Is America falling apart, Anthony Burgess was asking, 50 years ago
With the coronation of Donald Trump and his vice-presidential pick J. D. Vance as the kings of the Americans, a more than 50-year-old essay by the writer Anthony Burgess is worth a read.
It’s titled Is America Falling Apart? (paywall).
Burgess, fresh from a year living in New Jersey, was writing from Bracciano, a town 13 miles north of the Italian capital.
He was able to draw on the recent experience of life in America to compare and contrast that country with Italy. What was different? And was it different in a good way?
Was Italy a basket case?
Was America really the land where dreams become reality?
His reflections, from back in November 1971, remain exceedingly pertinent in 2024.
For, he notes the basic problem with America — the contrast between its promise of community and its debilitating neurotic belief in individualism. Compared to Italy, a country that believes in “the wresting of minimal sweetness out of the long‐known bitterness of living”, America is rich and spoiled and guilt-ridden and conflicted. In Italy, it’s not money or ruggedness that matters: “What matters is talk, family, cheap wine in the open air, the wresting of minimal sweetness out of the long‐known bitterness of living”.
The reasons Burgess suggests for the state of America are interesting. Especially at this moment in time, when anger, populism, isolationism, bigotry, misogyny and the war on the state are surging in America, while health care remains a privilege not a right, there are more guns than people and greed is considered good.
Here goes Burgess:
“America as a nation has never been able to settle to a common belief more sophisticated than the dangerous naiveté of the Declaration of Independence. ‘Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,’ indeed. And now America, filling in the vacuum left by the liquefied British Empire, has the task of telling the rest of the world that there’s something better than Communism. The something better can only be money‐making and consumption for its own sake”.
“America is anachronistic in so many ways, and not least in its clinging to a belief — now known to be unviable — in the capacity of the individual citizen to do everything for himself. Americans are admirable in their distrust of the corporate state — they have fought both Fascism and Communism — but they forget that there is a use for everything, even the loathesome bureaucratic machine. America needs a measure of socialization, as Britain needed it. Things — especially those we need most — don’t always pay their way, and it is here that the state must enter, dismissing the profit clement. Part of the present American neurosis, again, springs from awareness of this but inability to do anything about practical implementation. Perhaps only a country full of bombed cities [such as Italy] feels capable of this kind of social revolution”.
“There is no worse neurosis than that which derives from a consciousness of guilt and an inability to reform”.
“It would be supererogatory for me to list those areas in which thoughtful Americans feel that collapse is coming”.
“America made me develop new appetites in order to make proper use of the supermarket. A character in Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Put Out More Flags’ said that the difference between prewar and postwar life was that, prewar, if one thing went wrong the day was ruined; postwar, if one thing went right the day would be made. America is prewar country, psychologically unprepared for one thing to go wrong”.
Originally published at https://www.rashmee.com
