Since I moved to the right side of the tracks in St. Paul, I've developed a custom on lazy Sunday afternoons to walk to one of the bookstores on Grand Avenue, grab some interesting reading material, find an overstuffed chair, and read for several hours. After about 60 minutes I do draw stares from other customers coveting my prime seating location and eventually from management types who correctly suspect I may not be in the "buying mood." Modern theories of customer service prevent them from grabbing me by the scruff of the neck and hauling my freeloading arse out into the street, while scolding "this is not a lending library," so usually I'm left undisturbed. Typically on these Sundays, I'm able to do a complete skim reading of almost any book that captures my interest. After which I'll arise from the chair, return the book back to its shelf, and announce (loud enough for the weekend/holiday assistant manager to hear) "well I'll just have to think about that one" and I imperiously stride out the door.
When I choose to go to Ruminator, my preferred sections are Race Theory and Labor History. This is where you'll find such outrageous and unbelievable titles as ""The Wages of Whiteness" and "The Wit and Wisdom of Fritz Mondale." When I go to Bound to Be Read I usually end up in the periodical section, mainly because they have tables and chairs there which are positioned out of the direct view of the wary glances from the checkout counter. This is where I found myself last week, and as I was unable to locate a copy of The Economist, I grabbed the September issue of Harper's, slunk back to the modernistic metal chair by the window and dived in.
Per usual, the Harper's Index was alternately deceptive and incisive, but always amusing; the Lewis Lapham editorial was impenetrable but well constructed, and the Readings section was episodically amazing, maddening, and laugh out loud funny (for the right reasons). This dual nature of the publication is also evident in two articles presented this month, both concerning the position of the US in the post-Sept. 11 world. As Harper's does not maintain an online presence for article transcriptions, I'll summarize below (Yes, I did purchase this issue, which according to my calculations, should give me free reading credit there for another couple of months).
The stinker article was called "A Year Later" by Columbia University Professor Mark Slouka. And it is outstanding, in that it stands out from even the cynical, weary rhetoric of other morally and culturally relativistic, blame America first philosophers. I won't go into all the details of his essay, but what particularly struck me was his yawning, nonplused, and utterly numbed by the broader worldview reaction to the atrocities of 9/11:
"A horrible thing had occurred, certainly. And those directly affected by the tragedy, like all victims of unspeakable things (like the mother of the teenager killed in a traffic accident the afternoon of the eleventh), deserved all of our compassion. But this was no London during the Blitz. Or Stalingrad in the winter of 1943. Or Sarajevo in 1994. Thousands of innocent people had died, true. But innocents have been dying for a while now--millions of them, mostly children as quietly as melting snow each and every year. Surely we didn't think that just because [we are Americans]......."
"Now I had understood how we had managed to endure the slow disintegration of Bosnia with such fortitude; we had simply filed it, along with the events in Rwanda and Chechnya and Sierra Leone, under the rubric "Bad Things That Occur to People Who Are Not Americans." We seemed, on the whole, capable of bearing untold amounts of other people's pain and very little of our own."
.... pause for sound of me clearing my throat.... Yes, quite. You say your father just died? Well of course that's unfortunate for you. But what about the guy down the block--his father died last year, did you shed any tears? And according to reports, selected people in Zimbabwe have their fathers die all the time, somebody almost every day of the year. And did you know this has been going on for virtually decades?! So, really, you need to get over yourself.
The gold comes from an essay called "Le Divorce: Do Europe and America Have Irreconcilable Differences" by author Nicholas Fraser (who is a genuine European himself, of British-French extraction.). He posits that the problems Europeans increasingly have with Americans are due to the changes occurring to their own societies. Furthermore he implies that the economic and cultural stagnation, brought on by socialism, has lead to a generalized discontent in Europe. However, political and egotistical considerations tend to make the Old World look outward for the source of their discontent, rather than inward:
"Meekness and innocuous technocracy are the distinguishing features of Europe. Otherwise the European future consists of wishes--that nation-states should somehow cease to exist, that the nations of Eastern Europe might be ingested by the Union without excessive inconvenience, that less money might somehow be squandered on cows or olive trees, and that against expectations the world will somehow prove itself capable of being a less dangerous place, more in keeping with the carefully policed, air-conditioned, and wholly unexceptional space colonized by the E.U."
"In the meantime, there is America--also incomplete, but ceaselessly changing, a haven of dissonance, a source of promise as well as danger. And now Europeans want to blame America for whatever appears to be deficient in European civilization. They also hanker for a Europe somehow created in opposition to America, and superior to it. How else, indeed. is it possible to be a European these days?"
Fraser also recounts a line of dialog from a play by the Englishman Tom Stoppard, which shows the simultaneous (and inevitable combination of?) grudging respect and resentment Europeans have for Americans:
"They say what they mean, and there is a vivid muscularity about the way they say it. They are always the first to put their hands in their pockets. They press you to visit them in their own home the moment they meet you and are irrepressibly good-humored, ambitious, and brimming with self-confidence in any company. Apart from that I've got nothing against them."
If you'd like to read more about it, purchase the September issue of Harper's, ideally from Ruminator, as they deserve some dough from me, indirect as it may be. Just tell them St. Paul sent you.
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