Eden as Eldorado: Awakening from the American Dream

I am a European. I am a member of a multinational community--Europe--that probably for the first time in history puts me and the 300 million or so people living here at the center of its deliberations, debates and legislation. And I proclaim that I do not want to eat hormone-treated meat, now matter where it comes from, or genetically modified foods. I do not want to fly in old planes, and I am happy that something is being done to make lifeless stressful for those who live near airports.

I care that the sick receive the medical treatment they need, that the elderly have enough comfort, and the unemployed, too, can afford to have children.

And I am hesitant about bombing people, whether soldiers or civilians, anywhere, just on the presumption that if I do not bomb them, they will bomb others. In fact, I am averse to the idea of killing anybody, no matter who they are or what they have done or could do.

I am sick to death of having American rightness rammed daily down my throat. I am doubly sick to see the world slapped about and abused incessantly by the tantrums of that hysterical, hypocritical "superpower".

I am happy to eat bananas from the Caribbean, a part of the world with which we Europeans still have a huge debt for past ravages.

If Europe loses its "battle of the banana" I will simply boycott Chiquita products and even old Boeings. And exhort all my fellow Europeans to do the same. John Harden, Pisa, Italy, "One European's View," IHT, 3/16/99, p. 7.

The first time I ever questioned the validity of the concept of the American Dream was when I read in David Madden's collection of essays on the Thirties that it dated only from the Depression Days. It was a kind of ideological whistling in the dark, a final version of the Puritan 's "City on the Hill" concept of American Exceptionalism. My skepticism deepened when I read novelist George P. Elliott's rhetorical question in "The Nation", "Did you ever hear of a Vietnamese Dream?

The more I thought about the American tradition of Exceptionalism, the less credible it became. And as I examined the evident results of alleged American hegemony the more worried I became. As the president of the advertising agency BBD&O put it crudely during the recession of l958, "America is still the all-time Number One Hit on Humanity's Hit Parade." How do you deal with such silly hubris among the business leaders setting the American agenda.

Adam Garfinkle ("Cambodia's Past Is Its Own Business," IHT (2/2/99,p.8) explains lucidly the ambiguities and self-deceptions that follow from the evolving doctrine of American Exceptionalism. "According to the present stewards of U.S. foreign policy, 'globalization' defines the benign, transformative marriage of American power and values in the world as a whole. America has become not only the 'indispensable nation', as the secretary of state puts it, but also, in its own eyes at least a power so uniquely benign that it arrogates to itself the right both to make the rules of international order and to excuse itself from being bound by them.

Thus has evolved a double standard wherein Americans find natural to insinuate themselves into the affairs of others but cannot imagine others doing the same in theirs." The French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine has even devised a neologism for the current state of American Exceptionalism--the "Hyperpower". He believes that the breadth of American power is so unique "extending beyond economics, technology and military might to a "domination of attitudes, concepts, language and modes of life" that Superpower no longer covers the expanding influence.

He explained in a speech before the Association France-Ameriques that in former times great dynasties were almost always counterbalanced by other powers. "Today, that is not the case, and therefore there is this question at the center of the world's current problems." When asked recently by L'Express what could be done to "resist the steamroller" Vedrine responded by rephrasing the question,"How do you counterbalance these tendencies when they are abusive?"

"Through steady and perserving work in favor of real multilateralism against unilateralism, for balanced multipolarism against unipolarism, for cultural diversity against uniformity." (IHT, 2/5/99, p.5, c.3.) He concluded by insisting that none "of that will happen automatically and our influence in the world isn't going to grow all by itself.A strategy, a tactic, a method, are necessary. It's possible."William Pfaff clarifies this French initiative by noting that the German commentator Josef Joffe minimizes this sense of threat because "the United States irks and domineers but does not conquer."

(Tell that to Central American banana republics!) He adds that a characteristic formulation of the American Exceptionalist unilateralism is Madeline Albright's contention that the United States "stands taller and sees farther." ("France Airs Its Slant on America" IHT, 2/8/99, p.8.)

The biggest barrier, of course, is American hubris. The days of Thomas Jefferson's "decent respect for the opinions of mankind" are long gone--suppressed by two centuries of American Exceptionalism and ideologies that range from Manifest Destiny to the American Century." There are, of course, regressive genes in our intellectual heritage which acknowledge the necessity for openness to others--voices as diverse as Horace Mann, Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, William James and John Dewey--have urged us to be sharing rather than domineering.

But the contradictions in the American character from its very beginnings (declaring freedom for Everyman while killing or abusing all the Indians and enslaving blacks and poor whites) have engendered a subconscious guilt that make it difficult for Americans to know who they really are, where they have actually been in their unfolding history. That is why we have the absurd gap between what professional historians have established about our Pasts as a people and the childish Disneyfied illusions most Americans are afraid to abandon.

To put it in psychological terms, we assuage our suppressed guilt by pretending we already live in Eden (America as the all time Number One Hit on Humanities Hit Parade) while we behave as indigenes of Eldorado (everyman has a right to be rich). With our Egos in Eden and our Ids in Eldorado it is little wonder that we vacillate between exemplary Idealism (viz. the Peace Corps) and uncritical Materialism (Every man has a right to be rich)--to the consternation of the world which has to deal with our Hyperness and ourselves because it is not satisfying to be so confused.

Now there is a regressive gene in our intellectual heritage which encourages sharing and openness--from voices as diverse as Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, William James, Mark Twain and John Dewey. But the dominant gene is a more and more callow Exceptionalism that makes it harder and harder for the rest of the world to string along with us. And as the world becomes smaller and most instantaneous, the frictions escalate. There is perhaps no more crucial item on the American agenda today than to integrate our Edenic SuperEgo with an Eldoradan Id in an Ego that is meliorist and communitarian.

And blocking this indispensable integration, this essential maturing, is a false consciousness every bit as debilitating as our heritage of racism toward reds and yellows and blacks and that is the myth that there are no class divisions in America. The flippant side of the aphorism that every boy can grow up to be President (or better, a millionaire) is that everyone can do it on his own: hence the hostility in the Establishment to unions, feminism, black and red power. Their various pleas for equity assert the reality of class divisions.

At home, these self-deceptions have institutionalized social and moral deficits (two track public education, one for the increasingly affluent suburban, the other for the depressingly disoriented ghettos). Abroad, they have legitimized corrupt tyrannies either started or supported by American businesses (sugar baronies in pre-Castro Cuba, banana republics in Central America, cynical suppressions of egalitarian regimes that threaten American investments in Guatemala, Chile, and elsewhere).

It used to be a proud Senate boast that bipartisanship in foreign policy is a national honor. Truer would be the realization that the best American ideals have been suppressed almost everywhere in the world at the convenience of American investment. We have been covertly bipartisan in the suppression of egalitarian ideals abroad.

The dizzying acceleration of globalization shows how increasingly short-sighted this betrayal of our better selves is both here and abroad.