A lively debate between Frank Fukuyama and Bernard Henri-Levy. BHL doesn’t come out too well, I fear. Because Europeans grow up with American culture in a way that Americans do not grow up with Europe’s, it’s very easy to reach quick decisions about what America is and what it means. The European already has a stack of assumptions, ideas and arguments about this country; and visiting here requires a steady abandonment of them until something like the complex reality of this marvelous place emerges. Not everyone is able to lose those assumptions, and from what I’ve read of BHL’s book, it’s largely pretentious dreck. I’ve lived here for over two decades now. My first impression, literally, was that I was in a movie. I’d heard those accents my entire life, but they had always been on a screen. Now, they were all around me, like a strange dream. My first summer, a friend and I traversed by car the entire continent and back: Miami to San Diego to Seattle to Boston. I’ve been to almost every state in the succeeding two decades. But I still feel I have only a tentative handle on this country. In fact, I wondered after that first summer whether this entity that spans a continent and includes New Orleans and Seattle, Little Rock and Manhattan, Miami and Minneapolis, can legitimately be called a single country at all. My only consolation is that many Americans seem to feel the same way. Hence one single but increasingly vital word: federalism.
(Photo: AS, July 3, 2005, Provincetown, Mass.)
The Dish 