Post #123: The Unquiet Americans

19 July 2024

“The sage knows himself, but makes no show of himself;

Loves himself, but does not exalt himself.”

—Tao The Ching, ch. 72

     I have talked before (in #101 especially) about how much the Americans* meant to me when I was growing up in what was then still their sector of nominally occupied Berlin. I’ve always felt incredibly lucky to have been given a chance to attend my German-American school, on a 1 in 20 lottery draw for spots, at a time when getting such a bilingual education was still a great anomaly for a German kid. I’ve been impressed, throughout my life, with the generosity that Americans have shown me in all kinds of ways, whether during my years of graduate school or in the course of my long, winding Odyssey through the academy. If I’m not a natural child of the United States, I have nonetheless considered myself, all along, a kind of half-brother by another mother, or perhaps by adoption, or at least a cousin.

     But goodness gracious, how big they talk about themselves, their families, their God, and their country, as if the rest of world would not hear them if ever they stopped shouting at the top of their lungs! Rest assured, ye citizens of God’s own country, the shining model for all the rest of poor and huddled mankind, we can hear you quite clearly at lower decibels, because there are amplifiers all around, owing to your power and position in the world. When you sneeze, it has been said, other countries catch pneumonia; were you to whisper, we could still catch every word, because so much depends on it for us. When you turn up the volume in your characteristic way, you only make our eardrums ring and give us a headache, that is all.

     My last post on the poisons of politics stirred up a lot for me, as I assume the text made clear, and has left me struggling still with the unfolding prospect of a Trumpian triumph in November. It was in this mood that I tuned in to the latest news about J.D. Vance being chosen as The Donald’s running mate. I am happy to report that I find myself not nearly as viscerally put off by Mr. Vance as I am by Mr. Trump, disturbed though I am by the long line of former critics who, after once calling The Donald a possible future Hitler and the like, have of late taken to praising him as if he had descended from Mount Sinai itself. (“He didn’t know me before,” I saw Mr. Trump quipping about Mr. Vance’s conversion, “but then he fell in love with me.” I couldn’t help laughing more than I usually do. That was a good line, not exactly self-effacing, which may be too much to ask of Mr. Trump, but with just the slightest note of possible irony, if one listened very carefully and hopefully.)

     Mr. Vance has much to recommend him when you set him beside Mr. Trump. He did not grow up a rich jerk from Queens, quite the contrary; he did his service in uniform in a war-zone before talking big about matters military; he seems to have studied politics and philosophy with considerable commitment, and law too; he converted to Catholicism on the strength of reading Augustine, no less. I’m willing, for now, to suspend all disbelief and credit the rosy picture. Whether he is likely to be any more right than Mr. Trump in his politics, rather than merely more right-wing, I do not presume to say. I only know that I have my by now familiar reservations, before the contemporary American left and right alike. Luckily, I don’t need to say much more about that fraught aspect of things, because I am trying to get at something else here.

     Let me give Mr. Vance the benefit of the doubt on everything for a moment, and let me assume, for the sake of argument, that he is every bit the hero that his darling of a wife sees in him. I am delighted to hear that our knight of the sorrowful countenance won the favors of his beauteous princess by all the rules of chivalry and the heart, not dating warfare that makes the law fall silent. That he has been big enough to leave his wife’s Hinduism alone and that such a meat-and-potatoes kind of guy would gladly cook veggies for her and her mother is likewise very heartening. But here’s the thing: despite San Diego and Yale Law School, Usha still shows some lingering traces of her ancestral bashfulness,** bless her heart, and while she endorsed her husband before running cameras in terms not much less glowing than those of the others, she was able to make it charming, not just gushing. She wasn’t talking big; she was talking love; and therein lies all the difference.

     Then came the man himself. Remember, I am making myself like him here, based on the above considerations, taking him to be a worthy, self-reflective, sensitive human being. But lo, the fellow cannot, from the looks of it, get through two complete sentences without talking big in the manner I cannot stand: bark-bark-boast, bark-bark-boast, applause, applause! Which leaves me, as so often, in acute discomfort and scratching my ever-puzzled head.

     Why is it so necessary for Americans to be holding forth in this manner about how much they love America, as if someone were forever holding their feet to the fire in an effort to get them to doubt or deny the obvious?*** Recant, recant, and tell us that you loathe your own home! Absurd. (Yes, yes, I realize how many such noises there have been to that effect, not only in recent years but for many decades now. I know the tune only too well from other contexts, and I agree that it calls for a robust response. The barking mode long predates this deplorable turn, however, especially on the Republican side, and not much is gained if the ideological zealotry of the left is mirrored by an equally smug and tribal self-righteousness on the right. Such mirroring effects may be inevitable in politics, but attractive they are not.)

     Why must Americans drag their families into the limelight at every turn and make such a garish show of their pride and affection, as if it were not a given, all around the globe, that human beings are fond of their loved ones? Very well, so your wife and kids look “the best people in the world” to you, as I have heard otherwise straight-laced and sophisticated fathers announce to me without a blush. Dear Sir, with all due respect: what are you doing but to boast, given that she is, after all, your wife, not somebody else’s, and the children are, let us hope, your offspring, not the neighbor’s? We would be quite happy, if you said nothing, to assume that you are pleased with them, or else to judge for ourselves by the evidence, which tends to speak louder than words.

     And why, perhaps most irritatingly of all, cannot your omnipotent creator of the universe be trusted to look after his/her/its/their own interests without your assuming the part of self-appointed agent and all-purpose ad man? Why should the creative principle of the universe, if it really be no less, need your cheerleading? Meister’s Eckhart’s mantra bears repeating: “If thou wouldst be holy do not yelp about God.”†

     It raises a basic psychological issue that should require no pointing out, except that it must not be very widely understood in America, or the constant trumpeting would surely cease. When you hold forth so insistently about how uniquely great you are, you assure nobody who is not already convinced; you only sow doubt where perhaps there was none before. No one with any real spark of greatness would need to talk in this manner about himself or what is most dear to him; if the spark is not visible without incessant self-promotion, then how much can it really amount to? If you feel such a desperate need to tell us what we can easily figure out for ourselves, then what are we to conclude but that it is you who needs reassuring?

     I called Mr. Trump insufferable in my previous post, and it was this self-inflating dimension to his personality that I had primarily in mind, though I outlined a few other areas of concern. Alas, I don’t think that there is much hope of respite now that he has anointed (for the time being, anyway) an heir-apparent who seems no more gifted in the fine art keeping his voice down. You might say that a big mouth is an inherent feature of the political class. Perhaps so, but note how Boris Johnson, with whom Mr. Trump was for a while quite inappropriately compared, could always be counted on for a self-depreciating witticism, and based his political success upon it, because it is no less than what a British gentleman (I use the term loosely, see #99) is expected to do, in politics or anywhere else. The Teutons are less known for their humor or their understatement, but if perchance you are having trouble with putting a face to their government these days, the reason may be that they have, for the past few years, had a chancellor so self-effacing that there are Germans who cannot remember what he looks like. Not bad for a country once rumored to be populated by latter-day Huns. [Written months before the February 2025 elections, which may have brought his face more to mind and which resulted in the worst result for his party since 1890. He's a good guy, nonetheless, who says that he is very lucky in love.]

     Neither the French in general nor their current president in particular have often been accused of undue humility; but place Emmanuel Macron beside the Americans in question, and his voice barely rises above a polite murmur.†† I am not familiar with all the presidents or prime ministers of respectable countries today, but I have trouble imagining even one in the lot who would presume to fill a room with the size of his hat alone, the way Americans routinely do.††† A few tin-pot despots from more obscure corners of the globe may try, and get mocked for it behind their backs; a few darker characters still may succeed by the fear they spread, but nothing more. Kings and queens will indeed sometimes fill rooms with their crowns, or rather their dignity and decorum, but that is a special case not very relevant to the United States [whatever Mr. Trump’s pretensions in that department may be (added March 2025)].

     Ever since Mr. Trump stepped into the realm of pseudo-politics by running a full-page open letter in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe in September 1987, he has been peddling the same fabrications about an America supposedly beset by weakness of backbone, allowing itself to be taken advantage of and laughed at—as if the colossus that has been straddling the globe for most of the past century were some hapless Gulliver tied down by a bunch of uppity Lilliputians (then the Japanese and Europeans, now a few other culprits, but with a script otherwise unchanged). Americans may see themselves that way, quite sincerely, in their superpower myopia; but they should know that what others see instead is an elephant stomping around all-too freely in a china shop and breaking things. (Make America grate again, indeed.)  Power corrupts; great power, when one is not ever-wary of its temptations, corrupts greatly; and one of the first things it corrodes is the ability to see oneself in the right proportions, whether it be by inflating egos to giant dimensions or by fostering all manner of paranoid fantasies about being short-changed by pygmies.

     Obama was so popular in the world not on account of his policies, necessarily, and definitely not because he was taken to be weak, but because he could be trusted with other countries’ tea sets; some Americans took pride in that, and I was with them.‡ To say that he did not have American interests in mind because he did not constantly mouth off and alienate others by rampaging like an ill-tempered pachyderm is silly and slanderous. There are always things that need renegotiating on the diplomatic dance floor, granted, and a loose-gun reputation has certain benefits; still the spectacle of asserting one’s interests in so uncouth a manner is embarrassing to watch for anyone who can tell the difference between a Ming vase and the potted-plants section at the big-box store with fleets of tank-sized pickup trucks parked outside. One can only hope that the real Donald Trump is a smoother operator off-camera; if he is only faking it for the audience, however, then even his much-vaunted authenticity goes by the wayside.

     My previous post should have made it clear beyond all possible misunderstanding that my discomforts with the Republican side as it is presenting itself to us in 2024 does not in any way imply an endorsement of the Democratic alternative in its current form. It seems awfully late in the day to rehearse my many objections to “the toxic ravages of political correctness” that Norman Mailer was already denouncing in the most vitriolic terms at least thirty years before anyone thought of calling toxic anything one happens to disagree with or dislike. Identity politics and the woke horrors it has spawned are nothing very new under the sun, and those of us who have been in this fight for decades know where we stand. For the present, it is enough to say that four more years of the present dispensation—let alone a further forcing of the pace—most emphatically do not appeal to me. No more needs to be said, and I am wearying of the whole business of politicking in this manner. They have their place, I suppose, our desponding reflections on the political mayhem near election time; but alas, it does not bring out the best in us to engage in these doleful exercises, and it may have a way of driving us all crazy with its poisons instead (fear and loathing indeed, see #122).

     What do we really know, at a distance, of the individuals in question, and how much sense can any of us hope to make not only of so many unmanageably complex issues but of entire political agendas and the endless trade-offs they involve? To be able to take a position, we must necessarily enter into gross simplification and partially-blind tribal thinking, whatever we may tell ourselves. It’s certainly not been good for my own mental balance, this fortnight’s excursion into electoral politics, and I urgently need to retire from it and go back to watching the wider world at a distance, not through the news, which is maddening by its very nature, but through my old habit of reading the Economist, with a week or two of delay, and contenting myself with observing where things are going without getting caught up in the maelstrom of nightmares and dark passions, my own as much as anyone’s.

     As for my American cousins—whether red or blue, or purple, or pink—they are obviously a very large and complicated part of the human family, diverse almost beyond imagination along all kinds of parameters. I’ve generally found them very easy to get along with, and I am glad to have them around, even if irritations are sometimes inevitable. Family, as I understand it, even in the most extended sense, is never frictionless and happy-ever-after; the important thing is that even if you clash, perhaps fiercely at times, you can shelve your differences for Thanksgiving and keep going together for another year, or four.

*That they call themselves the Americans, as if there were no others to their north and south, and longer-established too, is perhaps the most outrageous self-aggrandizement of all. But “United Staters” does not roll off the tongue, and “Yankees,” though it has a nice ring to it, is too open to misunderstanding where British English is not spoken.

     When the heirs to the rebel colonies are so sure that their revolution was an unparalleled success, they tend to forget that loyalist British North America never disappeared, but that it has all this time maintained a rival society with considerable, and considerably quieter, charms—what we call Canada today (see #21). No human society is perfect, but the contest for the most relatively attractive one is a lot more competitive than the “Americans” like to believe, and not only on their continent either. The choice is an obvious one only if you either don’t know enough or you take so blinkered a view of the world that a proper appreciation of the alternatives is impossible.

     The supposed equality of cultures is bunk; there are important qualitative judgments to be made, even if it isn’t easy to weigh the many complex variables adequately. Alas, they are by no means all to the American advantage. That it can be a great place, with plenty of amazing people in it, nobody is denying, least of all I. We American-friendly types are on their side, for the most part; but they don’t become any more appealing when they tell one another before running cameras how uniquely wonderful they are and go into ecstasies of pompous self-delight over it. I wouldn’t have them be masochistic and self-loathing, a cultural turn I grew up with and that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone (see #105). It’s just that a little more realistic self-awareness and measured modesty throws anyone’s virtues into sharper relief than the deplorable habit of applauding oneself.

**One can easily imagine her blushing if she thought her performance too overdone. Her husband, too (I’m on to you, Thrasymachus!). But Mr. Trump? I don’t think so; not unless there’s a very different man hiding behind the image, which, as I’ve said many times before, is conceivable, even if I am not convinced that it’s all only an act. I would be immensely relieved if it were.

***It is all-too noticeable how much the boasting mode at its most strident seems at home in precisely those strata—the lower white—whose life is demonstrably not better than it would be in many other countries to which the U.S. is supposed to be so immeasurably superior. It’s a plain case of “my country, right or wrong,” in other words, hard to argue with, but not convincing to anyone who does not find it obvious. (It’s simply not up for serious debate, as Mr. Vance illustrates with particular color in ch. 11 of his Hillbilly Elegy.) A talisman that is so fervently believed in, one should not try to take from anyone unless one is very sure indeed of having a better replacement to offer (#95). No matter how dubious, even idolatrous, the object of devotion may look, the attempt to wrest it from clutching hands can only backfire and lead to a redoubling of the defensive efforts.

†Devout yelpers might point me to the Gospel message about not hiding one’s light under a bushel (Matt. 5:15). I would answer, going by the very passage, that a city on the hill cannot be hid (5:14), if it is for real, and that the supposed Savior reminded us not to carry on before others (that we may be seen), but to close the door and say our prayers quietly, so that they may be rewarded openly (Matt. 6:5–6) by powers capable of hearing the faintest whispers of our hearts—rewarded, it bears repeating (because we seem to forget it so easily), not with the things of the world, but with that fragrance of the good which carries even against the wind and requires no advertisement (Dhammapada 4:54).

††In an earlier version of a piece on Mr. Trump that I ended up not publishing, I observed that I had never once seen the man answer a question properly if it was not perfectly convenient for his purposes, nor show the least concern for elementary debating ethics, basic logic, or even coherence itself. Very well, you might say, but they routinely teach just such underhanded techniques at the Napoleonic grandes écoles too, where the French public elites are trained, and where it is a considered a bedrock maxim of real-politics always to answer the question you wanted to be asked, not the one you got instead. A fair point, I admit, but there is a crucial difference: these French foxes know exactly what they are doing, and they could easily answer the real questions if they wished; they do otherwise in the service of a high Machiavellianism that they take to be indispensable for governing the ungovernable, and not without cause.

†††”Big hat, no cattle,” they say in Texas, where they know a thing or two about super-sizing.

‡Much of the extreme animosity that Barack Obama met with in certain circles was, by Mr. Vance’s own admission (also ch. 11 in the Elegy), less about his policies (which were on the whole far more moderate than the reactions to them) than about the fact that he “struck at the heart of the deepest insecurities” in those communities.