I have always been wary of primitive anti-Americanism.
Whenever I heard friends speak ill of the United States, I made it a point to remind them that the country they cursed was the homeland of Philip Roth, Louis Armstrong, Jackson Pollock, James Baldwin, Carson McCullers, Orson Welles, etc.
AMERICA VICTIM OF ITSSELF
But the longer it goes, the more difficult it is for me to contradict the anti-Americans.
I look at what is happening with our neighbors to the south, and all I feel is fear.
And immense pain.
It’s as if the works of American artists that I venerated, their intelligence, their talent, their genius, no longer weighed once morest the colossal tidal wave of stupidity that is in the process of submerging the country.
What can a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat or a novel by Norman Mailer do once morest the crass ignorance of the masses and the hysterical extremism of the elites, both left and right?
Nothing. We are no longer in the 1960s, when culture still had a certain influence — not to say a certain influence — on the direction that the country might take.
Important novels no longer make it onto the bestseller list, and universities have become propaganda factories for the latest fashionable ideas.
In short, the longer it goes, the more I have the impression of seeing the Titanic sink.
To witness the slow and interminable agony of a civilization.
It was not the Russians who finally got the better of the US, nor the Chinese.
It is the Americans themselves who will have set fire to their own barracks.
The United States is literally imploding.
Consumed by their own demons.
ALL OPINIONS ARE EQUAL
I know it’s commonplace to quote this author when it comes to the United States, but Alexis de Tocqueville had it all planned out.
In Democracy in Americahis magnum opus published in 1835, the famous French philosopher said that the notions of freedom and equality, so dear to Americans, risked leading them to their downfall if they came to consider them as absolute values.
Because a society, whether we like it or not, is a chain.
However, the man who believes himself to be entirely free and who does not recognize any form of authority (whether political, intellectual or moral) does not consider himself as part of a chain, but as an autonomous link which is self-sufficient. to himself and owes nothing to anyone.
Not only will this individual shy away from the affairs of the city and focus only on his private life, but he will eventually believe that his opinions are as valid as those of any expert.
THE DECLINE OF THE EMPIRE
This is currently happening in the United States.
Trump, that’s it: the perversion of the egalitarian ideal. The notion of equality pushed to its climax.
All opinions are equal, no theory is more credible than another, it is enough that I have the conviction that a thing is true for it to become so.
How can you build a cohesive society on such foundations?
How to avoid crumbling?
