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SPENGLER
Why Americans can't laugh
at American culture
 Laughing at
one's own cultural quirks is one of the grand themes of
European literature, from Miguel Cervantes' Don
Quixote to Luis Bunuel's Viridiana, from
Fernando de Roja's La Celestina to Gilbert and
Sullivan's Mikado. Sadly, Americans cannot laugh
at their own culture. That deficiency, in fact, is the
defining trait of American culture, omitted from my
November 18 essay (What is American
culture?) With the help of the
readers of Asia Times Online, I now can demonstrate this
fact experimentally. I am grateful to the readers who
wrote to denounce the essay as "a disappointing screed",
"classist piffle", a "black mark on the rest of the
articles on your site", "trash", "garbage",
"condescending", "plain silly", "boorish", and so forth.
They have proven that in the matter of culture,
Americans cannot take a joke.
To be precise, the
problem is not that Americans do not like to laugh at
their own culture, but that they cannot, whether they
wish to or not. At first glance that seems out of
character. As individuals, Americans will laugh at
themselves all day long. So much do they love
self-deprecating humor that few politicians attain high
office without a knack for it. "I sure hope you guys are
Republicans," Reagan told the surgeons as they wheeled
him into the operating room after John Hinckley shot
him. Nevertheless, they cannot laugh at their culture.
Consider American humor in general: a tell-tale trait of
it is the absence of "American" jokes, that is, jokes
about Americans as such. Americans tell ethnic jokes,
regional jokes, or generic jokes. But there are no
characteristically American jokes, for the simple reason
that there are no American characteristics.
By
contrast, jokes that other nations tell about themselves
refer to cultural characteristics whose instant
recognition makes them funny. For
example:
Australia: Lassitude. A brewery
worker drowns in a beer vat. The shop steward breaks the
sad news to his wife, who asks, "Did he suffer much?" "I
don't think so. He got out to go to the loo four
times."
Spain: Honor. A member of the
minor nobility in Spain is dying. His confessor asks,
"Would you like to confess your sins?" "I have no sins."
"Then would you like to forgive your enemies?" "I have
no enemies. I killed them all."
Arabia:
Megalomania. A man goes to the caliph and announces that
he is God. "Careful what you say," warns the caliph, "A
man came to me last year claiming to be a prophet and I
put him to death." "It is well you did so," the lunatic
replies, "for I did not send him."
France:
Pretension. "Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was
Victor Hugo." (Jean Cocteau).
Scandinavia: Taciturnity. After drinking
for hours in silence, Sven says to Ole, "Skol." Ole
replies, "Did you come here to drink or to talk?"
England: Diffidence. An Englishmen comes
home and discovers his wife in bed with his best friend.
"I have to do this, Nigel," says the cuckold, "but
whatever possessed you?"
Ireland: Drinking
(anything involving a leprechaun and a pint of Guinness
will do).
To the contrary, not being American is
the premise of the most characteristically "American"
jokes. For example: The Lone Ranger (a Western sort of
knight errant) and Tonto (his faithful American Indian
companion) ride through a deep valley, when suddenly an
army of hostile Apaches appears on the ridges above
them. "Kimosavee, looks like we're in trouble," says the
Ranger. Tonto replies: "What do you mean 'we',
paleface?" Americans cannot laugh at their "culture"
because they do not quite know what it is. They laugh at
themselves as individuals, but cannot laugh at
themselves as a people. One cannot laugh at what one
cannot define, and definition is the essence of humor;
it is the flash of unexpected recognition that evokes
laughter. In post-modern usage, humor is essentialist,
or to say the same thing, post-modernism is humorless.
Trivial as these examples may seem, I will
explain later why precisely the same criteria apply to
high culture. Bear with me for a few paragraphs.
Lampooning T S Eliot's resume of English culture, I
listed some irritating features of American life as a
reductio ad absurdum on November 18. As Asia
Times Online readers protested, it was quite unfair to
reduce American culture to weak tea, oak-flavored
chardonnay, driving slowly in the fast lane, shopping
malls, and so forth. Reading over their remonstrations,
however, it is striking how little they agree among
themselves as to what American culture might be. Of
course I was "wrong". But what is right? The question
would not even come up in other countries. Ask an
Englishman who epitomizes his culture, and without
hesitation he will reply: "Shakespeare." From other
Europeans one will hear Goethe, Dante, Pushkin, Hugo,
Ibsen, Cervantes, and so forth.
But who defines
American culture? Is it Herman Melville and his white
whale, which so impressed Joe Nichols? Richard Einhorn
of New York believes that Annie Hall compares
favorably with Moliere. Will Hawkes of New York invokes
Noam Chomsky's claim that memorization of baseball
statistics demonstrates a high degree of intelligence. A
Mr Liebman of North Carolina prefers Charlie Parker and
Duke Ellington, as well as mystery writers Dashiell
Hammett and Raymond Chandler. They agree with each other
no more than they do with me. Let us begin with American
1978 Nobel Prize winner for literature, Saul Bellow of
Chicago. Bellow, not incidentally, is a denizen of the
Straussian inner sanctum at the University of Chicago
(his novel Ravenstein portrays his friend the
late Allan Bloom, Leo Strauss' best-known popularizer).
But Bellow has done much more than impress the Swedish
Academy. England's cleverest writer of fiction, Martin
Amis, hails Bellow as "the supreme American novelist" in
the December issue of Atlantic Monthly. In fact, Amis
takes us straight to the heart of the matter at hand.
The American novel is "dominated by the Jewish-American
novel, and everybody knows who dominated that: Saul
Bellow," Amis writes. "It transpired that there was
something uniquely riveting about the conflict between
the Jewish sensibility and the temptations - the
inevitabilities - of materialist America. As one Bellow
narrator puts it, 'At home, inside the house, an archaic
rule; outside, the facts of life'. The archaic rule is
somber, blood-bound, guilt-torn, renunciatory, and
transcendental; the facts of life are atomized,
unreflecting, and unclean."
America is not the
subject of Bellow's joke; America is the "atomized" and
"unreflecting" melting pot into which Bellow's hapless
heroes dissolve. There is no "there" there, as Gertrude
Stein said of Oakland. The melting pot offers no solace.
It is more like the Button-Maker's casting ladle in
Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt, in which Peer's soul
will be melted down, leaving no trace of the original.
It should be no surprise that Bellow gravitated toward
Leo Strauss and his circle, Eurocentric intellectual
snobs to their fingertips. After all, his literary
subject is the crash of Old World sensibilities against
American materialism.
"What do you mean 'we',
paleface?," rejoined Tonto. Americans cannot laugh at
themselves as a "we", because there is no "we" to laugh
at. "American" jokes invert the problem; the punch-line
depends on recognition that there is no "we" to begin
with. The outsider is the premise of the
characteristically "American" joke, that is, the joke
that requires an American setting: Tonto, Augie March,
the Scandinavian residents of Lake Woebegone or Fargo,
the Clintons of Arkansas. The same genetic trait defines
the Lone-Ranger-and-Tonto joke and the Nobel Prize
winning novel. Americans cannot tell jokes about their
own culture because there is no "there" there. It is
"atomized", in Amis' word. That is why they make jokes
about other cultures, in Bellow's case Jewish culture.
There is no essential American to put in the joke, so
they laugh at Tonto or Augie.
That is true with
the best of intentions, and all intentions are not of
the best. Some Americans resemble Moliere's bourgeois
gentleman, who was pleased to discover that he had been
speaking prose all his life without knowing it. These
people are pleased to discover that they have had a
culture all along without knowing - cinema, situation
comedies, pulp magazines - and repair to the American
studies department of a major university to write a
doctoral dissertation. We shall leave these unfortunates
to their fate. The Kulturnationen often choose as
their national poet the one who makes them laugh the
best at their own culture. Cervantes, whose Don
Quixote lampoons Spanish chivalry, is the clearest
case. Dante Alighieri invented an Inferno full of
the foibles of the Italians. One also might mention in
this context Gilbert and Sullivan, the lampooners of
English silliness. Heinrich Heine did the same for the
Germans, Ibsen for the Scandinavians, and so forth.
Among the Europeans, only the French cannot laugh at
their high culture, for it was a political instrument
from the time of Cardinal Richelieu, as Anthony Levi has
shown.
My interest in Bellow is strictly
diagnostic, as the obsessions of Jewish immigrants with
materialistic America never have concerned me. But Amis
is correct to crown him the rightful king of American
literature. Critics of an older generation, eg, the
Jewish immigrants Harold Bloom and Alfred Kazin, held
Walt Whitman to be the definitive American poet. They
oozed with adoration for an American ideal just beyond
their grasp. Bellow popped their sentimental
soap-bubble, for the reading public now recognizes Bloom
and Kazin as characters in a Bellow story. Woody Allen?
He is a madman who thinks he is Saul Bellow.
American writers only can produce comedy
(George Bush, tragic
character, November 25). Mark
Twain, America's most endearing writer because the least
pretentious, forewarns the reader of Huckleberry
Finn that he has written Don Quixote in
dialect. American efforts at tragedy miscarry. Contrast
two recent American reworkings of the Odyssey.
The Coen brothers' film O Brother Where Art Thou?
gives us a madcap Odyssey with everything in
reverse; Homer's fast-talking hero is a bungling escaped
convict who can do nothing right, Penelope wants to be
rid of him and remarry as quickly as possible, and so
forth. It is slender stuff, but delightful in its own
sphere. Charles Frazier's novel Cold Mountain,
which sets the Odysseus tale in the American Civil War,
makes the skin crawl.
Irate readers of Asia
Times Online will forgive me for making them
experimental subjects. Not to have a national culture is
both a blessing and a curse. Culture restricts our
vision of the future to what we drag with us from the
past. It is destiny, too often a tragic one. If we
identify culture in the loosest sense with language,
then we must admit that the end of nearly every culture
is a miserable one. Of the 6,000 or so distinct
languages spoken today, I have observed before, two
become extinct every week. Whole peoples go to their
death in the hopeless defense of a culture which long
since should have been relegated to the libraries.
America has no high culture, but it has the capacity to
reinvent itself. Where is the high culture of the
Europeans? Its highest expression was classical music.
Asian classical musicians now comprise more than half
the student body at the great American conservatories.
They bear the remnants of the high culture, even while
it falls into neglect in the lands of its origin.
America cannot understand the culture of other
nations, because it has no culture of its own. In my
November 25 essay I stated the same idea in a different
way, namely, that the American tragedy is the incapacity
of Americans to understand the tragedy of other peoples.
Is America condemned forever to win the war and lose the
peace? Will the force of American arms always roll the
stone uphill like Sisyphus, while the weakness of
American diplomacy always sends it crashing down again?
Is there some link between this tragic pattern of
American history, and the way Americans see (or fail to
see) the world - that is, American culture? At stake is
something far greater than Americans' preferred
entertainment. For all the military power at its
command, America is uniquely under-equipped to fight a
civilizational, that is, a cultural war.
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