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SPENGLER
What is American
culture?
How do Americans look
at the world? Is there a characteristic American way of
thinking, an American culture? Through what filter does
information reach their brain, and by what mechanism do
they respond to it? Last week's essay (Why America is losing the intelligence
war) blamed deep-seated
characteristics of American 
culture for the failure of American
intelligence. That begs the question of whether American
culture can be characterized in any general way (apart
from the well-worn bon mot that American culture
is an oxymoron).
Writing of
English culture, the poet and critic T S Eliot famously
described it as follows: "The reader must remind himself
as the author has constantly to do, of how much is here
embraced by the term culture. It includes all the
characteristic activities and interests of a people:
Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the
twelfth of August
[the start of the grouse
shooting season], a cup final, the dog races, the pin
table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled
cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, 19th
century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar."
After the
fashion of Eliot, I have complied my own list of
characteristic features of American culture.
1. Driving slowly in the fast lane.
Americans consider it their privilege to amble along in
the fast (left-hand) lane, while swifter drivers
overtake in the near-side lane (for which European
policemen would arrest them straightaway). Clumps of
slower drivers impede traffic and set the stage for
pileups. This is the sad result of misguided
egalitarianism. Americans believe that they should be
able to drive wherever they wish, whereas class
privilege rules the road in Europe. Faster cars belong
in the fast lane and nudge slower-moving vehicles out of
the way.
2. Burnt coffee at exorbitant
prices. The most popular cafe chain, whose name
decent people do not pronounce, burns its coffee beans
to produce what Americans mistakenly believe is an
authentic European taste. Proper coffee, by which of
course I mean Italian coffee, is bittersweet, not
burned. Americans evidently hate the wretched stuff
because they drown its flavor in a flood of milk, in the
so-called "latte", something I never have observed an
Italian request during many years of travel in that
country. By contrast, Italians drink cappuccino, mixing
a small amount of milk into the coffee and leaving a cap
of foam. If Americans do not like it, why do they buy it
at exorbitant prices? They do so precisely because the
high price makes it a luxury, but an affordable one for
secretaries and shopgirls.
3. Dishwater
masquerading as tea. Order tea from an American, and
you will receive a cup of lukewarm water and a tea-bag.
No beverage on earth is more revolting than this. This
and the previous item bring to mind a riposte attributed
to Abraham Lincoln: "Waiter, if this is coffee, then
bring me tea. But if this is tea, then bring me coffee."
4. Wood-flavored wine. Americans know as
little about wine as they do about coffee. California
winemakers throw oak chips into vats of fermenting
chardonnay in order to simulate the effect of aging in
oak barrels. That is true only for the cheaper wines,
but the dearer ones taste just as woody. The American
idea of a "big wine" is to suffuse cabernet sauvignon
(properly used to produce a delicate wine) with the
taste of oak. At best, American wines offer a soporific
sort of smoothness, but never achieve the quirkiness,
eccentricity and character which make European vineyards
an enchanted realm.
5. Shopping-mall
architecture. Most middle-sized American cities have
disappeared into a suburban morass, while shopping malls
have replaced the old town centers. Americans in most
parts of the US have no other place to congregate. Even
churches are relocating to shopping malls in order to
accommodate the habits of their congregations. Unlike
European cities (and older American ones) the public
aspect of cities is entirely absent: churches, public
buildings, monuments and so forth. The omnipresence of
purely commercial architecture depresses the mind;
Europeans accustomed to viewing well-proportioned
buildings in their daily perambulations find it
difficult to spend more than a day or two in such
places.
6. A consensus national restaurant
menu (Mexican-Italian-seafood-podge). A generation
ago, one could be sure of obtaining sawdust sausages,
Scotch eggs and pork pies in any British pub (and often
a ploughman's lunch with Wensleydale cheese). Today, one
can count on finding pizza, tacos, fried shrimp, Caesar
salad and cheeseburgers in any American restaurant, as
the American melting pot transforms various national
cuisines into indistinguishable blobs of grease and
dough. Unification of American cuisine is not much of a
loss, as the local cuisine was wretched to begin with,
but the result is nonetheless disheartening.
Anti-globalists have made a target of the purveyors of
fast food, but the chains have homogenized other
cuisines, such as seafood, Italian, Mexican, steak and
so forth. In the place of texture and flavor Americans
receive grease and quantity, which helps explain why
they are so podgy.
7. Chewing tobacco.
What more can one say? Heinrich Heine, the
greatest poet of mid-19th century Germany, wrote,
"Sometimes I think of emigrating to America, but I am
frightened by a country where human beings chew
tobacco."
8. Hand-me-down high culture.
Not to possess a high culture is no shame; the Pilgrim
Fathers of New England rejected Western high culture as
they found it in favor of a radical return to ancient
Israel. Like Moliere's bourgeois gentleman, the
Americans of the 19th century decided that a high
culture suited their new respectability. Americans who
would not recognize an allegory if it ate them alive by
inches, and cannot read a line of Dante Alighieri or
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, gush over Herman Melville's
confused and overwrought Moby Dick. American
scholars who have not heard of the 16th century
Lazarillo de Tormes claim that Mark Twain's
Huckleberry Finn is a work of originality. Harold
Bloom, the defender of the "Western Canon" against the
barbarian hordes of deconstructionism, enthuses over
Walt Whitman's onanistic (in the literal sense of the
term) excuse for verse. Bloom dismisses the critics of
the left as "resentniks", but is resentment not the
other side of the coin of pretension? In any case, these
are the embarrassing pretensions of two generations
past, the putative classics beloved of American
conservatives. University students today are more likely
to wade through the works of black and feminist writers
as a counterweight to the "elitist" high culture of
Melville and Whitman, that is, if they are not occupied
with courses on film and comic books.
9.
Gullibility. If Americans will buy chardonnay
saturated with oak chips to the point of resembling
turpentine, burnt coffee disguised by sweet hot milk,
chain-restaurant parodies of Italian food, and
hand-me-down literary classics, what will they not buy?
Itinerant European academics turn up on their shores in
emulation of the gypsy Melchiades in Gabriel Garcia
Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, from
Paul de Man on the left to Leo Strauss on the right.
Man thinks with his entire being, not with mere
abstract powers of ratiocination. Tactile, gustatory,
olfactory and sentimental habits bear on our view of the
world more than the philosophers we might have read in
school. Culture is the glue that holds generations
together; paradoxically, American culture makes a virtue
of the ephemeral. Americans in consequence cannot
imagine the frame of mind of those for whom a cultural
connection to the past has become a matter of life and
death. This sometimes charming, usually harmless trait
of American culture turns into a tragic flaw in the
context of America's encounter with Islam.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
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