Our trip was marred by a schedule, so the U-turn, the impulsive and sudden right, and the slow road were denied us. That said, those diversions we entertained were rewarded with surprise and satisfaction at something new or unexpected.
America is a mightily twisted place, we found -- and entirely sane.
Do you remember the early 1980s French film, Voici l'Amerique, a KGB sponsored display of the American decline? Naked sky-diving weddings, worm-eaters, an electric chair, and what else I can't remember, which was to counter Big Macs and Levis. The effect was laughter not fear, the great American circus. (Speaking thereof, on our trip we traced family routes, including the hometown of my great-grandfather, a Denver attorney, who ran off with the circus whenever it came through town; he'd be found in Dallas or someplace working as barker for the bearded lady).
We saw similar shows, from Moby Dick's, a bar in San Francisco, to the Wilburton, Oklahoma, road shack, that advertised, "DVD, Cell Phones, Satelite Dishes, Bait," to airplanes, tractors, cars or other contraptions raised on a twenty-foot poles by the highways. It all makes sense, it follows logical and goal-oriented behavior.
We're a land of people each his brother's equal -- and looking to prove it. Only so can the deviant enjoy the opportunities and shadows of the pursuit of happiness. And only so can a society manage its deviants.
De Tocqueville predicted it:
The reproach I address to the principle of equality is not that it leads men away in the pursuit of forbidden enjoyments, but that it absorbs them wholly in the quest of those which are allowed. By these means, a kind of virtuous materialism may ultimately be established in the world, which would not corrupt, but enervate, the soul, and noiselessly unbend its springs of action.America is a horrible place for the discontented. The times dissent has arisen, when its hysteria has taken general proportions, those times are rare. America is otherwise a graveyard for radicals. At a 1907 Gridiron dinner, President Theodore Roosevelt shook his fist at J.P. Morgan and screamed his high-pitched wail that if his latest railroad reform wasn't enacted the mob would enforce it for him. One can imagine what went through Morgan's head: contempt, and, probably, regret for so many dollars spent keeping the very sane, very conservative (and Democratic) Judge Parker out of the White House. Or, Morgan might just have chuckled, knowing that Roosevelt was high on protest, and that saner voices would prevail.
The splintered democracies of Europe are suckers for the political wave. America, with its imperturbable middle, gently sways, giving here, taking there, letting the "springs of action" work their work. De Tocqueville meant something else, but we readily apply his principle to the fags, or the Latter Day Saints. Each is given enough rope but never too much, only enough to play, and always firmly bound to the dock. A society of equals respects displays of difference, for each wants so desperately to be unique, all the while pursuing the same.
And so I have learned this Summer from the Marquis and from our travels that we are all miserably the same.
On the tail-end of this trip, I sat happily, one arm leading to wine, the other spread across a fine cloth, before a Cezanne and a Franz Marc, both museum quality and gorgeous, and I listened to their owner explain how little the psychic value of international bond trading. Nigeria finally defaulted, and he is poised to jump, looking at rewards I cannot comprehend. More important to him was that he made my daughter happy with a trip to Scotland a year ago. And if only he could write a book, he told me, he might feel like he created something of a tangible value.
I didn't bother to explain that his 24-hour work day, his gambles and skill at the silly and dangerous games of money are but another path to happiness, and if spent on making little girls happy and statues, Cezanne is just as dead.
My life seems simple and free to him, and enviable. It is, and I don't envy him, his house, or art collection; I pray that my countrymen always will, for this is what keeps America America, from San Francisco to Wilburton to New York: Alexis de T:
In olden society, everything was different; unity and uniformity were nowhere to be met with. In modern society, everything threatens to become so much alike, that the peculiar characteristics of each individual will soon be entirely lost in the general aspect of the world...And he concludes:The sentiment of ambition is universal, but the scope of ambition is seldom vast. Each individual stands apart in solitary weakness; but society at large is active, provident and powerful...
For myself, who now look back from this extreme limit of my task, and discover from afar, but at once, the various objects which have attracted my more attentive investigation upon my way, I am full of apprehensions and of hopes. I perceive mighty dangers which it is possible to ward off -- mighty evils which may be avoided or alleviated; and I cling with a firmer hold to the belief, that, for democratic nations to be virtuous and prosperous, they require but to will it.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. Providence has not created mankind entirely independent or entirely free. It is true, that around every man a fatal circle is traced, beyond which he cannot pass; but within the wide verge of that circle he is powerful and free; as it is with man, so with communities. The nations of our time cannot prevent the conditions of men from becoming equal; but it depends upon themselves whether the principle of equality is to lead them to servitude or freedom, to knowledge or barbarism, to prosperity or wretchedness.
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...