SLSL Intro. Burgess continued

[William Zantzinger]

"Is America Falling Apart?" By Anthony Burgess (1971) 



Europeans think more highly of Americans now than they
ever did. 

When Europe, after a millennia of war, rapine,
slavery, famine, intolerance, had sunk to the level of
a sewer, America became the golden dream, the Eden
where innocence could be recovered. Original sin was
the monopoly of that dirty continent over there; in
America man could glow in an aura of natural goodness,
driven along his shining path by divine reason. The
Declaration of Independence itself is a monument to
reason. Progress was possible, and the wrongs
committed against the Indians, the wildlife, the land
itself, could be explained away in terms of the
rational control of the environment necessary for the
building of a New Jerusalem. Right and wrong made up
the moral dichotomy; evil-that great eternal
inextirpable entity-had no place in America. 
	At last, with the Vietnam war and especially the
Mylai horror, Americans were beginning to realize that
they were subject to original sin as much as Europeans
are. Some things-the massive crime figures, for
instance-can now be explained only in terms of
absolute evil. Europe, which has long known about evil
and learned to live with it (live is evil spelled
backwards), is now grimly pleased to find that America
is becoming like Europe. America is no longer Europe's
daughter not her rich stepmother: she is Europe's
sister. The agony that America is undergoing is not to
be associated with breakdown so much as with the
parturition of self-knowledge. 
	It has been assumed by many that the youth of America
has been in the vanguard of the discovery of both the
disease and the cure. The various copping-out
movements, however, from the Beats on, have committed
the gross error of assuming that original sin rested
with their elders, their rulers, and that they
themselves could manifest their essential innocence by
building little neo-Edens. The drug culture could
confirm that the paradisal vision was available to all
who sort it. But instant ecstasy has to be purchased,
like any other commodity, and, in economic terms, that
passive life of pure being involves parasitism.
Practically all the crime I encountered in New
York-directly or through report-was a preying of the
opium-eaters on the working community. There has to be
a snake in paradise. We can't escape the heritage of
human evil by building communes, usually on an
agronomic ignorance that, intended to be a rejection
of inherited knowledge, that suspect property of the
elders, does violence to life. The American young are
well-meaning but misguided, and must not themselves be
taken as guides. 

	The guides, as always, lie among the writers and
artists. And Americans ought to note that, however
things may seem to be falling apart, art and the human
scholarship are flourishing here, as they are not, for
instance, in England. I'm not suggesting that Bellow,
Mailer, Roth and the rest have the task of finding a
solution to the American mess, but they can at least
clarify its nature  and show how it relates to the
human condition in general. Literature, that most
directly human of the arts, often reacts magnificently
to an ambiance or unease or apparent breakdown. 

TBC


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