Assuming all goes according to plan today and tonight, tomorrow the world will wake to the glorious dawning of a new America. The monstrosity of the Bush administration that has crippled this nation will be coming to an end, and a new, enlightened era will be about to begin. In the eyes of the world America will suddenly go from zero to hero. But make no mistake: this is about more than politics. We will awaken to the dawning of not only a new political era but also to a new cultural era.
For the past eight years the White House has been dirtied by ugly, gray soot while cowboy politics and an out-of-control commando military has rendered us not just feared but also the laughing stock of the world. Is it any wonder our own consumer confidence has sunk so low? With the world now fearful of our paranoid administration, they’re also mocking what was once a glowing cultural beacon—it’s no wonder we’re all depressed. Forget the economy, if you can. We’ve been wallowing in eight years of America’s cultural Great Depression.
It really can’t be denied. There’s no doubt that our national elections shape the culture of an era. Barring a catastrophic upset, we’ll elect a caring, thoughtful, charismatic leader to serve in the White House, and it will all of a sudden be acceptable for Europeans to once again love America and Americans. And the truth is that if the world loves us, we will again begin to love ourselves. New generations from abroad will allow themselves to recognize America’s strengths, rather than cower from our misuse of power, and snicker at our ineptness.
Yes, our culture has been unjustly maligned, but who can really blame the world for doing so? The Bush/Cheney administration has caused the world to believe, as Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Nobel Academy, recently stated, that the American novel is insular and isolated, and that our writers may very well be “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture.” But I believe what he was really saying is that we must be all those things to have elected such nitwits to our highest elective offices. If we were aware of the world as a whole, we simply wouldn’t have made such an ignorant mistake—twice!
Really, though, I believe Europeans including Mr. Engdahl are aware of the greatness and experimentalism of someone like Thomas Pynchon, to state just one example. I feel as if the world has been overwhelmed by the stupidity of our actions to the point where a perception has developed that all Americans are bad. In a way, it’s like how we used to feel about the Russians—how could we admire their writers when their leaders were killing innocents, aiming their missiles at us, and pounding on the tables in the United Nations? Since then, of course, we’ve come to recognize the greatness of their artists, just as the world will again recognize ours.
Sadly, it seems that of all the arts, literature has suffered the greatest corruption by anti-Americanism. But, happily, it looks like that age is coming to an end. There are so many reasons to be happy over the projected results of what may very well be the most important American election ever, not the least of which is that we’ll begin to smile again—and that the world will smile with us. And when that happens, we’ll be accepted back into the fold as friends, and our literature will again be accepted as worthy of international praise.
Let’s wake up tomorrow and change direction. Let’s smile and be proud to be Americans. It’s about time!
