Posted on 10/28/2001 12:53:16 PM PST by summer
October 28, 2001
Fragmented We Stand
By RICHARD TODD
Tne Sunday morning not long after the terrorist attacks, I went, as usual, to the dump here in my town in western Massachusetts. I ran into an old friend. He's an anthropologist and has spent much more time than I have in Islamic countries, and in front of the recycling bins we fell to talking about a theme that has, of course, underlain many conversations, everywhere, in recent weeks: why do they hate us? He spoke of those things that go beyond Middle East policy, of the inexorable spread of American cultural exports, of ''Baywatch'' and Madonna and Britney Spears and so on, and the inflammatory effect they have on fundamentalist believers. And of course we took pleasure in remarking that we didn't like this stuff much ourselves. We seemed to be offering each other a weird kind of reassurance: we, at least, are not what they hate.
Our dump is an unusually attractive place of its kind. Look past the heap of dead appliances, and you gaze up to a ring of hills, now brightly mottled with fall color. You can see only an occasional open field and the glint of a roof, but the hills in fact are populated, and I considered the various lives going on beneath the camouflage of the trees. Not many ''Baywatch'' fans up there, either, I thought. Of course this is contemporary backwoods New England, land of the rusted Volvo and the graying ponytail.
And yet what is true here is true, in varying degrees, throughout the country: there is much I don't know about Osama bin Laden, but there is something he doesn't know about me, and you, and the rest of us. He doesn't know what a disparate culture we live in, how constantly at odds with itself it is. One paradox of our country is that the society that looks like such a monolith from without, looks, from within, so fragmented.
Now, in the aftermath of the attacks and the start of the military effort, we are said to be ''coming together'' as a people. And so we are, in certain demonstrable ways, the flags snapping on pickup trucks, the outpouring of charitable donations, a new warmth between strangers. But I wonder just what things will be like when the snow flies and the flags are furled.
E pluribus unum has been our great national balancing act throughout history. But over the past few decades all the emphasis has fallen on the pluribus. To say that is to point to our greatest achievement: social progress among the races and ethnic groups, between the sexes. We have given voice to identities long stifled. More subtly, we have overturned (sometimes turned inside out) the old, smug cultural categories -- highbrow,'' ''middlebrow,'' ''lowbrow, '' bathing all in postmodern cleverness. In another sense, though, we have been so successful at self-liberation that we find it hard to say what our true shared culture is. The world, to be sure, has a clear image of ''American culture'' -- all K.F.C. and Bruce Willis and 'N Sync. But for most of us, that's just the default version of America -- most of us go on mercifully oblivious to it. Then again, most of us go on at least selectively oblivious to serious culture too. Check out the books in this week's Book Review. Some of them will surely interest you, but I doubt that you will feel obliged to read any of them (unless one happens to be a title relevant to your ''field''). It was not always thus. A half-century ago you would read ''The Lonely Crowd'' or ''The Naked and Dead'' or else be taken -- and take yourself -- as culturally deficient.
Culture in recent years has become to a large extent a matter of individual choice and expression. To be an American means figuring out how to be an American. We are, as the French would say, bricoleurs in our own culture -- we pick and choose, paste together, make it up as we go along. We shop. The consumerism that is our great shared activity operates chiefly as an opportunity to express our differences, carve out a private identity. And in turn we rely on a commodified understanding of one another. You're a real-estate broker who buys at Barneys, is into hip-hop and follows the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard? Cool. You know Sallie? She's the vegan Sufi software engineer who collects antique hat boxes. To have the freedom to declare your own ''style'' in things and in ideas is marvelous, isn't it? But why does it not always seem like freedom? In part, I think, because somewhere in the recesses of the mind we're haunted by the realization that the more we make our separate peace with our culture, the less sustenance that culture has to offer us all. What exactly do we belong to?
It has been some time -- longer than the adult lives of most of us -- since we have had a serious debate about our national identity. True, we have had our smoldering ''culture wars'' and our values-mongering politicians, and we have even produced some civil violence of our own. But these have largely been border clashes, not the experience of the great majority of people. As we staggered exhausted out of the Vietnam years, a resigned sigh went up over the land. It's as if we went through a hundred million amicable divorces and said a collective, ''Whatever.'' That may all end, and the end could be bruising: already in the post-Sept. 11 society we have seen a marked shrinkage in socially acceptable political discourse. We have had a long holiday from the work of trying to figure out what our collective values are. One name for this sweet state is ''tolerance.'' Another, less sanguine, is indifference.
Now we look around us and see more of our fellows than the eye used to be able to take in, and we are summoned to lock arms. The indifference fades fast. Let's hope the tolerance doesn't go with it.
Richard Todd is writing a book about the search for authenticity.
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