Who and What Defines America?

Harold Bloom can be a bit boorish at times (constantly scapegoating poststructuralist theorists for the declining status of the arts and humanities in our ever-more-corporate universities) but this essay, Reflections in the Evening Land, in which he turns to canonical American literature for insight regarding "our national self-destructiveness," is brilliant - one of the best things I've read by him in some time.

Bloom doesn't say anything particularly new, but he is eloquent in describing the toxic reign of the Bush regime, which "daily fuses more tightly together elements of oligarchy, plutocracy, and theocracy," and makes some important points worth airing in clear and simple language: "'Democracy'" is a ruined word, because of its misuse in the American political rhetoric of our moment."

At the age of 75, I wonder if the Democratic party ever again will hold the presidency or control the Congress in my lifetime. I am not sanguine, because our rulers have demonstrated their prowess in Florida (twice) and in Ohio at shaping voting procedures, and they control the Supreme Court. The economist-journalist Paul Krugman recently observed that the Republicans dare not allow themselves to lose either Congress or the White House, because subsequent investigations could disclose dark matters indeed. Krugman did not specify, but among the profiteers of our Iraq crusade are big oil (House of Bush/House of Saud), Halliburton (the vice-president), Bechtel (a nest of mighty Republicans) and so forth.

All of this is extraordinarily blatant, yet the American people seem benumbed, unable to read, think, or remember, and thus fit subjects for a president who shares their limitations. A grumpy old Democrat, I observe to my friends that our emperor is himself the best argument for intelligent design, the current theocratic substitute for what used to be called creationism. Sigmund Freud might be chagrined to discover that he is forgotten, while the satan of America is now Charles Darwin. President Bush, who says that Jesus is his "favourite philosopher", recently decreed in regard to intelligent design and evolution: "Both sides ought to be properly taught."

I am a teacher by profession, about to begin my 51st year at Yale, where frequently my subject is American writers. Without any particular competence in politics, I assert no special insight in regard to the American malaise. But I am a student of what I have learned to call the American Religion, which has little in common with European Christianity. There is now a parody of the American Jesus, a kind of Republican CEO who disapproves of taxes, and who has widened the needle's eye so that camels and the wealthy pass readily into the Kingdom of Heaven. We have also an American holy spirit, the comforter of our burgeoning poor, who don't bother to vote. The American trinity pragmatically is completed by an imperial warrior God, trampling with shock and awe.

Yes, the current state of the nation is enough to make Walt Whitman weep.

... so I should savor Sweden while I'm here for the holiday. Ira brought home a Christmas tree today, the first I've had at home in years. We'll have to heat up some glögg and decorate the tree later.