Britain is defined by so much history dating back to an age that Americans find mind blowing. So the facts versus fiction is less defined for me. Funnily enough I think of America as much more swathed in myth, partly I suppose due to a feeling of rootlessness and also a need to try and establish a common identity
Yes, America is a babe in the woods compared to Britain! And it feels like because it is so young, because its bones have not yet been set, it doesn’t know how to sustain its story as empire.
I’ve been reading a lot of James Baldwin recently, and this passage from No Name in the Street stuck out, highlighting how America’s relative inexperience with inequity is coming to roost.
“For a very long time, for example, America prospered—or seemed to prosper: this prosperity cost millions of people their lives. Now, not even the people who are the most spectacular recipients of the benefits of this prosperity are able to endure these benefits: they can neither understand them nor do without them, nor can they go beyond them. Above all, they cannot, or dare not, assess or imagine the price paid by their victims, or subjects, for this way of life, and so they cannot afford to know why the victims are revolting. They are forced, then, to the conclusion that the victims—the barbarians—are revolting against all established civilized values—which is both true and not true—and, in order to preserve these values, however stifling and joyless these values have caused their lives to be, the bulk of the people desperately seek out representatives who are prepared to make up in cruelty what both they and the people lack in conviction.”
Have you read Dos Passos’s trilogy U.S.A? It is a massive, sprawling, quixotic narrative about the deep divides in America. I read it years ago and it still haunts me.
I haven't! But after a quick internet search, I see that Jean-Paul Sartre was a big fan of John Dos Passos and wrote an essay about him and one of the books in the trilogy, where he says this about it:
“we immediately recognize the sad abundance of these untragic lives […] In capitalist society, people do not have lives; they only have destinies.”
Thanks to you and Sartre, I am sold! Adding it to the list.
Darius, what a wonderful essay on a subject of such universality that its roots lie in all of humanity. However the American view of generational violence does feel more at home in a country whose past is swathed in myth and, to some extent, fantasy.
It means so much to me that this essay resonated with you, Alison! Thank you for reading it and sitting with it.
Yes, sadly, generational violence is a global scourge that has been with us forever. If there is an American angle to it—and of course I'm talking in generalities here, and there are so many individuals in the U.S. and elsewhere who break this mold—it's that we're less mythologically instructed and more rootless than other peoples. It's also not lost on me that there is a closedness and privacy among British people that, very similarly, keeps many Brits from honestly reckoning with the harmful systems that have been perpetuated on your island.
Also, although I'm not sure whether it makes things in the UK relatively better or worse (likely just different), I am, for some reason, envious of how much more your nation's past is swathed in myth and fantasy than mine.
Britain is defined by so much history dating back to an age that Americans find mind blowing. So the facts versus fiction is less defined for me. Funnily enough I think of America as much more swathed in myth, partly I suppose due to a feeling of rootlessness and also a need to try and establish a common identity
Yes, America is a babe in the woods compared to Britain! And it feels like because it is so young, because its bones have not yet been set, it doesn’t know how to sustain its story as empire.
I’ve been reading a lot of James Baldwin recently, and this passage from No Name in the Street stuck out, highlighting how America’s relative inexperience with inequity is coming to roost.
“For a very long time, for example, America prospered—or seemed to prosper: this prosperity cost millions of people their lives. Now, not even the people who are the most spectacular recipients of the benefits of this prosperity are able to endure these benefits: they can neither understand them nor do without them, nor can they go beyond them. Above all, they cannot, or dare not, assess or imagine the price paid by their victims, or subjects, for this way of life, and so they cannot afford to know why the victims are revolting. They are forced, then, to the conclusion that the victims—the barbarians—are revolting against all established civilized values—which is both true and not true—and, in order to preserve these values, however stifling and joyless these values have caused their lives to be, the bulk of the people desperately seek out representatives who are prepared to make up in cruelty what both they and the people lack in conviction.”
(Baldwin wrote this in 1972, but America is the same now as it was then, in this regard.)
Have you read Dos Passos’s trilogy U.S.A? It is a massive, sprawling, quixotic narrative about the deep divides in America. I read it years ago and it still haunts me.
I haven't! But after a quick internet search, I see that Jean-Paul Sartre was a big fan of John Dos Passos and wrote an essay about him and one of the books in the trilogy, where he says this about it:
“we immediately recognize the sad abundance of these untragic lives […] In capitalist society, people do not have lives; they only have destinies.”
Thanks to you and Sartre, I am sold! Adding it to the list.
Darius, what a wonderful essay on a subject of such universality that its roots lie in all of humanity. However the American view of generational violence does feel more at home in a country whose past is swathed in myth and, to some extent, fantasy.
It means so much to me that this essay resonated with you, Alison! Thank you for reading it and sitting with it.
Yes, sadly, generational violence is a global scourge that has been with us forever. If there is an American angle to it—and of course I'm talking in generalities here, and there are so many individuals in the U.S. and elsewhere who break this mold—it's that we're less mythologically instructed and more rootless than other peoples. It's also not lost on me that there is a closedness and privacy among British people that, very similarly, keeps many Brits from honestly reckoning with the harmful systems that have been perpetuated on your island.
Also, although I'm not sure whether it makes things in the UK relatively better or worse (likely just different), I am, for some reason, envious of how much more your nation's past is swathed in myth and fantasy than mine.