The American Future (50 page)
Read The American Future Online
Authors: Simon Schama
Windmills
Flying back home to New York from San Diego and passing over the southern Sierra Nevada, I remembered a journey in the opposite direction spent beside Grigory the Russian. It was in the early days of glasnost, and this was Grigory's first time in the United States. He was on his way to a mathematics congress, I think at Stanford. After some polite mutual introductions, he trying out his fractured English, we relapsed into the usual things: reading, poking around in the meal tray for something that approximated food. Every so often Grigory, who had the window seat, would look out the window at whatever bit of America was passing below. And since it was one of those miraculously clear days, coast to coast, there was a whole lot of America to look at. Beyond the Great Lakes over Nebraska and its irrigation circles, the habit became more than looking. The Russian turned his body three-quarters in the seat and pressed his sandy-haired face against the window like a child trying to get at a Christmas display in a department store. As the scenery became not just picturesque but spectacular and the torn-off snowcaps of the Rockies climbed into the window frame, Grigory became fidgety, almost agitated. On and on he stared at Colorado and Utah with such strange intensity that I began to feel guilty for not looking quite so hard myself, all the more since I was then writing a book about landscape. It was a morning flight, due to land at San Francisco around one in the afternoon, but as the jet flew west, the interior of the plane had grown dark, most of the passengers opting for sleep or closing their shades to watch movies. It
turned out that it was this airborne darkness at noon that was upsetting Grigory and which he found incomprehensible when there was the beauty of the earth to witness beyond those pockmarked little windows. When we crossed Lake Tahoe and the pinewoods that Mark Twain had accidentally set alight, it was finally too much and he broke from his silent agitation. “AH,” he said very loudly, turning to me and waving a contemptuous hand at the dozers, “these people, why do they SLEEP? Why don't they SEE? Why do they not UNDERSTAND? This belongs to THEM! They must TREASURE like gold; you tell them, you must tell them now, wake them up and tell them, go on, yes, see, TREASURE.” “I wish I could,” I said, “but they're really into
Back to the Future
.”
Grigory, who perhaps had been too deeply immersed in Dostoyevsky at some point, was tormented that the docile planeload of passengers, their necks craned to the video monitors, were trapped in some sort of moral and aesthetic neverland; that they might take America, its history, and its geography for granted, preferring to opt instead for a snooze. The president at that time was also famously partial to his daily naps, and inevitably Grigory (who probably was more on the insomniac side) passed animatedly from the topographic to the political. He wanted a democracy that was wide awake, and if it was necessary to shake people out of their childish slumber, so be it. But what I couldn't tell him was that, though sometimes seeming to be lost in torpor, a visitation from big trouble will always bring about an American awakening. Nothing like hitting an air pocket to make the passengers vividly aware of the scenery below.
Is that the case in 2008? Right now, airplane America has lost altitude; the startle reflex has kicked in; and if the passengers are not screaming in terror, they are certainly not dozing either. What they are doing is
looking
hard at Americaâthe whole bundle of history, economy, geography, powerâas though their life depends on it, which it does. And they are considering which of the two men competing for their vote feels more like the president who can somehow embody that whole American bundle and by so doing call the country back to a sense of common purpose, as all the great occupants of the White House have done before. On the way to recovering that precious, easily squandered sense of national community, a lot of hard knocks will be given and taken, which is exactly what the Founding Fathers
prescribed: the storm of argument about whither and whence America without which elections are just so many exchanges of advertising techniques. Something else is going on this time: the republic shouting to be remade. Can it be done? Can the lumbering beast of American power, so big and clumsy, so taken by surprise when its good intentions go awry and the world takes offense, manage the latest act of self-transformation? I've lived in the United States half my life, and take it from me, it can, though nothing is a sure bet anymore. Butâand this, I hope, may not come as a complete shock to any reader who has made it this farâthe glory of American life is its complexity, not a word usually associated with the United States, but true nonetheless. From the richness of that complexity come, always, rejuvenating alternatives. The Hamiltonians have done you wrong for the last eight years? Well, you know where to go for redress. Anglo-America thinks it's going down to a Hispanic
reconquista
? Try remembering that America has always been shared between Latino and Anglo cultures.
But what this wealth of alternatives means is that, however dire the outlook, it's impossible to think of the United States at a dead end. Americans roused can turn on a dime, abandon habits of a lifetime (check out the waiting list for Smart cars), convert indignation into action, and before you know it there's a whole new United States in the neighborhood.
That too, the Founding Fathers hoped for: that nothing would be beyond American reinvention except their Constitution, and that too of course could be amended. But if the country is to come charging out of the gates of its several calamities with a fire-driven sense of national renewal, it will be because its people draw so ceaselessly on the lives and wisdoms of their ancestors. The history habit in America has nothing to do with reverence and everything to do with the timelessness they attach to their stories; moments that do have dates and dead people attached to them but which somehow leak into the present. They feel about Lincoln the way we feel about Shakespeare: the sound is old, the fury right now. It was striking that almost everyone I spoke to along this trip through American time and country sooner or later invoked Jefferson or DuBois, Teddy Roosevelt or FDR, Reagan or Hamilton, as though there were no distance at all between them and the YouTubers, which, in the long haul, there isn't. It's as though, at the most urgent moments of American decision, historical time folds in on itself and
all of its shaping protagonists are there, like some ghostly chorus, to witness and instruct.
Sometimes past and future trip over each other in the most unlikely ways. Lately, the scourge of Democrats, the billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens, born in Holdenville, Oklahoma, not all that far from the Cherokee, a devotee of George W. Bush and the bankroller of the Swift Boatmen who spent the campaign of 2004 besmirching John Kerry's honorable war record in Vietnam, has gone, to the horror of most of his natural allies, bright green. It is not necessarily a burgeoning sense of the planet in peril that accounts for this conversion. Pickens expects to make a bundle from the water reserves his Mesa Water company is stockpiling for the future; precisely the kind of aggressive capitalism that would have had Powell in a rage about “avarice.” But Pickens has declared in public that the age of oil is over and America had better wise up fast to that fact. Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or anywhere else, he says, won't make a real dent in the country's energy deficit. So instead, the oilman is developing in Texas what will be the continent's biggest wind farm, thousands upon thousands of windmills to generate power for the entire South and Southwest. Plumb crazy, say the critics; the old boy has lost it.
And then considering this improbable turn, I think of someone else I encountered in 1964 on my first trip to America. After the Atlantic City convention, my coeditor and I headed back south again to Washington and then on by bus to Williamsburg, Virginia, or as most of America calls it, Colonial Williamsburg. It was all I expected and less: redcoats doing musket practice, men in periwigs, a lot of pewter tankarding. Too much eighteenth century, I thought, and yet not enough. So my friend and I escaped to where we were staying the night, which turned out to beâfor reasons I can't remember (a bad sign)âthe local mental hospital. Not among the patients but with the hospitable director and his wife, who, on learning I was reading history at Cambridge, peppered me with questions about Oliver Cromwell I was woefully unprepared to answer, though I did hazard a view that the rumor of Cromwell being a secret Jew was probably unfounded. But the price of hospitality was staying up late and talking a lot of Long Parliament.
The morning, though, was an American gift, pancakes and glittering sunshine streaming through the mercifully unleaded windows. Before
departing we took a stroll in the grounds. Some of the patients were happily employed looking after the garden; sweeping a bit, weeding a lot. One of them was bending over something that wasn't in Billy Bartram's botany at all: a child's plastic windmill; a whirligig. He was a little man with a perfectly round, bald head, rimless glasses, and an impish grin which he turned to me as he patted the whirligig on the head, gave its little red sails a turn, rose, and came right over. “Would you like to see my windmills?” He said this with such elfin brightness that I said of course, and around the garden he led me, where amid the geraniums and buddleia were more and more; scores of his little whirligigs. With each one rediscovered, his beams grew sunnier until at length he came up very close, smelling strongly of institutional soap, and in a confessional whisper said, “Say, I bet you want to know why I'm planting my windmills.” No reply was needed. He went on, “See, no one knows this, but I can tell you 'cause you look like a clever kid, I can tell you, that one night when the wind is”âand he put a chubby index finger to a pink thumbâ“just SO, it'll catch, catch all my windmills and you see if this whole place doesn't take off and land somewhere where we will all be HAPPY.” And he did a little giggle and skipped off down the sandy path to another shrubbery. And I thought, there goes Jefferson's kind of American, someone who reckons that “the care of human happiness not the destruction of life is the first and only object of good government.” And what, really, is so crazy about that?
THE IMPOTENT ANGEL?
Shortly after the outbreak of war in 1939, the Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin, then living in Paris, offered a reading of a Paul Klee drawing he had bought eighteen years earlier. Klee had called his figure, suspended in a roughly sketched fiery void,
Novus Angelus
, the “New Angel.” And while ever since, this particular angel has borne the weight of a lot of social theory, the truth is that he is a funny little thing, crowned with grade-school cut-out curls and three-toed birds' feet. Feeling swept into the vortex of European destruction, Benjamin burdened the peach-colored seraph with his own philosophical agonies, turning him into “The Angel of History.” Noticing that the figure's head and torso seem to face opposite directions, Benjamin declared that the angel looks backward (toward us) into the immediate past, where a spectacle of mounting calamity registers in a bug-eyed stare. Why? Because the angel sees too much; the whole bloody mess, start to finish, while we poor mortals, the shortsighted historians of the contemporary, can only apprehend one damned thing after another; a chain of discrete episodes. In the meantime, the angel watches powerlessly as the wreckage rises into the sky.
“The angel,” his custodial interlocutor writes, “would like to stay, to awaken the dead and make whole again what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from heaven, and has caught his outstretched wings with such force that he can no longer close them.” Unable to edge forward into the smoking wind, prevented from ministering to the disaster, the angel is blown helplessly backward into the future by the violence of the unrelenting gale. And it is true; seen this way, the figure looks hopelessly wind-tossed, like dandelion fluff. “The storm,” Benjamin added, unconvincingly, “is what we call progress.”
Is this what has happened in the United States in the bleak fall of
2008? Is Barack Obama doomed to be the impotent angel, struggling against the tempest, but blown backward into the future? Whatever now unfolds, an American Tacitus, surveying one of the most momentous years in the annals of the Republic, is certain to note the sharp differences of political season. As light returned to America after the winter solstice, so did voters, flocking to caucuses and primaries in numbers that caught “seasoned observers” off guard. American democracy, trapped in a deep freeze of alienation, mistrust, and indifference, began to thaw. The waters of spring moved, and with them, the current of the future, pulling citizens along into the fast-flowing stream of democratic renewal. High summer was the zenith of optimism. Both parties had settled on candidates not cut from the conventional cloth of political fabric. Either of them was easily imaginable as a presidential improvement over the woeful performance of the incumbent and his hapless maladministration. The rhetoric of benign alteration, of an American resurrection, rose into the dog star sky along with the fireworks over Denver and the balloons of St. Paul. But the shadows lengthened, the dusk came sooner; the leaves colored and dropped along with the stock market. By the time the November consummation much of the country craved actually arrived, History, in the shape of financial catastrophe, had set a parenthesis around the verdict. The outcome matters, but not as much as you thought, was the message from the Angel of History, as a cascade of insolvencies, each more vertiginous than the last, drove the campaign from the pages. In the craters marked by the fall of the titans, lay the rubble of American economic security: retirement income, bank deposits, car warranties, university endowments, state and municipal revenues, consumption, employment. Confidence in a great American renewal, which had bounded through the spring and summer, disappeared into a sinkhole of debt that gaped wider and wider as the year moved to its merciful quietus.
Does all this mean that what the country sensed as a moment of historical truth was actually an illusion? The election was supposed to be unlike the travesties that have masqueraded as popular choice, in which hard questions were diverted to the politics of gossip, the tactics of takedown, a competition of inane flag waving. This one would be differentâan election that, unlike many in the recent past, would face the troubles of America without without choking its dynamism or
discounting its perennial capacity for reinvention. And debates there certainly were, on everything that ails the United States: health care, outsourcing, Afghanistan, NAFTA, FEMA, NATO. But in the end there has been TARP. So has the determination of the American people wanting to catch the wind, rather than be blown along by it, been set at naught by the debacle on Wall Street and Detroit? Does it mean the issues that have been the subject of this book have all turned out to be more marginal to American destiny than anyone, including this writer, anticipated? Will 2008 ultimately go down in American history as the year of traumatic reckoning, a systemic collapse of the national metabolism in which the election result that pulled crowds into the streets on the night of 4â5 November will be seen in retrospect as nothing more than a brief spike of joy, the feverish euphoria of the dying beast?
No. For, in the four o'clock twilight in which I'm writing, on a day when the memory of jubilant Chicago crowds has been replaced by the return of familiar stories of Illinois, it's possible to overcorrect. The historian of the American future will point out that there were
two
momentous alterations happening simultaneously in the country as the old regime left the White House: one boding well, the other ill. The two phenomenaâthe rehabilitation of governance from the odium and insignificance into which Reagan's demonizing doctrine thrust it, and the disintegration of economic securityâare inescapably interlocked. The capacity of democratic government, with a greater degree of public trust behind it than at any time since the 1940s, to contain, arrest, and reverse economic atrophy and the demoralization of the markets is about to be tested. And while it would be naive to discount the magnitude of the disaster, I suspect that for that historian, the moment on the Capitol steps on January 20, 2009, will turn out to have been at least as formative for American destiny as the certainty of yet another panic on Wall Street. The administration of the forty-fourth president and the hydra-headed monster of recession will be tightly meshed together, as if in a gladiatorial net. On whether the former can marshal all the goodwill and resolution his campaign and election generated to contain and defeat the brute, the American future will depend.
So this is a moment in which the two forces that made America formidableâcapitalist energy and democratic liberalismâget weighed
in the balance. That America can depend on the robustness of its free society, and the demonstration of political inclusiveness supplied by the election, to arm itself against the social unhappiness to come, is just as well. For in most other respects, it's impossible for any attentive historian not to notice that the proliferation of multiple crises looks suspiciously like a classic prerevolutionary moment. We have seen this before, in eighteenth-century France and twentieth-century Russia. In those two overstretched empires, insupportable wars stretched state credit so badly that it became dependent on foreign bondholders who in a shrinking economy wondered whether there might come a time when revenues might not be enough to service the debt, and became ominously restive. Those were the times when anger and hunger moved together in the bad temper of the people, when rackety frauds besmirched the good standing of rulers, so that the only solution seemed to be to have done away with everything and everyone that had brought the country to that sorry pass. But America had an altogether different kind of revolution, and its consequences are still its saving grace. In France and Russia, absolutist governments were without the lightning rod of credibly representative political institutions able to conduct the electrical force of popular fury into constructive energy. The genius of America's revolution, and the constitution that came from it, has always been to draw the sting of rage with the promise of just and benevolent alteration.
Until this year, and this election, Lincoln's “government for the people, of the people, and by the people” was a promise incompletely realized. In hard times, the unequal distribution of fortune (which in the last eight years has grown wider than at any time in the past half century), was certain to make the disfranchised, those most distant from the center of power, feel their impotence most bitterly. With no stake in American democracy and not much to lose, councils of despair could, and did, turn incendiary. Cities burned. So this last benign and peaceful revolution that has brought an African American of mixed race and culture to the presidency is of incalculable importance to the resilience of the American democratic experiment. Obama's breathtaking ascent from congressional insignificance (much like his cynosure Lincoln) to the White House does not in itself, of course, guarantee that he might not squander the reserves of national goodwill he carries with him across its threshold, nor that he or his administra
tion might not yet be defeated by the severity of the multiple disasters facing them.
But if there is certain hardship in the offing and if calamities mostly not of the people's doing have eaten away at the faith in an American future, it is just as well that it falls to a new president to begin the daunting work of reassurance and repair with a clean sheet and, for the time being, with a full measure of the people's trust. Nor could any designer of a national future come up with someone better suited to blunt the smarting sense of grievance that comes from the irrefutable truth that a few have inflicted disaster on the many. In the person he is, in the America he has come from, the forty-fourth president seems to embody the possibility of common purpose over the obstinacy of sectionalism.
The American story has always been a dialogue between Jefferson's unbounded faith in heroic individualism and the obligations of mutual community voiced by Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. But the supremacy of self-interest, of which corporatism was its manifestation writ monstrous, is for the moment at any rate well and truly over, the casualty of its wildest ride. The Enron and Madoff frauds, both breathtaking in scale; the criminally tardy response of government to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina, the abandonment of the people of New Orleans to their fate for days on end; the shaming sense that the American people were sold a bill of goods in Iraq, and that the country's “reconstruction” was merely an opportunity for outsourced freebooting have buried the era of “best of luck, pal.” Instead, an alternative America has been recovered, one that was actually there all along. In this America, “government” is no longer the enemy of freedom but its guardian, no longer the bogeyman of enterprise but its honest conscience and forthright guide, no longer shrouded in furtive entanglements but vigorously transparent. A government that need not blush at its claim to be “for, of, and by the people.”
And in this recovered United States, the matters that have threaded through American history in the pages of this bookâthe judgment of right and sufficient cause for war, the assertion of natural resources as public trust rather than sold property, the culturally inclusive nation, the bravely stubborn Jeffersonian belief that a moral society is also a tolerant oneâwill all be brought into the light of day, irre
spective of how pressing the needs of economic rescue and repair become. Indeed it is at just such moments that the opportunity for righting a course can best be tackled. Whatever the American future might look like, it had better not resemble the version that has brought it down in the first place. Nor will it be. There are times in the Republic's history when it might suffice for the country to be constituted from a free but random agglomeration of individuals all looking out for themselves, the result being, somehow, by some social alchemy, a shared common fortune. But this is not one of them. In shared misfortune, the need to look out for one another seems at the very least unsentimental, a necessary condition of society holding together. American independence will not be jeopardized by American interdependence.
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That's what the man in the red plaid shirt said he wanted from his government, his president, when he spoke to the Democratic Convention just before Obama's acceptance of the nomination. His face was pink, his passion was high, and he came from Marion, Indianaâa state that symbolized just how far things had come in America, by going for Obama in the election. He had been, he said, a lifelong Republican and had assumed, in his modest way, that the American way would allow him, as Jefferson had promised, his usual allowance of happiness: steady job, mortgage affordable on one income, decent health care. And then the consumer electronics plant closed and he was laid off with just ninety days' severance pay. He had been outsourced. It was the end of his America. Dismay turned to despair and then to anger. And in the city that had lynched blacks in 1930, the churchgoing Republican decided that his kind of American, his kind of president, was the African American candidate for the White House. And so he stood up before the Cecil B. DeMille fake-antique columns that were the backdrop for the revival of republican civism and said so. His name was Barney Smith, and what he wanted, he said, was a president who would “put Barney Smith before Smith Barney.”
You have to hope that Barney gets what he wants; not least because a collapse of General Motors would leave Marion, Indianaâa city where unemployment of the eighteen-to twenty-five-year-olds and of older people is already running at near 25 percentâon the floor.
But perhaps Barney Smith will have celebrated at least an election in which politics conceived of as business as usualânegative campaigning, the pornography of patriotic paranoiaâabjectly failed to deliver and the country was instantly the better for it. Washington on the night of 4 November, around eight in the evening, at any rate, was eerily quiet. Traffic was sparse; foot traffic in the rainy streets meager. There was little sign of people on their way to election-night parties; not a single placard or poster as the polls shut. The capital had shut its eyes, crossed its fingers tight enough to constrict its blood flow, and held its breath. Early data began to chatter in from exit polling and in the states across the Potomac that mattered, John McCain's numbers rose and rose; the silence in the city was so thick, you could cut it. Nothing by way of saying “it's the rural counties, south and west” made much difference; the intestinal knots got knottier.