was a single bard bestirred to write a mighty anthem—along the lines of James Thomson’s “Rule, Britannia! Britannia rule the waves! Britons never, never, never shall be slaves!”—for America, the nation that in the century just concluded had vanquished two barbaric nationalistic brotherhoods, the German Nazis and the Russian Communists, two hordes of methodical slave-hunting predators who made the Huns and Magyars look whimsical by comparison? Or had the double A’s in my Discman died on me?
Did anybody high or low look for a Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi to create a new tribute on the order of the Statue of Liberty for the nation that in the twentieth century, even more so than in the nineteenth, opened her arms to people from all over the globe—to Vietnamese, Thais, Cambodians, Laotians, Hmong, Ethiopians, Albanians, Senegalese, Guyanese, Eritreans, Cubans, as well as everybody else—and made sure they enjoyed full civil rights, including the means to take political power in a city the size of Miami if they could muster the votes? Did anybody even wistfully envision such a monument to America the International Haven of Democracy? Or had my
Flash Art
subscription run out?
Did any of the America-at-century’s-end network TV specials strike the exuberant note that Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee struck in 1897? All I remember are voice-overs saying that for better or worse … hmm, hmm … McCarthyism, racism, Vietnam, right-wing militias, Oklahoma City, Heaven’s Gate, Doctor Death … on balance, hmm, we’re not entirely sure … for better or worse, America had won the Cold War … hmm, hmm, hmm …
My impression was that one American Century rolled into another with all the pomp and circumstance of a mouse pad. America’s great triumph inspired all the patriotism and pride (or, if you’d rather, chauvinism),
all the yearning for glory and empire (or, if you’d rather, the spirit of Manifest Destiny), all the martial jubilee music of a mouse click.
Such was my impression; but it was only that, my impression. So I drew upon the University of Michigan’s fabled public-opinion survey resources. They sent me the results of four studies, each approaching the matter from a different angle. Chauvinism? The spirit of Manifest Destiny? According to one survey, 74 percent of Americans don’t want the United States to intervene abroad unless in cooperation with other nations, presumably so that we won’t get all the blame. Excitement? Americans have no strong feelings about their country’s supremacy one way or the other. They are lacking in affect, as the clinical psychologists say.
There were seers who saw this coming even at the unabashedly pompous peak (June 22) of England’s 1897 Jubilee. One of them was Rudyard Kipling, the empire’s de facto poet laureate, who wrote a poem for the Jubilee, “Recessional,” warning: “Lo, all our pomp of yesterday /Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!” He and many others had the uneasy feeling that the foundations of European civilization were already shifting beneath their feet, a feeling indicated by the much used adjectival compound fin-de-siècle. Literally, of course, it meant nothing more than “end-of-the-century,” but it connoted something modern, baffling, and troubling in Europe. Both Nietzsche and Marx did their greatest work seeking to explain the mystery. Both used the term “decadence.”
But if there was decadence, what was decaying? Religious faith and moral codes that had been in place since time was, said Nietzsche, who in 1882 made the most famous statement in modern philosophy—“God is dead”—and three startlingly accurate predictions for the twentieth century. He even estimated when they would begin to come true: about 1915. (1) The faith men formerly invested in God they would
now invest in barbaric “brotherhoods with the aim of the robbery and exploitation of the non-brothers.” Their names turned out, in due course, to be the German Nazis and the Russian Communists. (2) There would be “wars such as have never been waged on earth.” Their names turned out to be World War I and World War II. (3) There no longer would be Truth but, rather, “truth” in quotation marks, depending upon which concoction of eternal verities the modern barbarian found most useful at any given moment. The result would be universal skepticism, cynicism, irony, and contempt. World War I began in 1914 and ended in 1918. On cue, as if Nietzsche were still alive to direct the drama, an entirely new figure, with an entirely new name, arose in Europe: that embodiment of skepticism, cynicism, irony, and contempt, the Intellectual.
The word “intellectual,” used as a noun referring to the “intellectual laborer” who assumes a political stance, did not exist until Georges Clemenceau used it in 1898 during the Dreyfus case, congratulating those “intellectuals,” such as Marcel Proust and Anatole France, who had joined Dreyfus’s great champion, Emile Zola. Zola was an entirely new form of political eminence, a popular novelist. His famous
J’accuse
was published on the front page of a daily newspaper,
L’Aurore
(“The Dawn”), which printed 300,000 copies and hired hundreds of extra newsboys, who sold virtually every last one by midafternoon.
Zola and Clemenceau provided a wholly unexpected leg up in life for the ordinary worker ants of “pure intellectual labor” (Clemenceau’s term): your fiction writers, playwrights, poets, history and lit profs, that whole cottage industry of poor souls who scribble, scribble, scribble. Zola was an extraordinary reporter (or “documenter,” as he called himself) who had devoured the details of the Dreyfus case to the point where he knew as much about it as any judge, prosecutor, or law clerk. But that inconvenient detail of Zola’s biography was soon forgotten. The new hero, the intellectual, didn’t need to burden himself with the irksome toil of reporting or research. For that matter, he needed no particular
education, no scholarly training, no philosophical grounding, no conceptual frameworks, no knowledge of academic or scientific developments other than the sort of stuff you might pick up in Section 9 of the Sunday newspaper. Indignation about the powers that be and the bourgeois fools who did their bidding—that was all you needed. Bango! You were an intellectual.
From the very outset the eminence of this new creature, the intellectual, who was to play such a tremendous role in the history of the twentieth century, was inseparable from his
necessary
indignation. It was his indignation that elevated him to a plateau of moral superiority. Once up there, he was in a position to look down at the rest of humanity. And it hadn’t cost him any effort, intellectual or otherwise. As Marshall McLuhan would put it years later: “Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity.” Precisely which intellectuals of the twentieth century were or were not idiots is a debatable point, but it is hard to argue with the definition I once heard a French diplomat offer at a dinner party: “An intellectual is a person knowledgeable in one field who speaks out only in others.”
After World War I, American writers and scholars had the chance to go to Europe in large numbers for the first time. They got an eyeful of the Intellectual up close. That sneer, that high-minded aloofness from the mob, those long immaculate alabaster forefingers with which he pointed down at the rubble of a botched civilization—it was irresistible. The only problem was that when our neophyte intellectuals came back to the United States to strike the pose, there was no rubble to point at. Far from being a civilization in ruins, the United States had emerged from the war as the new star occupying the center of the world stage. Far from reeking of decadence, the United States had the glow of a young giant: brave, robust, innocent, and unsophisticated.
But young scribblers roaring drunk (as Nietzsche had predicted) on skepticism, cynicism, irony, and contempt were in no mood to let such … circumstances … stand in the way. From the very outset the attempt of this country cousin, the American intellectual, to catch up with his urbane European model was touching, as only the strivings of
a colonial subject can be. Throughout the twentieth century, the picture would never change (and today, a hundred years later, the sweaty little colonial still trots along at the heels of … sahib). In the 1920s the first job was to catch up with the European intellectuals’ mockery of the “bourgeoisie,” which had begun a full forty years earlier. H. L. Mencken, probably the most brilliant American essayist of the twentieth century, led the way by pie-ing the American version of same with his term “the booboisie.” In fiction the solution was to pull back the covers from this apple-cheeked, mom’s-cooking country of ours and say, “There! Take a good look at what’s underneath! Get a whiff of the rot just below the surface!”—the way Sinclair Lewis did it in
Main Street, Babbitt, Elmer Gantry
, and
Arrowsmith
, for which he became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and Sherwood Anderson did it in
Winesburg, Ohio
. Anderson’s specialty was exposing the Middle American hypocrite, such as the rigidly proper, sexually twisted Peeping Tom Midwestern preacher. He created a stock character and a stock plot that others have been laboriously cranking out ever since in books, TV, and movies, from
Peyton Place
to
American Beauty
.
The Great Depression of the 1930s gave our version of this new breed, the intellectual, plenty of material to get wholesomely indignant about. For a change, America did look dreadful. But even then things weren’t as blissfully vile as they were in Europe, the birthplace of the intellectual. Europe, after all, now had the Depression plus fascism. The solution was what became the specialty of our colonial intellectuals: the adjectival catch-up. Europe had real fascism? Well, we had “social fascism.” And what was that? That was the name Left intellectuals gave to Roosevelt’s New Deal. Roosevelt’s “reforms” merely masked the fascism whose dark night would soon descend upon America.
“Fascism” was, in fact, a Marxist coinage. Marxists borrowed the name of Mussolini’s Italian party, the Fascisti, and applied it to Hitler’s Nazis, adroitly papering over the fact that the Nazis, like Marxism’s standard-bearers, the Soviet Communists, were revolutionary socialists. In fact, “Nazi” was (most annoyingly) shorthand for the National Socialist
German Workers’ Party. European Marxists successfully put over the idea that Nazism was the brutal, decadent last gasp of “capitalism.” Few of their colonial cousins in America became doctrinaire, catechism-drilled Marxists, but most were soon enveloped in a heavy Marxist mist. The Marxist fable of the “capitalists” and the “bourgeoisie” oppressing “the masses”—“the proletariat”—took hold even among intellectuals who were anti-Marxist. Prior to the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, the American Communist Party had great success mobilizing the colonials on behalf of “anti-fascist” causes, such as the Loyalists’ battle against the “fascist” Franco in the Spanish Civil War. “Anti-fascism” became a universal ray gun, good for zapping anybody, anywhere, from up here … on the intellectuals’ Everest of Indignation.
After World War II, this mental atmosphere led to a curious anomaly. By objective standards, the United States quickly became the most powerful, prosperous, and popular nation of all time. Militarily we developed the power to blow the entire planet to smithereens by turning a couple of keys in a missile silo; but even if it all blew, we also developed the power to escape, breaking the bonds of Earth’s gravity and flying to the moon in history’s most amazing engineering feat. And there was something still more amazing. The country turned into what the utopian socialists of the nineteenth century, the Saint-Simons and Fouriers, had dreamed about: an El Dorado where the average workingman would have the political freedom, the personal freedom, the money, and the free time to fulfill his potential in any way he saw fit. It got to the point where if you couldn’t reach your tile mason or your pool cleaner, it was because he was off on a Royal Caribbean cruise with his third wife. And as soon as American immigration restrictions were relaxed in the 1960s, people of every land, every color, every religion, people from Africa, Asia, South America, and the Caribbean, began pouring into the United States.
But our intellectuals dug in like terriers. Just as they had after World War I, they refused to buckle under to … circumstances. They saw
through
El Dorado and produced the most inspired adjectival catchups
of the twentieth century. Real fascism and genocide were finished after World War II, but the intellectuals used the Rosenberg case, the Hiss case, McCarthyism—the whole Communist Witch Hunt—and, above all, the war in Vietnam to come up with … “incipient fascism” (Herbert Marcuse, much prized as a bona-fide European “Frankfurt School” Marxist who had moved to our shores), “preventive fascism” (Marcuse again), “local fascism” (Walter Lippmann), “brink of” fascism (Charles Reich), “informal Fascism” (Philip Green), “latent fascism” (Dotson Rader), not to mention the most inspired catch-up of all: “cultural genocide.” Cultural genocide referred to the refusal of American universities to have open admissions policies, so that any minority applicant could enroll without regard to GPAs and SATs and other instruments of latent-incipient-brink-of-fascist repression.