Date: Wed, 09 Apr 2003 09:10:52 +0100
Subject: Schama on the US of A-part2
From: michaelP <michael-AT-sandwich-de-sign.co.uk>


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Here comes part 2...


When the magnitude of French and British indebtedness to the US became
clear, American considerateness (as the French saw it) towards German
reparation schedules fed into the poisoned brew of conspiracy theories that
seethed and bubbled in the anti-American press in the 1920s and early 30s.
In The American Cancer, Robert Aron and Arnaud Dandieu went so far as to
argue that the first world war had been a plot hatched by American high
finance to ensnare Europe in a web of permanent debt, a view echoed in J-L
Chastanet's Uncle Shylock and in Charles Pomaret's America's Conquest of
Europe. The newspaper France-Soir calculated the weight of debt at 7,200
francs for every French man and woman. Nor was there much sentimental
gratitude for General Pershing's doughboys. Why, it was asked, had the
engagement of American troops on the Western Front been delayed until 1918,
when their active deployment a few months earlier might have significantly
reduced Allied losses? The answer was that the US had waited until it could
mobilise a force large enough, not just to win the war, but to dominate the
peace.

For French writers like Kadmi-Cohen, author of The American Abomination, the
threat from the US was not just economic or military. It now posed a social
and cultural threat to the civilisation of Europe. Leading French writers -
André Siegfried, André Tardieu and Georges Duhamel - entered the fray
against the beast, convinced that the defence of humane culture demanded no
less.

The greatest of the "American perils" (a phrase that had become a
commonplace in this literature) was the standardisation of social life (the
ancestor of today's complaints against globalisation); the thinning of the
richness of human habit to the point where those habits could be marketable,
not only inside America, but because of the global reach of American
capitalism, to the entire world. Hollywood movies, according to Duhamel, "a
pastime for slaves, an amusement of the illiterate, for poor creatures
stupefied by work and anxiety", were the Trojan horse for the
Americanisation of the world. But the lament of Duhamel and others went well
beyond a call to man the barricades of high culture against the oncoming
barbarians from the west. It sounded the tocsin about the corruption of diet
and dress by mass-produced dross; the cultural catastrophe that awaited
Europe should the miserable alienation and uniformity of American culture be
exported across the Atlantic. Jean Baudrillard's belief that the defining
characteristic of America is its fabrication of reality, was anticipated by
Duhamel's polemics against the "shadow world" of the movies with their
reduction of audiences to somnolent zombies sitting in the dark. After the
second world war, Simone de Beauvoir made what she thought was a telling
contrast between the richness of old-world social experience and the
thinness of the American equivalent by comparing a game of petanque with
candlepin-bowling. Boules, old style, was played beneath an avenue of leafy
plane trees in some village square and incorporated the natural unevenness -
the bumps and hollows of the playing ground - into the skill of the game.
The American pastime, on the other hand, had reduced bowling to a soulless
indoor exercise where machines, not men, retrieved balls, and where the
balls themselves were rolled on surfaces of mercilessly honed smoothness.

The charge that America was imposing its synthetic third-rate cultural
habits on the prostrate body of mangled, bankrupt, war-torn Europe returned
with even more force after 1945. Where Americans thought of the Marshall
plan (together with the forgiveness of French debts) as an exercise in wise
altruism, European leaders like De Gaulle still bristled with suspicion at
the patronising weight of the "MP". Complaints against Coca-Colonisation,
the mantra of the anti-globalisers, were already in full cry in the 1950s.
But as Arthur Koestler put it in 1951, though he bowed to no-one in his
loathing of "cellophane-wrapped bread, processed towns of cement and
glass... crooners and swooners... the Organisation Man and the Readers'
Digest... who coerced us into buying all this? The United States do not rule
Europe as the British ruled India; they waged no Opium war to force their
revolting 'Coke' down our throats. Europe bought the whole package because
Europe wanted it..."

Yet somehow in the present crisis American democracy has let itself be
represented as American despotism. Many in the European anti-war movement
see the whole bundle of American values - consumer capitalism, the free
market in information, an open electoral system - as a way of life which
Americans impose on, rather than offer to, other cultures. In the most
extreme polemics American freedom is itself a disingenuous fraud, coercion
with a smiley face; Harold Pinter's "monster out of control". Some of this
demonisation is the purest casuistry. At the very moment when
representa-tives of the Iraqi exile community were recounting stories of the
unspeakable atrocities they had endured at the hands of Saddam Hussein,
banners in the hands of the usual suspects were proclaiming an equation
between the stars and stripes and the swastika.

Not all of these cavils are necessarily false, of course, just because they
get uttered by hard-core Ameriphobes for whom the United States has always
been the evil empire. Historically, Americans have valued haste over
rumination. Fast-food nation was invented in the 1830s, and Captain Hall's
puzzled observation that the word "improvement" in America seemed to mean
"an augmentation in the number of houses and people and above all in the
amount of cleared land", has not lost any of its validity with the passing
of a 170-odd years. Early on, Europeans identified appetite and impatience
as the cardinal American sins. Alexis de Tocqueville was struck by the
almost frantic hurry with which Americans had to get somewhere, never mind
where; and their short fuse when anything impeded the path of their route.

American public support for the war with Iraq - more fragile than is often
represented in the European press - has depended critically on unexamined
assumptions that it will be a matter of mere weeks. Nothing perhaps is more
unconscionable in the Bush administration's presentation of what lies ahead
than its reluctance to broach the painful truth that what lies ahead will be
much more testing than a fly-by war and a drive-through peace.

And yet it is cant rather than calculation that has most contributed to the
sudden widening of the Atlantic. While complaints about national
egocentricity sound a bit rich coming as they do from the French and their
foreign minister, who professes himself a fan of that exemplary
multilateralist, Napoleon Bonaparte, it seems borne out by every screw-them
aside uttered by the imperturbably affable Mr Rumsfeld. Knut Hamsun put the
unapologetic celebration of separateness down to a lack of education or even
curiosity about other places and cultures, and commented, perhaps waspishly,
"it is incredible how hard America works at being a world of its own in the
world".

Virtuous isolation, of course, wasn't a problem as long as the US saw the
exercise of its power primarily in terms of the defensive policing of its
own continental space. But now that policing has gone irreversibly global,
the imperious insistence on the American way or else has only a limited
usefulness in any long-term pacification strategy. Like it or not, help will
be needed, especially given America's notoriously short attention span,
intolerance of casualties and grievously wounded prosperity. Serving the
United Nations with notices of imminent redundancy should its policies not
replicate those of the US and the UK might turn out to be short-sighted
since in Europe, even in those countries whose governments have aligned
themselves with America, there was almost no support for war without UN
sanction.

Perhaps Mrs Trollope put it best after all: "If the citizens of the United
States were indeed the devoted patriots they call themselves, they would
surely not thus encrust themselves in the hard, sorry, stubborn persuasion
that they are the first and best of the human race, and that nothing is to
be learned but what they are able to teach and that nothing is worth having,
which they do not possess."

* A shorter version of this article appeared in the New Yorker.




regards
michaelP


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