American Vertigo

With no further blithering on my part, here are some quotes which I found notable. Doesn’t mean I agree with them, only that I found them notable…

On the American view of nature

For a European, one of the most enigmatic characteristics of the American ethos is its relationship with nature.
The Floridians don’t tame nature; they push it back. Instead of subjugating it, they drive it away. Florida is vast, and space is of so much less importance than in Europe, that there’s room for both city and nature.
There are the remains of a pioneering spirit that for centuries has accommodated itself to a sense of temporary habitat, perched, as it were, on the side of the road, pressing forward with the frontier, and by definition precarious.
But there is also, anchored deep in the mentality of the country, a slightly supernatural, almost superstitious relationship to what Americans, even the secular ones, are prone to call Mother Nature. As if omnipotence found its limits there, reached its rational confines.
No pity for our enemies, the American of the twenty-first century seems to be saying; no mercy for terrorist, certainly, or even for opponents of the country’s economic supremacy. But let Nature take her best shot.

On a Colorado ghost town and ‘rooted-ness’

Poetry of these ruins. Beauty of these stranded wrecks from the past.
And beauty, especially, of this people so faintly attached to their roots – beauty, once again, of the prodigious freedom with which they treat their places.

America is the place both of the most extreme uprooting and of the most single-minded territoriality; that it’s the one country in the world where you move, change places, change your home most often, and the one where, at the same time, you remain the most strongly attached to your point of origin and childhood.


On Guantánamo

There are two possibilities. Either we believe that America is at war – in which case these detainees must benefit from prisoner-of-war status and from the protections accorded by the Geneva Convention. Or we subscribe to the End of History, to police treatment – and then all the rights normally granted to prisoners by common law need to be recognized. But this intermediate condition, the fact that Guantánamo’s prisoners, having neither the rights of combatants nor the rights of criminals, finally have no rights at all … I have not heard it denounced clearly enough.

On ‘American Empire’

One is confronted, then, with the extreme unconventionality of a model that gathers its sturdiness both from the conviction among the dominated – including China and India – that it’s in the U.S. banks, the U.S. financial system, and the dollar that the best return on their assets lies, and from the other, linked conviction that the rest of the world must continue to send its elite, its researchers, its future executives, its businessmen, to be trained, until further notice, in American universities, scientific institutions, and companies; in short, this paradoxical system, unique in history and, in reality, extraordinarily fragile, that makes America’s strength dependant on the strength of the confidence that is daily invested in it.

On privatization of the prison system, and the death penalty.

“For me, there’s a before and an after; before I was living like a dog, no one cared about me, but the advantage was that they no longer thought about executing me; today the food is better, the cell is cleaner, but I think they’re going to come looking for me.”
The negative side: the abandonment, when the state resigns and the law of profit reigns, of any kind of reform project. These outcast men – or in this case, women – whom the body politic, and thus the community of citizens, may forget to punish but with whom, at the same time, they have utterly lost contact. This is the height of abandonment.


On the Amish, from Iowa incidentally, not where I come from

The real and final pioneers. The only ones who haven’t given in, haven’t summed up their religion as the “In God We Trust” of banknotes.
The silent witnesses (truly silent, since, unlike the Indians or the blacks, they don’t say anything, don’t demand anything, and, above all, don’t reproach others for anything) – the silent witnesses, then, to the values that were those of America but on which America has turned its back since it sold itself to the religion of commodity.
America’s living bad conscience but, once again, silent.
Just here. We don’t criticize anything. But we are Amish. The profound, hidden, forgotten, denied truth of America is alive in us.

On creationism

There are two theories, and you have a choice: that’s the formula of an enlightened obscurantism; that’s the principle of revisionism with a liberal and tolerant face; that’s the act of faith of a dogmatism reconciled with freedom of speech and though; that’s the subtlest, most underhanded, most cunning, and at bottom most dangerous ideological maneuver of the American right in years.

On religious fundamentalism and secularism

What I reproach these churches for is their banality. It’s their propensity for turning God into some kind of “good guy,” friendly and reassuring, free of problems, watching over a sterile universe, bereft of anguish or negativity. It’s the idea of an insipid God, devoid of mystery, whose aims, although previously impenetrable, are now becoming as familiar as those of a near neighbor or friend.

What, after all, is secularism? It is not, as we know, agnosticism. Nor is it atheism. It is the command given to every state not to favor one faith over another.
France has fought for secularism. It has won its secularism after centuries of confusion and wars of religion. The Americans did not need to separate from anything. The wall of separation, to speak like Jefferson, was raised from the beginning. They were born secular, whereas we French had to become it.

… the compromise negotiated by the Founding Fathers is resisting the slings and arrows of time fairly well – never forget that the God mentioned in the Republican and Democratic conventions, the inaugural speeches, the houses of Congress, is a purposefully abstract God, almost deistic, and at core, consensual, recognized by all American faiths, Christian or not.


Signs of vertigo - Obesity

Another sign: obesity. Not the obesity of bodies, obviously
A social obesity. An economic, financial and political obesity. Obesity of cities. Obesity of malls, as in Minneapolis. Obesity of churches, as in Willow Creek. Obesity of parking lots that, in these malls and churches, sometimes grow so enormous that they generate a full-fledged miniature society, an entire way of life with its own rhythms, spaces, distraction and rest areas, cafeterias, shuttles, even – and this takes the cake – specially organized shuttles so that, once your car is parked, shoppers or worshippers can be loaded into yet another vehicle, thus saving them the trouble of walking.
The obesity of enterprises subject to the law of forced growth … “Greed is good; greed is right; greed works; greed clarifies.”
The bigger it is, the better it is, says America today. Large is beautiful, it repeats over and over in a kind of hysterical reversal of the 1960’s slogan.

A synopsis

…this magnificent, mad country, laboratory of the best and the worst, greedy and modest, at home in the world and self-possessed, puritan and outrageous, facing the future and yet obsessed with its memories…