A battered society

A battered society
May 13, 2008

By Louis Rene Beres - America is a broken land. Whether one looks to our airports, our hospitals, our schools, our streets or our jails, the evidence is clear. Yet, every day — by an immense clamor; by an open disregard for real learning; by a vast rhythmic repetition — we Americans are told to find remedies in politics.

Again, we expect that a new president will redeem us. Once more, millions of Americans who can no longer afford food, mortgage payments, education, rent or health care are urged to the polls. As citizens of a "great democracy," we have the right to vote, but not the corollary right to keep our eyes, our bones and our teeth.

What sort of democracy is this? The candidates offer policy differences, but all are incapable of reversing the pervasive destruction of American life. "This is the dead land," said T.S. Eliot in "The Hollow Men" (1925), and now we receive "the supplication of a dead man"s hand."

No new president can halt the corrosive withering of heart, body and mind that diminishes these United States. No matter how uplifting, the candidates" dried voices can offer only a contrived hint of improvement. Hope still exists, but it must sing in an undertone.

Renewal can never come from the candidates themselves. Every society is the sum total of individual souls seeking redemption. Today, our American souls cannot be mended by speeches and promises.

Our presidential candidates embarrass themselves daily. Their shameless self-promotion displays an unwitting self-parody. We know this; still we still remain silent.

Every sham can have a patina. We Americans now inhabit a society so numbingly false that even our melancholy is gloss. Wallowing in the dim twilight of imitation, we show infinite forbearance for lies. With pitifully inadequate resentments, the lonely American crowd now harbors its most humiliating truth. In our noisy temple of shallow belief, the debility is self-inflicted.

The presumed requirements of national prosperity have supplanted individual dignity. American well-being is based upon an addictive consumption. Ground down by the babble of presidential oratory, we the people are motivated not by any balanced life search for meaning and harmony, but by the hallowed numbers on retail sales. Our American economy — like the disjointed society from which it springs — is built upon sand.

An authentically individual American is now a quaint artifact. Our mass society has no intention of encouraging self-actualization. To the contrary, the soulless American herd now marches lockstep toward further alienation. It is possible for us to be lonely in the world or lonely for the world, and our mass society has plainly produced both.

What can be done to escape the pendulum of our own mad clockwork?

Consider that we Americans are carried forth not by any commendable nobility of purpose, but by a great collective agitation, by inane repetition and by the demeaning momentum of crude and obscene entertainments. We may wish to slow down a bit and smell the roses, but our country now imposes upon its entire exhausted people the breathless rhythm of a machine. The end of all this concocted delirium is easy enough to identify. It is to prevent us from remembering who we are, and what we might still have become.

What does it truly mean to be an American? We may pay lip service to the high ideals of the Declaration and the Constitution, but almost no one really cares about these musty old documents. Invoked only for ostentation, the legal and philosophical foundations of the United States are today the provinces of a tiny handful of people. For the most part, we now lack any sources of national cohesion except for celebrity sex scandals, local sports team loyalties and the peculiarly comforting brotherhoods of war.

We Americans inhabit the one society that could have been different. Once we had a unique potential to nurture individuals to become more than a crowd. Emerson had described us as a people animated by industry and self-reliance, not anxiety, fear and trembling.

In spite of our silly claim to "rugged individualism," we Americans are shaped by the mass. Our battered society bristles with annoying jingles, endless hucksterism, crass allusions and endless equivocations. Surely, we think, there must be something more to this country. "I celebrate myself, and sing myself," said the poet Walt Whitman, but today the American self is under final assault by stupefying music, far-reaching tastelessness, and a literally epidemic gluttony.

In the end, credulity is America"s worst enemy. Our inclination to believe that redemption lies in the next presidential election is a fatal disorder. Campaign issues do need to be addressed, but so too do our deeper problems.

Only a rare few can ever redeem America, and these quiet and self-effacing souls remain hidden, even from themselves. Our redemption as a people can never be found among the crowd of candidates who stubbornly refuse to pause for a single serious thought. "Leaning together, headpiece filled with straw," this presidential crowd will only continue to crow anxiously for acknowledgment, adulation and power.

Louis Rene Beres is professor of international law at Purdue University and an author.