new forms for old feeling

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….

---She traveled to DC to meet Cain when she was out on the East Coast. When she got to her hotel room, she found that she'd been upgraded to a lavish suite. Cain allegedly met her at the hotel bar and told her that he'd upgraded her, and then he took her out to dinner. Afterward, he offered to show her the National Restaurant Foundation headquarters, but instead of showing her any sort of office, he parked the car and attempted to reach up her skirt. He followed that move by attempting to push her head toward his crotch. When she resisted, Cain took a cue straight from Ye Olde Guide To Cheesye Pornographie, allegedly saying, "You want a job, right?"--- Read More:http://jezebel.com/5857152/new-accuser-says-herman-cain-reached-up-her-skirt-pushed-her-head-toward-his-crotch image:http://gawker.com/5818196/how-many-secret-gays-are-in-the-herman-cain-campaign%20

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….

---‘This constant strife between the desires inspired by equality and the means it supplies to satisfy them harasses and wearies the mind.’ But paradoxically it also led to order. ‘One may say that it is the very vehemence of their desires that makes the Americans so methodical. It agitates their minds but disciplines their lives.’ Lerner summarizes a number of these contradictions as follows. ‘Thus Tocqueville saw the American as a deeply split personality: “feeling the need for guidance and longing to stay free”; “finding life at once agitated and monotonous”; feeling pride in his nation and in his own equality with others, yet ravaged by a sense of his own loneliness and insignificance - and, out of that sense, seeking to assuage his loneliness by huddling with others and to cure his insignificance by joining the majority...’ If there was a central feature to the New World that was to be seen in America it was its turbulence and restlessness, its absence of tranquility.--- Read More:http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/TEXTS/Tocqueville_final.pdf image:http://www.twylah.com/MotherJones/topics/herman


 

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.

---Tocqueville described this turbulence caused by the conflicts of desire and reason, centre and periphery, equality and individualism, in a number of brilliant passages. ‘No sooner do you set foot on American soil than you find yourself in a sort of tumult; a confused clamour rises on every side, and a thousand voices are heard at once, each expressing some social requirements. All around you everything is on the move.’4 The contrast was re-emphasized when he returned to France. When one passes from a free country into another which is not so, the contrast is very striking: there, all is activity and bustle; here all seems calm and immobile. In the former, betterment and progress are the questions of the day; in the latter, one might suppose that society, having acquired every blessing, longs for nothing but repose in which to enjoy them.’5 The restless, swiftly changing cascade is what struck him forcefully. Restlessness of character seems to me to be one of the distinctive traits of this people--- Read More:http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/TEXTS/Tocqueville_final.pdf image:http://civiliansnews.com/2011/10/16/herman-cain-americans-for-prosperity/

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.

---The Confidence Man, published on the eve of the American Civil War, caused quite the uproar. Perhaps Americans saw the novel as inappropriate, or even an affront to the unsettling issues the nation was then confronting. A swift and satirical discourse on a variety of moral and political concerns, The Confidence Man was an oddly structured comic allegory about a shape-changing grifter who boards a Mississippi riverboat on (of all occasions) April Fool’s Day. The grifter victimizes an assortment of passengers in a series of scams on a trip that takes them from St. Louis to New Orleans. Once he wins his marks’ trust, he cons them with promises of charity and virtue. But even as the con man’s charm tests their resolve on a number of subjects, his ultimate goal is to reveal his fellow passengers’ deeper (and often contrary) desires. Melville introduces characters who change identities so rapidly that the reader is confronted with a portrait of the American frontier as perceived through a series of disguises.---Read More:http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2010/05/book-confidence-man.html image:http://gawker.com/5849197/how-in-the-world-is-herman-cain-on-top

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

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