Profit as evidence of god’s approval for the sacred project of America buffeting the shock between business and piety, lucre and morality. The Emersonian chosen people, selected, picked for a special destiny. Many are called, few are frozen; a form of species apart from the human race whose special destiny lies partly in the celebration of the individual self, and its fluctuating identities, national archetypes: the minstrel, the comic poet, the backwoodsman, the Yankee, the city slicker, the con artist, the trickster….
In Kafka’s Amerika, the opening paragraph displays a very gloomy criticism of America, almost a Freudian conception of life as essentially tragic, despite bursts of optimistic euphoria. Kafka conceives of America’s liberty and freedom as a false apparition; a true statue of Liberty that does not exist, meaning that true liberty does not exist even though it is glorified and publicized as free. Kafka fragments the idealistic conception, the promised land, and in its place creates an image of America as a terrifying, violent, outlaw land characterized by insurmountable social ills. Kakfa’s opening paragraph, where the venerable statue is grasping a sword instead of a torch conveys the sense of ambivalence and the destructive potential seen at the heart of the American project as a confrontation between the nihilistic and spiritual, the death fantasy and the death denial or even procrastination:
As Karl Rossmann, a poor boy of sixteen who had been packed off to America by his parents because a servant girl had seduced him and got herself a child by him, stood on the liner slowly entering the harbour of New York, a sudden burst of sunshine seemed to illumine the Statue of Liberty, so that he saw it in a new light, although he had sighted it long before. The arm with the sword rose up as if newly stretched aloft, and
round the figure blew the free winds of heaven….
Alexis de Toqueville, writing in the 1830′s was fascinated by the American propensity of reinvention, to move across boundaries into new identities. Writer F.S. Fitzgerald contradicted this by apparently saying there are no second acts in American lives. Although Americans are world beaters at reinvention through the transformative narrative of redemption, he makes a subtle point that these are merely costume changes, pauses, in the headline act based on self-defining life dramas….
Europeans have never really understood the elasticity of the American spirit. The extremism of its bourgeois morality that is underscored by a fervor seemingly based on the messianic. Heidegger called this “seeming” in the place of “being.” The American propensity to manipulate reality, such as the impressions of others to suit convenience and to claim that truth we cannot change never existed in the first place. That’s plausible at best, but he was not off the mark in the American propensity to deny reality of the present to live in imaginary worlds in an indefinite future, perpetually in anticipation of a new world to be brought into being through their efforts. “Being” is postponed by the pursuit of “becoming” in which nothing is meant to be enduring, and the individual identity is meant to be replaceable. The American condition is a denial of the stable conception of who we are. This identity, seems to lie in our narratives, the cultural narrative that surpasses most other markers of identity through the force of the redemptive self, and the ability, the destiny of the American to make a difference in the world.
Manifest destiny. An American self-defining story that implicitly reconfigures and enacts contested cultural themes about the meaning of “American”; destined to spread freedom, albeit in the face of a reluctant world. Generally, for better but often for worse, many Americans
apprehend their lives as variations on a script, whereby after many trials and tribulations, they will get it right.
The Freudian conception is definitely not American. Conflicted children at their innermost being developing greater ambivalence as they grow up with equally ambiguous feelings about the world and their rightful place in it. The
ultural entitlement. Americans have always embraced the Emerson view, even if Sigmund has been sanitized and popified for the American; Freud’s basic tragic view, fatalistic is not in concert with American middle-class aspirations. And it cannot be harmonized with America’s cultural heritage. The frontier, the heartland, vast and bountiful with the outside world being evil and in need of redemption.
ADDENDUM:
As the French Heideggerian Jean Buadrillard explains, we Americans work against “that death to which no one can any longer give a meaning, but everyone knows has at all times to be prevented.” We refuse to let the necessity of death—or anything else—define us. Death has become a disease to be cured through medical technology and scientific personal discipline. But that means that we are more defined by our working
against death than ever before: our material prosperity has done the opposite of freeing us middle-class beings from the need to work. Americans, Baudrillard says, are lonely individuals “running straight ahead, because they have lost the formula for stopping.”To stop and think and enjoy, we would have to acknowledge some other reality besides the results of our free work, and that we cannot do. Because we believe that everything is replaceable—even what nature intends for us—we can never relax enough to accept our natural destiny of being replaced. Read More:http://www.mmisi.org/ir/40_02/lawler.pdf …
…The core of Brooks’ description of our suburbs is that they have no sense of place, “no centers, no recognizable borders or boundaries.” They are not and can never become “home.” They are, as is America itself, anthropologically unprecedented; before them, “people always lived in some
definable place.” And our detachment is not just geographical. Brooks describes what our “achievement ethic” has done to families, friendships, and all forms of human loyalty, and he adds that we cannot even begin to figure out how to counter the ways it “corrodes virtue.” Our anxious
homelessness is the cause of our unprecedented drive, and so of our unprecedented prosperity, but what we Americans have done to ourselves we are in the process of doing to the whole world. Our “Suburban Empire”—the rule of people who exist nowhere in particular—is increasingly a global empire in which all human beings will live nowhere in particular. Read More:http://www.mmisi.org/ir/40_02/lawler.pdf