Essays from the Nick of Time (11 page)

In the piece, published in June 1913 (roughly six months after Anderson walked out of the paint factory), Marinetti explained that Futurism was about the “acceleration of life to today’s swift pace.” It was about the “dread of the old and the known… of quiet living.” The new age, he wrote, would require the “negation of distances and nostalgic solitudes.” It would be, instead, an age enamored of “the passion, art, and idealism of Business.”

This shift from slowness to speed, from the solitary individual to the crowd excited by work, would in turn force other adjustments. The worship of speed and business would require a new patriotism, “a heroic idealization of the commercial, industrial, and artistic solidarity of a people”; it would require “a modification in the idea of war,” in order to make it “the necessary and bloody test of a people’s force.”

As if this weren’t enough, as if the parallel were not yet sufficiently clear, there was this: the new man, Marinetti wrote—and this deserves my italics—would communicate by
“brutally destroying the syntax of his speech. Punctuation and the right adjectives will mean nothing to him. He will despise subtleties and nuances of language.”
All of his thinking, moreover, would be marked by a
“dread of slowness, pettiness, analysis, and detailed explanations. Love of speed, abbreviation,
and the summary. ‘Quick, give me the whole thing in two words!
’
”

Short of telling us that he would have a ranch in Crawford, Texas, and be given to clearing brush, nothing Marinetti wrote could have made the resemblance clearer. From his notorious mangling of the English language to his well-documented impatience with detail and analysis to his chuckling disregard for human life (which enabled him to crack jokes about Karla Faye Tucker’s execution as well as mug for the cameras minutes before announcing that the nation was going to war), Dubya was Marinetti’s “New Man”: impatient, almost pathologically unreflective, unburdened by the past. A man untroubled by the imagination, or by an awareness of human frailty. A leader wonderfully attuned (though one doubted he could ever articulate it) to “today’s swift pace”; to the necessity of forging a new patriotism; to the idea of war as “the necessary and bloody test of a people’s force”; to the all-conquering beauty of Business.

All national stories favor myth over hard fact, just as, to some extent, all personal ones do; few nations, however, have succeeded in erasing the hard facts of history as successfully, as utterly, as we have. But the empire of facts will have its say. Although Octavio Paz may have been right when he suggested that Americans have always preferred to use reality rather than to know it, we may yet have that acquaintance forced upon us.

Reality, of course, was not a fit subject this past year; we were a nation in crisis and had little patience for such frippery. Those who harbored notions of introducing it into the national debate, therefore, wisely held back and let the mythmakers have their day. But that day has passed. The storm of grief and fury has begun to abate, the patriotic surge, like the popularity of Osama bin Laden toilet paper, to recede. It may be time.

The spirit of pain is archaeological: it strips away—whether by brush or by pick—the layers of wishful thinking accumulated during times of peace. It scours and flays. It is by nature atavistic. At its best (unless it cuts too deep, comes too close) it can reveal the essential self, buried under a thin soil of misperceptions.

It seems almost trite to say it: whatever else last September’s events have done, they have forced on us—or will, eventually—a revolution in seeing. It will take time to understand what we have been shown; as of yet, the work of re-vision has hardly begun. Still, a few facts seem to be taking shape. A few truths, even. The first is that, despite the muzzy pap of the globalists, who never tire of limning their vision of a borderless, friction-free world, we remain strikingly—even shockingly—tribal. The second is that the source of this tribal identity—the three-century-old myth of American exceptionalism—is alive and well. And not just alive and well but ruddy-cheeked and thriving. Quieted for a time by prosperity, it has revived under stress.

The third, more troubling, has to do with what that prosperity—that long, sweet slumber—has done to us, and by us I mean the so-called baby-boom generation of which I am a part. Indulged by history as perhaps no generation has ever been indulged, heretofore largely excused from attendance, we’ve responded to our wake-up call with an odd and often unadmirable mix of jingoistic bluster and domestic capitulation. Sensing an opportunity, the Christian soldiers of our administration have ducked behind the banner of our righteousness and are marching as to war (a real war, this time), Colin Powell flapping like a small, decorative banner in the wind.

But let me be clear. I am not interested in anatomizing the current administration’s modus operandi: its made-for-TV bellicosity, its positively Reaganesque oversimplifications, its ever-increasing arrogance. I’m a novelist, not a policy wonk. I’m less interested in our unelected representatives’ predictable willingness to capitalize on our confusion than I am in the source of that confusion. Why? Because I sense something there, something not visible perhaps to those blinkered by empiricism (even the soft-shelled empiricism of the social sciences), something so large and amorphous that the radar of the pollsters cannot detect it—less a historical truth than a broadly cultural, intuitive one. I believe, to put it plainly, that last year’s attack was so traumatic to us because it simultaneously exposed and challenged the myth of our own uniqueness. A myth most visible, perhaps, in our age-old denial of death.

Consider it. Here in the New Canaan, in the land of perpetual beginnings and second chances, where identity could be sloughed and sloughed again and history was someone else’s problem, death had never been welcome. Death was a foreigner—radical, disturbing, smelling of musty books and brimstone. We wanted no part of him.

And now death had come calling. That troubled brother, so long forgotten, so successfully erased, was standing on our porch in his steel-toed boots, grinning. He’d made it across the ocean, passed like a ghost through the gates of our chosen community. We had denied him his due and his graveyards, watered down his deeds, buried him with things. Yet here he was. He reminded us of something unpleasant. Egypt, perhaps.

This was not just a terrorist attack. This was an act of metaphysical trespass. Someone had some explaining to do.

Some years ago, at the University of California, San Diego, a young woman raised her hand in the middle of a seminar I was then teaching on the first century of Rome and the dawn of the Christian era. She seemed genuinely disturbed by something. “I know you’re all going to think this is crazy,” she said, “but I always thought Jesus was an American.”

A lovely moment. What she had articulated, as succinctly as I had ever heard it articulated, was the spirit behind three and a half centuries of American history: America as an elect nation, the world-redeeming ark of Christ, chosen, above all the nations of the world, for a special dispensation. What she had expressed, with an almost poetic compaction, was what the cultural historian Sacvan Bercovitch had termed the core myth of America. Had John Winthrop been sitting at the table with us that foggy day in La Jolla, he would have understood what she was saying, and approved of it. As would Harriet Beecher Stowe. And Ronald Reagan. And, apparently, Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Stowe herself had made it all admirably clear in 1854: “The whole world,” she wrote, in words notable for their lack of originality, “has been looking towards America with hope, as a nation specially raised up by god to advance a cause of liberty and religion.” Others, from Henry David Thoreau to the evangelists of the Third Great Awakening, expressed the idea geographically, blending sacred and secular history, superimposing the religious metaphor over the actual land: America was bounded to the north by Canada, to the south by Mexico, to the East by Eden, and to the West by the Millennium. History moved from east to west. We had escaped fallen Egypt, crossed the sea, reinvented ourselves in the New World wilderness. Chosen for a special covenant with God, we would be “as a City upon a hill,” to recall both John Winthrop’s sermon aboard the
Arabella
in 1630 and Ronald Reagan’s inaugural address from 1981. Inevitably, it was understood (is still understood), the westward-tending tides of Manifest Destiny would carry us on till the ship of state ground ashore on the pebbles of paradise.
¹

I had occasion to recall all this more than once last fall. I remembered it when I read that the sales of millennial tracts across the nation were going through the roof because, according to biblical prophecy, the last days were to be preceded by great sorrow (as though only our sorrow would weigh in the record), when educated friends explained to me, with a kind of tragic gusto, that their entire worldview had been convulsed by the tragedy (and implied that it was vaguely un-American of me that mine had not), when a minister acquaintance confessed to undergoing a crisis of faith so severe that he was considering leaving the church.

When I wondered aloud to another acquaintance how it was possible for a man’s faith to sail over Auschwitz, say, only to founder on the World Trade Center, I found myself quickly taken to task for both my myopia and my callousness—the product, he implied, of my excessively European sensibility. He himself had been in a state of crisis for two months. He slept badly, struggled with depression. His children were afraid to get in the subway or walk past a tall building, and there was nothing he could tell them. He was considering leaving New York and moving to Mexico. “How can you not see that everything is different now?” he concluded. “And anyway, who are you to decide when it’s right for someone to have a crisis of faith?”

The answer to the second question was easy enough: no one, though I did reserve the right to wonder at the minister’s timing, or where his faith might have been hiding when half a million human beings were being massacred in Rwanda, not a few of them in churches. But the first had me stumped. Simply put, I did not believe that everything was different now, particularly not in the ontological sense in which my friend intended it. Nor did I understand his apparent eagerness to proclaim it so.

Everywhere I turned that eerily cloudless, almost crystalline September, I encountered a similar dissonance. A few days after the attack, for example, Auden’s “September 1, 1939” had blossomed in the vast, virtual fields of the Web:

Even on the most superficial level, Auden’s poem struck me as uniquely unsuited to the times. Rather than clinging to our average day, we seemed to be fairly trampling one another in our haste to assert that nothing would ever be average again, that the lights had indeed gone out and our homes become a haunted wood. Art? Music? Please. Colleagues in the School of the Arts at Columbia, where I teach (few writers, interestingly enough), seemed prepared to duel for the opportunity to testify to the Frivolity of Art in Times Like These. “It all feels so absurd,” one said to me, referring to his own work. “What’s the point?”

To which I couldn’t answer, any more than I could have answered if he had been arguing the redundancy of beauty, or breathing. What could I say? That in June 1945, workers reclaiming the Reich’s prisons in Moravia had found poems, folded into thick squares, stuffed up into the electrical wiring? Or that it seemed curious to me that a person locked in a cell, awaiting interrogation or death, would choose to write a poem on a piece of toilet paper, while another, arguably as safe as any human being has
ever
been in this world, would come to see art as a kind of decorative garnish, a sprig of parsley on the cultural plate? Should I have pointed out, perhaps, that art had always been an act of affirmation and resistance that, by its very complexity, worked against the shameful reductivism of fear, or that to believe otherwise was a luxury only the truly swaddled could afford? No, this seemed too obvious. Something else was at work here. I didn’t understand it.

I understood it no more than I understood the poster that had appeared in a store on my corner the week of the attack bearing the slogan “Never, never, never, never give up!” “Give up what?” I wanted to ask the sober crowds on Broadway. “To whom?” 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 not London during the Blitz. Or Stalingrad in the winter of 1943. Or Sarajevo in 1994. Thousands of innocent people had died, true. But innocents had 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…

Ah, but we did. How else to explain it? In our national heart of hearts, just below the global crust (with its multi- and poly- and inter- prefixes), the conviction that we were different, apart, a City upon a hill, remained untouched. Why was this
“the biggest news event in the history of the world”
(my own, stunned italics), as the administration of New York’s prestigious Stuyvesant High School told its students? Simple. Because it had happened here. To us. And, lest we forget, we Americans had been commissioned by God himself to bear the light of liberty and religion throughout all the earth. Rwanda? Bosnia? Couldn’t help but feel sorry for those folks, but let’s face it: Rwanda did not have a covenant with God. And Jesus was not a Sarajevan.

Hardly anyone outside the tattered fringe of the religious far right would have articulated it so bluntly, of course. And yet the fact remained: although the specifically Christian foundation of American exceptionalism had been largely buried by the years, the self-conception built upon it—however secularized and given over to mammon—remained intact. Our tragedy had exposed it, laid it bare, and torn it badly. Now I 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 Happen 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. My brother-in-law’s jokes about the famine in Ethiopia had been making the rounds before the dying there was even properly under way; by the summer of 2002, he had not told me a single World Trade Center joke. Humor, I realized, clearly had its limits—or borders, more precisely. The tribe still came first.

So much for globalism. What bothered me, however, was not so much the bald fact of our tribalism (which I found natural and excusable) as the hypocrisy with which we had denied it. What troubled me, specifically, was the kind of Benetton tokenism that allowed us to parade our global sympathies because we had eaten in a Sudanese restaurant last week, or featured a woman from Senegal in one of our ads. If we were going to weep for the victims of the attack on the World Trade Center and not for the dead of Srebrenica, it seemed to me, then we should have the courage to admit where the frontiers of our allegiance lay.

How close did tragedy have to come for us to bleed? Did we have to smell the smoke to have our imagination and our compassion activated? Did the victims have to be American? Or speak English? Was that enough? Or did they, perhaps, have to look like us as well? Was it possible, in other words, that our reaction to the tragedy was not wholly about those who had died—whom 99.9 percent of us had never known anyway—but about us? That what moved us, what woke us up to the fact that people had died—unexpectedly and tragically—was the uncomfortable thought that we might? It was a bit of a shock. Here in America, under the protective eye of Jesus, we could die. Now
that
was worth a crisis of faith.