Garrison Keillor writes a hilarious review/spoof of Bernard-Henri Lévy's book, American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville (via Marginal Revolution)
An early version of Levy's ramblings was published in the The Atlantic last spring. From that excerpt I determined I would not buy the book. I will pretend to not understand how such poorly edited, over-analysis came to be published. I'm as sympathetic as the next person, maybe a little more so, to tales of foreigners in America, and Americans in America, trying to understand how a nation of millions (the exact number, of course, having been quite different at various points in time) scattered over such a distance functions, nay, thrives as a nation, as a community. It's a fascinating country. Much to love, much to wonder about, no more to dislike than in any other country.
The trouble with Levy's Atlantic article, and I'm guessing, the book too, is that he seemes determined to essentialize America, to yoke the culture of Texas and Minnesota closer together than I-35 brings them. Maybe, just maybe, in Tocqueville's time you could essentialize about the American "character." Easier to do with thirteen million than three hundred million. But that was the insight of Tocqueville, he tempered his generalizations with an appeciation of the variety in American life.
If you are going to try and explain America, to itself, or the rest of the world I don't think you can start with the presumption of unity. You have to presume diversity and variation, and let the guiding question be what unites the country in spite of that diversity. How does the nation hang together, though at times it has hung separately.
To give you a sense of Levy's over-analysis without subjecting you to the whole first chapter, take a look at this excerpt. It is a good question, why do Americans fly their nation's flag more than in Europe or Australasia, or Canada? But the question is not that profound. But "strange," "obsession," "a response to that trauma,"neurotic abreaction," or "something else entirely"? I'd say "something else entirely," without endorsing any of the other over-reactions to the flag that Levy has.
It's a little strange, this obsession with the flag. It's incomprehensible for someone who, like me, comes from a country virtually without a flag-where the flag has, so to speak, disappeared; where you see it flying only in front of official buildings; and where any nostalgia and concern for it, any evocation of it, is a sign of an attachment to the past that has become almost ridiculous. Is this flag obsession a result of September 11? A response to that trauma whose violence we Europeans persist in underestimating but which, three years later, haunts American minds as much as ever? Should we reread those pages in Tocqueville on the good fortune of being sheltered by geography from violations of the nation's territorial space and come to see in this return to the flag a neurotic abreaction to the astonishment that the violation actually occurred? Or is it something else entirely? An older, more conflicted relationship of America with itself and with its national existence? A difficulty in being a nation, more severe than in the flagless countries of old Europe, that produces this compensatory effect?Posted by robe0419 at January 29, 2006 5:21 PM