A word of warning from a century ago …
Now one word to my own people and their peculiar shortcomings. Anglo-Saxon domineering is the greatest danger to Humanity in the world today. Americans are proud of having blotted out the red Indian and stolen his possessions and of burning and torturing negroes in the sacred name of equality. At all costs we must get rid of our hypocrisies and falsehoods and see ourselves as we are — a domineering race, vengeful and brutal, as exemplified in Haiti; we must study the inevitable effects of our soulless, brainless selfishness as shown in the world-war. — Frank Harris
That quote comes from My Life and Loves, the self-published autobiography which Harris arranged to have privately printed in four volumes, beginning in 1922. It was widely reviled and banned in both the U.S. and the U.K., where Harris was loudly criticized for being salacious, not to mention “fanciful,” as in embroidering the facts or making things up out of whole cloth. But Harris was admirably anti-Puritanical and an eloquent writer whose many books, especially his volume on Shakespeare and his biography of Oscar Wilde, as well as his portraits of dozens of important cultural figures of his time, have lasting value for their penetrating insight. He sounded off on all kinds of subjects. Like his warning, much of what he wrote could have been written yesterday.
“At all costs we must get rid of our hypocrisies and falsehoods and see ourselves as we are…” That’s one of the great American ironies. Trump shows daily what America is as a country and culture, and yet we deny it even when the reality of freely elected Trump is in our faces.
American television vividly illustrates the values of Trumpland. After all, it gave birth to him. We see its racially informed class system, its misogyny, its tackiness, its totalizing form of unmitigated capitalism in incessant commercials, its plutocratic political system, its cheap infotainment, its fanatic celebration of the individual over every form of common good, its indifference to good taste and intelligence so extreme it becomes an affront to human dignity.
Decent people retreat to their alcoves of silence. The protests of the media will save us they say. They pretend not to see that the media eagerly promotes Trump’s daily outrages since it has become so profitable. Never mind that the orange-haired media king was propelled to the presidency and is daily empowered by this process.
The American system long ago began to feed on its own self-destruction, its rustbelt rot, its lobbied government always for sale, its best journalists sidelined by corporatocracy, its continual state of war, its systematic neglect of its infrastructure. But we say Trump is an anomaly. He’s not us. As if our cowardice, distraction, and indifference played no role in the American tragedy.
Thanks for the comment. Once again an amplification that enhances the post. I can’t help thinking that you must have got a brief diet of the tube during rest stops on your recent American tour.
Yes, free moments channel surfing TV in hotel rooms over 9 weeks in 23 cities. Much of the character of the USA is made apparent, but it was nothing new — more a confirmation of what many have long seen. Nothing seems to be changing, except that the celebration of culturally and politically debased people is perhaps becoming more open and candid. By portraying trashiness as cool and entertaining, we can better rationalize the increasing disparity of wealth and class. This is one of the many, ever-increasing cultural transformations in the USA created by the consolidation of the economic theories referred to as neo-liberalism. The truly horrifying part is that even most educated Americans have little understanding of what is being done to our country.