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khoerner7's review against another edition
1.0
This book was way over my head. I don't know enough about social theory to make sense of all the philosophers he quoted. I also think he did not get a clear idea of what America is like for the majority of people. He picked lap dancers, politicans and celebrities to interview, not the best way to get a complete view of this country.
colleen27's review against another edition
2.0
At times Levy brought a fascinating outsider's view of the American culture and way of life, but those moments were not enough to save this book from the other side of his narrative, the condescending attitude seemed to stand in the way of objective observation and authentic insight. The pretentious and unnecessarily complex style of writing, full of fragmented sentences and fifty cent words, distracted from the flow and readability of many of the articles that comprised the body of the book, and sorely tested my patience.
blackoxford's review against another edition
4.0
Political Dark Matter
Recent elections in the United States and Britain produced results that were surprising to the pundits, manna to publishers and embarrassing for the pollsters. Unexpected forces which are still not entirely understood were at work in the electorate. We know these forces exist only because they are necessary to understand what is otherwise unexplainable.
This political situation is identical to the current scientific state of cosmology, the study of the universe. In cosmology, the way the universe behaves is unexplainable without the existence of forces and substances that we have never directly experienced, or even named. The scientific designations for these are the intentionally unilluminating terms of dark energy and dark matter.
Scientists know dark energy and dark matter exist, even if they don't know anything more about them, because when they look at astronomical history, the light from distant stars which could be millions of years old, it isn't what they expect it to be. Or rather, in this ancient light are clues about what is really going on now that we find difficult to grasp.
Reading Bernard-Henri Levy's American Vertigo is much like reading the astronomers analysis of the light from distant stars. Written in 2004, it is a well-observed and equally well-written snapshot of the now-distant cultural and political star that was the United States. Levy's unique astuteness, his European sensitivities, and his access to many of the 'players' - the Clintons, Obama, the Bushes, Jesse Jackson, and Michael Moore, among many others, but not Trump - across the American spectrum of politics, race, the arts, and economics interests can be appreciated perhaps only now in the light of current political events. Levy spotted the dark matter in America before many others were aware it even existed.
Levy's overarching cultural conclusion about America in 2004 is not very different from that of Umberto Eco's 1990 Travels in Hyper Reality. To put that conclusion briefly, if also bluntly, America is a fake country. It prefers imitation to authenticity. It reveres counterfeit as if it were real. It wants the New to only simulate the Old and then only to give an impression of continuity. Americans may not like the description but Levy gives plentiful evidence to support it.
Levy's visits to places like Cooperstown in New York State, the entirely fictional home of baseball, and the mid-Western faux-pioneer Amana communities, now mere tourist stage sets, are the equivalent of Eco's Disneyland and imitation Pieta exhibitions. The artificiality of these places is precisely why they are preferred. America is a country founded as a non-existent ideal. The ideal is what holds the place together no matter how Reality tries to divide it. These places of American icons are literally fake, but nonetheless more expressive of and closer to the ideal than any original or non-fiction narrative could possibly be.
This preference for the new/old roots, the purpose-built history, the fictional reality, the re-created simulacrum extends well beyond domestic tourism. The American capacity for forgetting its inconvenient past, for example, is likely only exceeded by the Chinese. The Mount Rushmore presidential monument, made famous worldwide by Alfred Hitchcock's film North by Northwest, was built by a member of the Ku Klux Klan, on a site sacred to the local Indians, in an intentional act of racial humiliation. There is hardly the dimmest cultural memory that during the series of massive strikes after WWI in the Pacific Northwest, the equivalent of the Jarrow March in England, the working people of Seattle proudly boasted of the United States as "forty-seven states and the Soviet republic of Washington." Like so much else in America, the past is irrelevant, except as edifying fiction.
America also shares far more with China: an ability not to see what is contrary to the national-line, as it were. In China, no one was aware of the famine which killed 45 million people during the Great Leap Forward. Even as family members died of starvation, the devastation was perceived as only local, random, and temporary. Levy's visits to the string of failed Northern cities from Buffalo through Cleveland and on to Detroit leave his European sensibilities reeling. He is incredulous, not because of some temporary economic downturn but because these cities were allowed to dramatically de-populate as a matter of national trade policy over a period of half a century. This destruction was certainly less intense but no less systematic than the Chinese experience, and certainly, as in China, brought about by deliberate government policies. Compared to such wilful ignorance, the necessity to give equal credence in guided tours of the Grand Canyon to both instantaneous creationism and erosion over millennia is trivial.
As many other cultural commentators, including Alexis de Tocqueville and Simon Weil have noted (see GR review of Weil's On the Abolition of All Political Parties), the political party structure of the United States is non-ideological. There is no political 'home' for socialist (much less Marxist) or capitalist (say liberal economic) theories. Party debates are notably un-intellectual and are dominated by 'personalities'. There are conservatives and liberals scattered through both parties. Consequently, both major parties are inherently "contentless" and their cut and paste policies are frequently internally inconsistent - liberal gun laws, say, with highly conservative views on marriage, and draconian immigration policies coupled with free trade commitments - so that rational political debate is almost impossible.
A little discussed consequence of the non-ideological character of American politics is the great difficulty it takes to establish the political presence of an issue if there is no existing conflict between the parties. New issues, even on relatively minor topics, disturb the artificial equilibrium of established party politics (so do old issues that have passed their sell-by dates whose change or removal would be disruptive to party power, like Cuban policy). Without an ideological conduit to facilitate a rationale for such a new issue and its integration into a 'platform', it may be left orphaned, much like the issues of Native American rights, election district gerrymandering, Black voter suppression, a racially biased police and judiciary, globalisation, to name just a few. Or, indeed, as Levy notes explicitly, a continuous Mexican border fence, which wasn't possible to get on either party's agenda in 2004, yet appeared at least reasonable to consider given the level of manpower used to police the border at the time. Any 'end-run' with these issues outside the party machines is both difficult and dangerous, in fact difficult precisely because it is dangerous to party power structures.
Inauthenticity may be the mark of at least many politicians in all democratic countries. However, in his interview with the poet and writer Jim Harrison in the rather remote Montana town of Livingstone, Levy gets some prescient criticism that would have shocked most contemporary Americans. "The problem with America," Harrison says, "is Yale...Both Bush and Kerry are Yale... This represents the triumph of the greedy pigs over the progressives, that's the absolute truth of America." Harrison's take in other words: having the best and the brightest running the country means that the country is run for the best and the brightest. This is echoed in a number of venues around the country but undoubtedly sounded vaguely anti-democratic and unpatriotic at the time.
Politically as well as aesthetically, therefore, American popular culture represents a triumph of Kitsch, an ever forming and reforming, amoebic pastiche of sentimentality, nostalgic myth, and a pinch of irony. This latter ensuring that no one takes anything all too seriously, a variant on the American politicians' plausible deniability. The People may rule but that doesn’t mean that they have to take responsibility. Political kitsch is perhaps best summarised by the recent introduction of the concept of ‘alternative facts’ by the White House Press Secretary. Such a concept may provoke guffaws among the educated classes but it is implicitly understood by the bulk of the electorate.
Political attitudes generally are highly unstable - as in fashion, or the latest music, and hip vocabulary - even when party loyalties persist (they are also lied about as a matter of course, especially to pollsters, the tongue rarely leaving the cheek). The parties have an inherent tendency to avoid emerging political interests. So the political system in its entirety, run by the best educated and almost solely politically experienced segment of the population, can maintain its mythical claim to democratic integrity. To question the legitimacy of this ‘elite’ verges on the traitorous and could never find its way into mainstream discourse.
Until of course a demagogue like the forty-fifth president comes along and blows the gaff. It was the astronomer, Vera Rubin, who discovered the existence of dark matter in the 1970's. She has never received any accolades for her pioneering work in cosmic physics. It is now estimated that dark matter constitutes by far the majority of the 'stuff' of the universe. Neither did Levy get a prize for his discoveries in 2004 of what also turned out to be the majority of electoral stuff in American politics. Neither in physics, nor in political science do we know what this stuff is. But knowledge of its existence has changed the world we live in decisively. Who can deny that it is definitely more vertiginous?
Recent elections in the United States and Britain produced results that were surprising to the pundits, manna to publishers and embarrassing for the pollsters. Unexpected forces which are still not entirely understood were at work in the electorate. We know these forces exist only because they are necessary to understand what is otherwise unexplainable.
This political situation is identical to the current scientific state of cosmology, the study of the universe. In cosmology, the way the universe behaves is unexplainable without the existence of forces and substances that we have never directly experienced, or even named. The scientific designations for these are the intentionally unilluminating terms of dark energy and dark matter.
Scientists know dark energy and dark matter exist, even if they don't know anything more about them, because when they look at astronomical history, the light from distant stars which could be millions of years old, it isn't what they expect it to be. Or rather, in this ancient light are clues about what is really going on now that we find difficult to grasp.
Reading Bernard-Henri Levy's American Vertigo is much like reading the astronomers analysis of the light from distant stars. Written in 2004, it is a well-observed and equally well-written snapshot of the now-distant cultural and political star that was the United States. Levy's unique astuteness, his European sensitivities, and his access to many of the 'players' - the Clintons, Obama, the Bushes, Jesse Jackson, and Michael Moore, among many others, but not Trump - across the American spectrum of politics, race, the arts, and economics interests can be appreciated perhaps only now in the light of current political events. Levy spotted the dark matter in America before many others were aware it even existed.
Levy's overarching cultural conclusion about America in 2004 is not very different from that of Umberto Eco's 1990 Travels in Hyper Reality. To put that conclusion briefly, if also bluntly, America is a fake country. It prefers imitation to authenticity. It reveres counterfeit as if it were real. It wants the New to only simulate the Old and then only to give an impression of continuity. Americans may not like the description but Levy gives plentiful evidence to support it.
Levy's visits to places like Cooperstown in New York State, the entirely fictional home of baseball, and the mid-Western faux-pioneer Amana communities, now mere tourist stage sets, are the equivalent of Eco's Disneyland and imitation Pieta exhibitions. The artificiality of these places is precisely why they are preferred. America is a country founded as a non-existent ideal. The ideal is what holds the place together no matter how Reality tries to divide it. These places of American icons are literally fake, but nonetheless more expressive of and closer to the ideal than any original or non-fiction narrative could possibly be.
This preference for the new/old roots, the purpose-built history, the fictional reality, the re-created simulacrum extends well beyond domestic tourism. The American capacity for forgetting its inconvenient past, for example, is likely only exceeded by the Chinese. The Mount Rushmore presidential monument, made famous worldwide by Alfred Hitchcock's film North by Northwest, was built by a member of the Ku Klux Klan, on a site sacred to the local Indians, in an intentional act of racial humiliation. There is hardly the dimmest cultural memory that during the series of massive strikes after WWI in the Pacific Northwest, the equivalent of the Jarrow March in England, the working people of Seattle proudly boasted of the United States as "forty-seven states and the Soviet republic of Washington." Like so much else in America, the past is irrelevant, except as edifying fiction.
America also shares far more with China: an ability not to see what is contrary to the national-line, as it were. In China, no one was aware of the famine which killed 45 million people during the Great Leap Forward. Even as family members died of starvation, the devastation was perceived as only local, random, and temporary. Levy's visits to the string of failed Northern cities from Buffalo through Cleveland and on to Detroit leave his European sensibilities reeling. He is incredulous, not because of some temporary economic downturn but because these cities were allowed to dramatically de-populate as a matter of national trade policy over a period of half a century. This destruction was certainly less intense but no less systematic than the Chinese experience, and certainly, as in China, brought about by deliberate government policies. Compared to such wilful ignorance, the necessity to give equal credence in guided tours of the Grand Canyon to both instantaneous creationism and erosion over millennia is trivial.
As many other cultural commentators, including Alexis de Tocqueville and Simon Weil have noted (see GR review of Weil's On the Abolition of All Political Parties), the political party structure of the United States is non-ideological. There is no political 'home' for socialist (much less Marxist) or capitalist (say liberal economic) theories. Party debates are notably un-intellectual and are dominated by 'personalities'. There are conservatives and liberals scattered through both parties. Consequently, both major parties are inherently "contentless" and their cut and paste policies are frequently internally inconsistent - liberal gun laws, say, with highly conservative views on marriage, and draconian immigration policies coupled with free trade commitments - so that rational political debate is almost impossible.
A little discussed consequence of the non-ideological character of American politics is the great difficulty it takes to establish the political presence of an issue if there is no existing conflict between the parties. New issues, even on relatively minor topics, disturb the artificial equilibrium of established party politics (so do old issues that have passed their sell-by dates whose change or removal would be disruptive to party power, like Cuban policy). Without an ideological conduit to facilitate a rationale for such a new issue and its integration into a 'platform', it may be left orphaned, much like the issues of Native American rights, election district gerrymandering, Black voter suppression, a racially biased police and judiciary, globalisation, to name just a few. Or, indeed, as Levy notes explicitly, a continuous Mexican border fence, which wasn't possible to get on either party's agenda in 2004, yet appeared at least reasonable to consider given the level of manpower used to police the border at the time. Any 'end-run' with these issues outside the party machines is both difficult and dangerous, in fact difficult precisely because it is dangerous to party power structures.
Inauthenticity may be the mark of at least many politicians in all democratic countries. However, in his interview with the poet and writer Jim Harrison in the rather remote Montana town of Livingstone, Levy gets some prescient criticism that would have shocked most contemporary Americans. "The problem with America," Harrison says, "is Yale...Both Bush and Kerry are Yale... This represents the triumph of the greedy pigs over the progressives, that's the absolute truth of America." Harrison's take in other words: having the best and the brightest running the country means that the country is run for the best and the brightest. This is echoed in a number of venues around the country but undoubtedly sounded vaguely anti-democratic and unpatriotic at the time.
Politically as well as aesthetically, therefore, American popular culture represents a triumph of Kitsch, an ever forming and reforming, amoebic pastiche of sentimentality, nostalgic myth, and a pinch of irony. This latter ensuring that no one takes anything all too seriously, a variant on the American politicians' plausible deniability. The People may rule but that doesn’t mean that they have to take responsibility. Political kitsch is perhaps best summarised by the recent introduction of the concept of ‘alternative facts’ by the White House Press Secretary. Such a concept may provoke guffaws among the educated classes but it is implicitly understood by the bulk of the electorate.
Political attitudes generally are highly unstable - as in fashion, or the latest music, and hip vocabulary - even when party loyalties persist (they are also lied about as a matter of course, especially to pollsters, the tongue rarely leaving the cheek). The parties have an inherent tendency to avoid emerging political interests. So the political system in its entirety, run by the best educated and almost solely politically experienced segment of the population, can maintain its mythical claim to democratic integrity. To question the legitimacy of this ‘elite’ verges on the traitorous and could never find its way into mainstream discourse.
Until of course a demagogue like the forty-fifth president comes along and blows the gaff. It was the astronomer, Vera Rubin, who discovered the existence of dark matter in the 1970's. She has never received any accolades for her pioneering work in cosmic physics. It is now estimated that dark matter constitutes by far the majority of the 'stuff' of the universe. Neither did Levy get a prize for his discoveries in 2004 of what also turned out to be the majority of electoral stuff in American politics. Neither in physics, nor in political science do we know what this stuff is. But knowledge of its existence has changed the world we live in decisively. Who can deny that it is definitely more vertiginous?
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