Posted on 04/18/2002 8:01:57 PM PDT by PsyOp
I am aware that many of my contemporaries maintain that nations are never their own masters here below, and that they necessarily obey some insurmountable and unintelligent power, arising from anterior events, from their race, or from the soil and climate of their country. Such principles are false and cowardly; such principles can never produce aught but feeble men and pusillanimous nations.I've had this discussion with others on this forum, that America cannot be anywhere else, for America is a unique creation, the product of a culture, a moral code, and a circumstance nelsewhere repeated or repeatable.
B.S. I still say, and I point to the above to prove it. De T spends plenty of time reviewing the American circumstance, its British and puritan traditions, its expanse and its riches, and he discards it all with the above, from his conclusion.
Apply equality in law and protection of property (a necessary condition to equality, de T explains: "All that he asks of the state is, not to be disturbed in his toil, and to be secure of his earnings" -- now that'll p.o. the libertarians who will agree with the phrase and condemn the present for its violations, which de T otherwise explains as the product of the struggle between equality and freedom), and voila, l'Amerique.
Damn, I love getting pissed off. Especially at 4 a.m.
P.S. Don't worry, only the keyboard gets pounded...
Your thoughts on the WWII generation remind me of my treatment of it in my book on limousines [were I able, I'd raise it on my website & avoid the space here, but my webmaster (Mom) is still in Maine, and with her the computer that has all my junk on it...]. From a general review of the meaning of the limousine in culture & the automotive age, & from the section:
"Learning to Drive: the 1950's"I might have framed it by de Tocqueville and thereby better understood it; still, I think, it was on.Following the war, private chauffeurs and limousines were for the remnants of a different world. In Britain the Labour Party tossed out Churchill and focused national attention on the welfare state. One post-War Labour Party envoy to New York felt the British Mission's Rolls-Royce was too "patrician." The Mission's long-standing and impeccable chauffeur, George Tambone, in a sublime backhanded reply dissuaded the man of the Rolls-Royce's expendability. Another type of car "might be suitable for you, sir," Tambone explained, "but we often carry Prime Ministers and Foreign Secretaries in this car. For them, nothing else would be appropriate."
In the United States the ascendency of the middle class led to a consumer culture that favored self-autonomy and instant gratification over social convention. The aristocracy was out and with it the chauffeur. To the hard working, independent businessman of the age, a limousine, much less a Cadillac sedan, meant that customers would think they're being ripped off. This was ascendency of the Buick, a solid car, solidly in the middle of the GM hierarchy and the American middle class.
The ways of outward extravagance disappeared, like the rides in the park of an earlier day. The chauffeur was killed in Italy, and the Packard now had power assisted brakes and automatic transmission. Still, there were enough hold-outs to the old school and new wealth seeking to join it to continue the traditions of privately chauffeured cars and fuel the ascendency of Rolls-Royce, which became the prestigious make of the post-War world. Albeit quieter (and literally so), extravagance lived on magnificently in the back of a Phantom V. Of American limousines, it was the Cadillac.
1920's extravagance gave way to the self-reliance and self-indulgence of the Fifties. Cars were to be powered by nuclear reactors. Man was master of all he surveyed, including the drivers seat. Triumphant armies returned home, went back to school, and started families. Victorious, self-sufficient, and the equal to any man, the stage was finally set for real equality (an as yet painful journey). Social distinction gave way to merit, and the new meritocracy had no use for chauffeurs.
There was much confusion, though, for things hadn't sorted out. The wartime sabbatical from production left a tremendous gap between the new and the old, manifestly seen by the 1942 and 1946 models that followed one another sequentially. Packard had a novel solution to the problem. The company took its entire pre-War tooling and shipped it off to Moscow, which accounts for the oddly recognizable Zim limousines in which Stalin and Kruschvev were driven. But what was a dowager to do without the old town car? And who was to drive it? The flashy Russian emigre, Maxim Karolik, one quite used to riding in the back seat, drove a group of friends to New York on the way to a Princeton football game. One recalled that Maxim dropped them at Times Square, as "he was completely lost, because he had always been driven by a chauffeur. We caught the next train to Trenton and took a cab back to Princeton."
Ironically, that same leveling of society that placed Karolik behind the wheel marked the growth of the chauffeured, for-hire business. Started in 1921 with the purchase of a limousine concession and its six cars, J.P. Carey's Grand Central Packard Renting Corporation took the notion of luxury for hire and formal livery transportation a step further. The company would soon replace the private chauffeur, and quite literally so. Aside from providing formal limousine service to visiting dignitaries and occasional use for local New Yorkers, Carey's company hired not a few clients' chauffeurs, bought the limousines, and rented both back to the client. Carey's grandson, Paul Carey, Jr., recalls one client who resided at the Plaza hotel and ran about town in her Lincoln limousine driven by her private chauffeur, Tommy. She wanted a new limousine and a secure future for Tommy, so a deal was struck whereby Carey bought the Lincoln, hired Tommy, and provided either the Lincoln or a new Cadillac whenever she required. Carey describes how this lady would instruct the chauffeur: "Tommy, we'll use the Lincoln today..." or, "Tommy, let's use the Cadillac," just as if the car came from her own garage.
...almost all the tastes and habits which the equality of condition produces naturally lead men to commercial and industrial occupations.The last I love, for de T ends the sentence with the brilliant and highly enlightening remark,Circumscribed within the narrow space which politics leave them, rich men in democracies eagerly embark in commercial enterprise; there they can extend and employ their natural advantages; and indeed, it is even by the boldness and the magnitude of their industrial speculations that we may measure the slight esteem in which productive industry would have been held by them, if they had been born amidst an aristocracy.
A similar observation is likewise applicable to all men living in democracies, whether they be poor or rich. Those who live in the midst of democratic fluctuations have always before their eyes the image of chance; and they end by liking all undertakings in which chance plays a part. They are therefore all led to engage in commerce, not only for the sake of the profit it holds out to them, but for the love of the constant excitement occasioned by that pursuit.In no country in the world are private fortunes more precarious than in the United States. It is not uncommon for the same man, in the course of his life, to rise and sink again through all the grades which lead from opulence to poverty. American women support these vicissitudes with calm and unquenchable energy; it would seem that their desires contract as easily as they expand with their fortunes.
The love of wealth is therefore to be traced, either as a principal or an accessory motive, at the bottom of all that the Americans do..."
... this gives to all their passions a sort of family likeness, and soon renders the survey of them exceedingly wearisome.Lol! And so true.
[a nation whose motto is "ordem e progresso" is not off to a good start...]
BTW, one of America's first summer colonies was on the peninsula of Nahant, and it attracted many wealthy Bostonians. As Nahant grew so did the neighboring industrial city of Lynn. The only way too and from Nahant was through Lynn, a thought which amused and amuses the inhabitants of that now-decayed industrial city.
I don't know how accurate Caldwell's picture of globetrotting millionaires is, as the same dynamic is going on in any upscale suburb. Maybe water makes the difference, though.
It looks like every suburb or rural area is either going to go "up" or "down" -- either become a preserve for the rich or be given over to "sprawl." Sometimes it's hard for the unpracticed eye to tell the difference, though. The nearer, older suburbs see their own share of McMansions and luxury condos, and even picturesque, affluent villages, get a cookie-cutter quality of their own, if you see enough of them. They will be turning out quaint storefronts in the future as they do malls now.
Some architects turn out standard, uniform malls, others flee mallishness. But the big trends now seem to blur the difference. Postmodernism seems to do this very well -- or very poorly. The McMansion aims at or apes distinctiveness but doesn't achieve it. The condos in new towns achieve the same mix of uniqueness and conformity without quite so many pretensions.
The thing about talk of social class in America, is that it's hard to tell if it means a great deal or scarcely anything. Of course it does matter whether you are driven from your home by toxic waste dumps or high taxes or not. And there are a lot of city neighborhoods or suburbs in name only that one would flee at all costs.
But the chief charm of the richer suburbs seems to be what's not there, rather than what is. It's pretty enough, and one can daydream about how wonderful it would be to live there, but what do they really do with it? They don't escape economic headaches or mass culture. The children are less likely to get arrested or pregnant, but may fall into other troubles and it's not entirely clear that families are closer. It's not really another world, when I can drive five or ten miles from a crummy industrial suburb in name only to the really leafy one. I'm not saying there's no difference. It's just that sometimes it's hard to tell how much of a difference there is. You can escape the negatives, but do you really find the positive, valuable thing?
You might appreciate this. It looks very confused and rambling now, but it was moving the first time I read it. It fascinates me that FDR's America, the Hudson River Valley, seems never to have escaped from the depression. The same is true of those mill and mine towns that gave him his highest vote counts.
I don't think Fallaci is the new Tocqueville, but she does have some interesting comments about America, rather in the line of Tom Wolfe, in substance and in style. Europe was always talking about freeing the proles, but only America did.
The truth is that America is a special place, my friend. A country to envy, to be jealous of, for reasons that have nothing to do with wealth et cetera. It’s special because it was born out of a need of the soul, the need to have a homeland, and out of the most sublime idea that Man has ever conceived: the idea of liberty, or rather of liberty married to the idea of equality. It’s special also because the idea of liberty wasn’t fashionable at the time. Nor was the idea of equality. Nobody was talking about these things but a few philosophers of the so-called Enlightenment. You couldn’t find these concepts anywhere except in big expensive books released in installments and called Encyclopedias. And apart from the writers or the other intellectuals, apart from the princes and the lords who had the money to buy the big book or the books that inspired the big book, who knew anything about the Enlightenment? The Enlightenment wasn’t something you could eat! Not even the revolutionaries of the French Revolution were talking about it, seeing how the French Revolution didn’t start until 1789, thirteen years after the American Revolution exploded in 1776. (Another detail that the anti-Americans of the good-it-serves-America-right school ignore or pretend to forget. Bunch of hypocrites!)
What’s more, it’s a special country, a country to envy, because that idea was understood by often illiterate and certainly uneducated farmers. The farmers of the American colonies. And because it was materialized by a small group of extraordinary men. By men of great culture, great quality. The Founding Fathers. Do you have any idea who the Founding Fathers were, the Benjamin Franklins and the Thomas Jeffersons and the Thomas Paines and the John Adamses and the George Washingtons and so on? These weren’t the small-time lawyers ("avvocaticchi" as Vittorio Alfieri rightly called them) of the French Revolution! These weren’t the brooding and hysterical executioners of the Terror, the Marats and the Dantons and the Saint Justs and the Robespierres! These were people, these Founding Fathers, who knew Greek and Latin like our own Italian teachers of Greek and Latin (assuming there still are any) will never know them. People who had read Aristotle and Plato in Greek, who had read Seneca and Cicero in Latin, and who had studied the principles of Greek democracy like not even the Marxists of my day studied the theory of surplus value. (Assuming they really did study it.) Jefferson even knew Italian. (He called it "Toscano".) He spoke and read in Italian with great fluency. In 1774 as a matter of fact, along with the two thousand vine plants and the thousand olive trees and the music paper which was rare in Virginia, the Florentine Filippo Mazzei brought him multiple copies of a book written by a certain Cesare Beccaria entitled "Of Crimes and Punishments." As for the self-taught Franklin, he was a genius. Scientist, printer, editor, writer, journalist, politician, inventor. In 1752 he discovered the electric nature of lightning and invented the lightning rod. Is that enough for you? And it was with these extraordinary leaders, these men of great quality, that the often illiterate and certainly uneducated farmers rebelled against England in 1776. They fought the War of Independence, the American Revolution. Well, despite the muskets and the gun powder, despite the death toll that is the cost of every war, they didn’t do it with the rivers of blood of the future French Revolution. They didn’t do it with the guillotine and massacres in the Vendee. They did it with a piece of paper that, along with the need of the soul, the need to have a homeland, put into effect the sublime idea of liberty-or rather of liberty married to quality. The Declaration of Independence. "We hold these Truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men..." And that piece of paper that we’ve all been copying well or badly from the French Revolution on, or from which we’ve drawn our inspiration, is still the backbone of America. The vital lymph of this nation. You know why? Because it turns the plebes into the People. Because it invites them, rather orders them, to govern themselves, to express their own individuality, to pursue their own happiness. All the opposite of what communism did, prohibiting people to rebel, to govern themselves, to express themselves, to get rich, and setting up His Majesty the State in place of the customary kings. My father used to say, "Communism is a monarchic regime, and it’s an old-school monarchy. Because it cuts off men’s balls. And when you cut off a man’s balls, he’s no longer a man." He also used to say that instead of freeing the plebes, communism turned everyone into plebes. It made everyone starve to death.
Well, in my view America frees the plebes. Everyone is a plebe there. White, black, yellow, brown, purple, stupid, intelligent, poor, rich. Actually the rich are the most plebeian of all. Most of the time they’re such boors! Crude, ill-mannered. You can tell immediately that they’ve never read Galateo, that they’ve never had anything to do with refinement and good taste and sophistication. In spite of the money they waste on clothes, for example, they’re so inelegant as to make the Queen of England look chic by comparison. But they are freed, by God. And in this world there is nothing stronger or more powerful than freed plebes. You will always get your skull cracked when you go up against the Freed Plebe. And they all got their skulls cracked by America: English, Germans, Mexicans, Russians, Nazis, Fascists, Communists. Even the Vietnamese got theirs cracked in the end, when they had to come to terms after their victory so that now when a former president of the United States goes there to visit they're in seventh heaven. "Bienvenu, Monsieur le President, bienvenu!" The problem is that the Vietnamese don’t pray to Allah. It’s going to be much harder to deal with the sons of Allah. Much longer and much harder. Unless the rest of the Western world stops peeing its pants. And starts reasoning a little and gives them a hand.
For better or worse, Oriana is back. I don't think she's too accurate about the influence of the Enlightenment on 18th century Europe, but it's too bad Gilda Radner won't be around to imitate her this time.
About Arizona and Nevada: I heard all the states along the Colorado get equal amounts of Colorado river water. I don't know if this is true, but it looks like a stroke of genius to make what were large empty tracks of desert states and give them parity with megastate California.
Here's the longer reply: De T saw the evils inherent to a centralized system, and he warned against it. Going to history's most prominent example, he wrote,
The [Roman] emperors possessed, it is true, an immense and unchecked power, which allowed them to gratify all their whimsical tastes and to employ for that purpose the whole strength of the state. They frequently abused that power arbitrarily to deprive their subjects of property or of life; their tyranny was extremely onerous to the few, but it did not reach the many; it was confined to some few main objects and neglected the rest; it was violent, but its range was limited.And he considered how it might apply to a society of equals:
It would seem that if despotism were to be established among the democratic nations of our days, it might assume a different character; it would be more extensive and more mild; it would degrade men without tormenting them. I do not question that, in an age of instruction and equality like our own, sovereigns might more easily succeed in collecting all political power into their own hands and might interfere more habitually and decidedly with the circle of private interests than any sovereign of antiquity could ever do. But this same principle of equality which facilitates despotism tempers its rigor.You might say he predicted the nanny state, borne of
..an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their livesand who submit, feebly, to
...an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood... For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?And so he predicted the modern Democratic voter:
Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things;it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits.The insight moves onward and he applies it to other aspects of the democratic society, such as the apathy such a system engenders, and so on to the end of the section in your link. Much to fear, indeed.
Now, it gets delicious, and ever so prescient (predicting Free Republic, in fact). Pick it up here , starting with:
I believe that it is easier to establish an absolute and despotic government among a people in which the conditions of society are equal than among any other; and I think that if such a government were once established among such a people, it not only would oppress men, but would eventually strip each of them of several of the highest qualities of humanity. Despotism, therefore, appears to me peculiarly to be dreaded in democratic times. I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the time in which we live I am ready to worship it.But you must read on, and you will smile:
I shall conclude with one general idea, which comprises not only all the particular ideas that have been expressed in the present chapter, but also most of those of which it is the object of this book to treat...This is our struggle, carried forth yet today. Or have you given up? The Marquis saw it coming, and he didn't give up:The political world is metamorphosed; new remedies must henceforth be sought for new disorders. To lay down extensive but distinct and settled limits to the action of the government; to confer certain rights on private persons, and to secure to them the undisputed enjoyment of those rights; to enable individual man to maintain whatever independence, strength, and original power he still possesses; to raise him by the side of society at large, and uphold him in that position; these appear to me the main objects of legislators in the ages upon which we are now entering.
...Other thinkers... take a different view: beside that track which starts from the principle of equality to terminate in anarchy, they have at last discovered the road that seems to lead men to inevitable servitude. They shape their souls beforehand to this necessary condition; and, despairing of remaining free, they already do obeisance in their hearts to the master who is soon to appear. The former abandon freedom because they think it dangerous; the latter, because they hold it to be impossible.Re-reading it, I am, again, stunned.If I had entertained the latter conviction, I should not have written this book, but I should have confined myself to deploring in secret the destiny of mankind. I have sought to point out the dangers to which the principle of equality exposes the independence of man, because I firmly believe that these dangers are the most formidable as well as the least foreseen of all those which futurity holds in store, but I do not think that they are insurmountable.
... Let us, then, look forward to the future with that salutary fear which makes men keep watch and ward for freedom, not with that faint and idle terror which depresses and enervates the heart.
Driving along Sloat at 23rd Ave in the Sunset district, I noticed a beautiful, marble temple. Unsure what it was, I asked my daughter to look and see. She couldn't find any name or indication of the church or order. I turned around the block, and we discovered behind it a huge, low, flat-top concrete structure, like a one-story parking lot. Very odd.
We got back to the front of the temple and read the inscription which graced the top front:
We drove around back again to discover a family that was climbing the steps to the concrete flat top to ride bicycles on it. I asked. It's a reservoir.
Of course.
The biggest lesson I learned out West was the extent of man's dominion over the earth. The builders of San Francisco found justification in the scripture for creating a city out of sand dunes and uninhabitable hills, and for bringing fresh water from the mountains to grow it. The whole of the West is such.
I think de Tocqueville's analysis aptly prortrays and defines the kind of people so inspired.
The beaches we saw south and north of SF were pretty bad: either very small, or rocky and sea-weed laden. And NO seashells! What's up with that???
BUT the coastline is fantastic, dramatic and the views....well I'll always remember them with awe.
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