
Divine Indigestion: The endlessly fabulized American self - samclemens
http://thebaffler.com/salvos/foer-franzen-sturgeon
======
Animats
That's a terrible piece of writing. It reads like the canned essays sold to
students. It mentions all the checklist items from the syllabus but has little
to say.

The article starts out by referencing "American Foreign Policy and Its
Thinkers", which, he says, is is challenging Francis Fukuyama's view of the
world. Nobody needed to do that in 2015. Fukuyama's "The End of History and
the Last Man" came out in 1992. Fukuyama was writing about the world situation
at the time, which looked good. The USSR had come apart non-violently, the US
and Russia were getting along, there were no major wars in progress, and
liberal democracy seemed triumphant. Fukuyama thought that "history", seen as
battles and conflicts, might be over, and things would settle down.

By 2015, nobody needed to put effort into arguing against that idea.

Then the author goes off in another direction, arguing that American
literature has an imperial bent. There was a time when British literature
certainly did. Read Kipling's tales of India under the Raj. There were periods
when American literature did. Jules Verne goes over the top on that in "From
the Earth to the Moon". Eisenhower's "Crusade in Europe" took that path. But
now? Not so much. The bent in serious American literature today seems to be
guilt. Serious books have to be about racism, sexism, gay problems,
homelessness, ecological damage, or something similar that readers of serious
literature can feel guilty about. Take a look at this week's lead books in the
New York Times Review of Books.[1] Guilt is a predominant theme.

Then the author rants about individualist orthodoxy. To see individualist
orthodoxy, look at popular movies. Almost always, there is a hero, who,
through their own individual acts, accomplishes something important. History
rarely reads like that. Books, which have more space and time than a movie,
tend not to be as hero-focused. If they are, the author has dreams of selling
the movie rights.

The author goes on and on, in various directions, but doesn't get anywhere. If
the author took one of their ideas and developed it, they might have said
something.

[1]
[http://www.nytimes.com/section/books](http://www.nytimes.com/section/books)

