Something urges me to republish a Sequence; not my habit. Could it be what we are witnessing now in the USA, a quadrature of I described already some years ago.
Some time ago, in a piece on jazz and jazz clubs, I wrote this:
“Jazz, the kind of music which for me has always represented that little bit of success of the American Dream, of that ideal of the Great Melting Pot of races and ethnic groups. Jazz: the fusion of White Christian church music, French New Orleans brothels and Black cotton-picking slaves finally liberated by Northern whites, who were sometimes compassionate, yet basically self-interested.
“This great stream of jazz music, still meandering in ever new directions, I always felt at one with. I knew, of course, and from early on, of many a story in the beginnings of Jazz as concert music, of the bad treatment of black jazzmen by white visitors and white owners of the clubs. Yet, once having read Beneath the Underdog, the book written by that great bass player Charlie Mingus, I gave up all hope and each illusion. That experience of jazz musicians, more than anything else, has come to stand for what I now consider to be the USA as a failed nation. Jazz has perhaps been the only realized bit of that American Dream.
“The USA is still a race-ridden society, a failed nation trying to represent itself hysterically as a true nation by screaming its national anthem at any time, covering the heart with a ridiculous hand.”
Once again, I bring up this topic, if only to get my neologism Failed Nation on your screen. The USA was the first to depict other states as ‘failed states’, implying that the USA were in tip top order, state-wise that is. This, of course, may already be a hyperbole; worse is that, indeed, one may conceive of a state in good working order, however running what must be considered a failed nation.
If it were not so very sad, one might laugh about idiots who are now complaining about ‘the Jew’ Soros financing ‘an invasion of the USA’ by way of a march of people from the Middle America’s to the US border, thus threatening to destroy ‘the purity of the American Nation’. Apart from the silliness of the notion of a ‘pure nation’, as silly as the notion of a ‘pure race’ – if there is one country that has been, almost by definition, ‘impure’ nation-wise, it is the US of A.
Impure, first of all because it destroyed the original inhabitants, the Indians and their bisons. Impure, because of the immigration of a plethora of peoples from various regions of the earth where they were kept ‘in chains’. Yet, precisely this ‘impurity’ inspired the American poets of the 19th century to dream of a new, integrated nation of races, ethnicities, men and women and what not.
Listen to Walt Whitman:
I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the
rivers of America, and along the shores of the great
lakes, an all over the great prairies,
I will make inseparable cities with their arms about
each other’s necks
By the love of comrades,
By the manly love of comrades.
For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you ma
femme!
For you, for you I am trilling these songs.
However, in the 19th century’s mid-fifties political and social conditions still permitted this all-inclusive dream of a democracy of races and sexes and ethnic groups. The Civil War had yet to come… Michael Conlin has asked this pertinent question: So how can we make sense of a person like Whitman, who writes, “I am the hounded slave…I wince at the bite of the dogs” in his poetry, but in his prose also writes of African Americans that they have “as much intellect and calibre (in the mass) as so many baboons?”
Even the protagonists of such all-inclusive democracy had their qualms. The upshot of the ideal of ‘the great melting pot’ has been a soup of antagonistic ingredients which do not make for a good meal. The USA is full-blown capitalism, thriving on an available labour force of badly organized workers whose so-called ethnic and racial ‘roots’ remained of prime importance. The Interbellum battles of organized labour against state-organized capital were short-lived.
The one thing which could have sustained the melting together of all these different entities in that great pot of the USA, was the common language. In contrast with the European ‘Community’ of today, America always demanded of its citizens one language. Even that hope is gone, with school teaching in Spanish in southern California.
What in the past seemed to be dialectical differences, to be ‘elevated’ into a yet unknown unity, why not Whitman’s ‘democracy’, have grown into rifts – rifts between academia and the common man, between country-side and metropolis, between an armed conservative anarchism and a democratic republicanism, between doctrinarian believers and a minority of indifferent atheists et cetera. Dewey, one of my philosophical heroes, lies crying in his grave.
Trumpism is not an incident or accident. It is the outgrowth of this failed nation called USA; it represents the final, violent cramps of a body politics and a body social, in full agony. Do not think this is merely a sad and ephemeral chapter in USA history, to be followed by a Whitmanesque revival of true democracy and the many splendored-joy of men and women. After this one, there will come many more Trumpisms of one sort or another.
Sierksma Haarlem 30.10/2018
Post Scriptum 1: To use a movie as an argument in political debates is always risky. Nonetheless, I advise the reader to watch Cogan – Killing Them Softly, directed by Andrew Dominik, based on a book by Georges V. Higgins. The pointe resides in the metaphor of a crisis in the illegal poker business run by Mafiosi, as a result of a hold up at one of the tables, I claim, to describe the 2008 financial crisis which began in the USA. We observe and hear both Bush and Obama appealing to the illusions of The Great America for All et cetera, presenting the measures taken and the banks saved as of national interest. Brad Pitt, after ‘eliminating’ the men who caused the ‘troubles’ that stopped the play at the tables, looks at the screen with Obama ideologizing, and doubts whether that man believes in what he says. America for Cogan is a failed nation.
And do not misunderstand me: Europe, in its postmodernity stage, will also end as a failed nation. It takes a bit longer over here than in the USA, though. Perhaps, by way of a cruel roundabout, what the ghastly Mrs. Thatcher once said is becoming true: Something like a Society does not exist.
Post Scriptum 2: In the United States one may observe a general kitschy quality of all spheres of social life. In my La Terra Trauma [see: Academia.edu] I wrote this passage, applying to Postmodern society in general, but more specifically to the USA:
“In postmodernity this relative autonomy of various spheres of social life gets lost; all behaviour has become a little bit sexual, a little bit political, a little bit playful, a little bit informative, except for that vital type of behaviour which keeps the economy going – work. (Cf. Baudrillard, La Transparance du Mal, Essai sur les Phénomènes Extrêmes, 1990, 17, who is of course, as is his habit, overstating this phenomenon.) However, even in many regions of work, especially in the so-called services, we find this promiscuity of what were formerly different modern types of behaviour. Observe the ‘Dallas’ quality of the girl in the supermarket checking your account, or the secretary running her little management outfit for the boss, looking like she is partying 24 hours a day.”
Sierksma's Sores 