After America Read online

  There’s your American decline right there: from out-of-this-world to out-of-our-minds, an increasingly unmanned flight from real, historic, technological accomplishment to unreal, ahistorical, therapeutic, touchyfeely multiculti.

  So we can’t go to the moon. And, by the time you factor in getting to the airport to do the shoeless shuffle and the enhanced patdown, flying to London takes longer than it did in 1960. If they were trying to build the transcontinental railroad now, they’d be spending the first three decades on the environmental-impact study and hammering in the Golden Spike to celebrate the point at which the Feasibility Commission’s expansion up from the fifth floor met the Zoning Board’s expansion down from the twelfth floor.

  Google and Apple and other latter day American success stories started in somebody’s garage—the one place where innovation isn’t immediately

  And what do you have to show for all that government? It’s amazing with a multi-trillion-dollar barrel how quickly you wind up scraping the bottom of it. In Obama’s “American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan,” two of the five objectives were to “computerize the health-care system” and “modernize classrooms.”9 That sound you hear is the computerized eyerolling with which every modernized hack author now comes equipped. For its part, the Congressional Progressive Caucus wanted “green jobs creation” and “construction of libraries in rural communities to expand broadband access.”10 And in a postmodern touch, Mark Pinsky at the New Republic made the pitch for a new Federal Writers’ Project, in which writers laid off by America’s collapsing newspaper industry would be hired by the government to go around the country “documenting the ground-level impact of the Great Recession.”11 America has a money-no-object government with a lot of money but no great objects.

  GOTTERDAMMERUNG

  When the father of Big Government, Franklin Roosevelt, was brought before the Hoover Dam, he declared:This morning I came, I saw, and I was conquered, as everyone would be who sees for the first time this great feat of mankind.12

  But the bigger government gets, the less it actually does. You think a guy like Obama is going to put up a new Hoover Dam (built during the Depression and opened two years ahead of schedule)? No chance. Today’s Big Government crowd is more likely to put up a new regulatory agency to tell the Hoover Dam it’s non-wheelchair accessible and has to close. As Deanna Archuleta, Obama’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Interior, assured an audience in Nevada: “You will never see another federal dam.”13 “Great feats of mankind” are an environmental hazard, for mankind has great feats of clay. But hang on, isn’t hydropower “renewable” energy? It doesn’t use coal or oil, it generates electricity from the natural water cycle. If that’s not renewable, what is? Ah, but, according to environmental “dam-busters,” reservoirs are responsible for some 4 percent of the earth’s carbon dioxide emissions. Environmental devastation-wise, the Hoover Dam is the patio pool to Al Gore’s mansion. Out, out, dammed spot!

  So, just as the late Roman Empire was no longer an aqueduct-building culture, we are no longer a dam-building one. It’s not just that we no longer invent, but that we are determined to disinvent everything our great-grandparents created to enable the self-indulgent lives we take for granted and that leave us free to chip away at the foundations of our own society. So-called “progressives” actively wage war on progress. They’re opposed to dams, which spurred the growth of California. They’re opposed to airconditioning, which led to the development of the Southwest. They’re opposed to light bulbs, which expanded man’s day, and they’re opposed to automobiles, which expanded man’s reach. They’re still nominally in favor of mass transit, so maybe we can go back to wood-fired steam trains? No, sorry, no can do. The progressives are opposed to logging; they want a ban on forestry work in environmentally sensitive areas such as forests. Ultimately, progressives are at war with mass prosperity.

  In the old days, we didn’t have these kinds of problems. But then Mr. and Mrs. Peasant start remodeling the hovel, adding a rec room and indoor plumbing, replacing the emaciated old nag with a Honda Civic and driving to the mall in it, and next thing you know, instead of just having an

  Human capital is the most important element in any society. The first requirement of the American Dream is Americans. Today we have American sclerosis, to which too many Americans are contributing. Capitalism is liberating: you’re born a peasant but you don’t have to die one. You can work hard and get a nice place in the suburbs. If you’re a nineteenth-century Russian serf and you get to Ellis Island, you’ll be living in a tenement on the Lower East Side, but your kids will get an education and move uptown, and your grandkids will be doctors and accountants in Westchester County.

  And your great-grandchild will be a Harvard-educated dam-busting environmental activist demanding an end to all this electricity and indoor toilets.

  To go back to 1950, once our friend from 1890 had got his bearings in mid-century, he’d be struck by how our entire conception of time had changed in a mere sixty years. If you live in my part of New Hampshire and you need to pick something up from a guy in the next town, you hop in the truck and you’re back in little more than an hour. In a horse and buggy, that would have been most of your day gone. The first half of the twentieth century overhauled the pattern of our lives: the light bulb abolished night; the internal combustion engine tamed distance. They fundamentally reconceived the rhythms of life. That’s why our young man propelled from 1890 to 1950 would be flummoxed at every turn. A young fellow catapulted from 1950 to today would, on the surface, feel instantly at home—and then notice a few cool electronic toys. And, after that, he might wonder about the defining down of “accomplishment”: Wow, you’ve invented a more compact and portable delivery system for Justin Bieber!

  Long before they slump into poverty, great powers succumb to a poverty of ambition. It could be that the Internet is a lone clipper of advancement on a sea of stasis because, as its proponents might argue, we’re on the brink of a reconceptualization of space similar to the reconceptualization of time that our great-grandparents lived through with the development of electricity and automobiles. But you could as easily argue that for most of the citizenry the computer is, in the Roman context, a cyber-circus. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, written shortly after Hollywood introduced us to “the talkies,” the masses are hooked on “the feelies”:

  “Take hold of those metal knobs on the arms of your chair,” Lenina whispers to her date. “Otherwise you won’t get any of the feely effects.” He does so. The “scent organ” breathes musk; when the on-screen couple kiss with “stereoscopic lips,” the audience tingles. When they make out on the rug, every moviegoer can feel every hair of the bearskin.

  In our time, we don’t even need to go to the theater. We can “feel” what it’s like to drive a car on a thrilling chase through a desert or lead a commando raid on a jungle compound without leaving our own bedrooms. We can photoshop ourselves into pictures with celebrities. We can have any permutation of men, women, and pre-operative transsexuals engaging in every sexual practice known to man or beast just three inches from our eyes: a customized 24-hour virtual circus of diverting games, showbiz gossip, and downloadable porn, a refuge from reality, and a gaudy “feely” playground for the plebs at a time when the regulators have made non-virtual reality a playground for regulators and no one else.

  In the end, the computer age may presage not a reconceptualization of space but an abandonment of the very concept of time. According to Mushtaq Yufzai, the Taliban have a saying:Americans have all the watches, but we’ve got all the time.14

  Cute. If it’s not a Taliban proverb, it would make an excellent country song. It certainly distills the essence of the “clash of civilizations”: Islam is playing It hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back for ever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.

  THE HOLE IS GREATER THAN THE SUM OF ITS
PARTS

  Almost anyone who’s been exposed to western pop culture over the last half-century is familiar with the brutal image that closes Planet of the Apes: a loinclothed Charlton Heston falling to his knees as he comes face to face with a shattered Statue of Liberty poking out of the sand and realizes that the “planet of the apes” is, in fact, his own—or was. What more instantly recognizable shorthand for civilizational ruin? In the film Independence Day, Lady Liberty gets zapped by aliens. In Cloverfield, she’s decapitated by a giant monster. If you’re in the apocalyptic fantasy business, clobbering the statue in the harbor is de rigueur.

  As far as I can ascertain, the earliest example of Liberty-toppling dates back to an edition of Life, and a story called “The Next Morning,” illustrated by a pen-and-ink drawing of a headless statue with the smoldering rubble of the city behind her. That was in 1887. The poor old girl had barely got off the boat from France and they couldn’t wait to blow her to kingdom come. Two years later, on the cover of J. A. Mitchell’s story The Last American , she still stands but the city around her has sunk into a watery grave as

  But liberty is not a statue, and that is not how liberty falls. So what about a different kind of dystopian future? Picture a land where the Statue of Liberty remains in the harbor, yet liberty itself has withered away. The word is still in use. Indeed, we may have a bright shiny array of new “liberties,” new freedoms—“free” health care, “free” college education. If you smash liberty in an instant—as the space aliens do in Independence Day—we can all have our Charlton Heston moment and fall to our knees wailing about the folly and stupidity of man. But when it happens incrementally, and apparently painlessly, free peoples who were once willing to give their lives for liberty can be persuaded very easily to relinquish their liberties for a quiet life. In the days when President Bush was going around promoting the notion of democracy in the Muslim world, there was a line he liked to fall back on:Freedom is the desire of every human heart.15

  If only that were true. It’s doubtful whether that’s actually the case in Gaza and Waziristan, but we know for absolute certain that it’s not in Paris and Stockholm, London and Toronto, Buffalo and San Jose. The story of the western world since 1945 is that, invited to choose between freedom and government “security,” large numbers of people vote to dump freedom every time—the freedom to make their own decisions about health care, education, property rights, the right to eat non-state-licensed homemade pie, and eventually (as we already see in Europe, Canada, the UN Human Rights Council, and U.S. college campuses) what you’re permitted to say and think. An America running out of ideas eventually gives up on the American idea.

  The pop-cultural detonation of national landmarks is a mostly American phenomenon. In the rest of the world, it happens for real. At the same time as Amazing Stories and Astounding Science Fiction were running those Fiction and it wasn’t that Astounding, and it didn’t even require much Science. On one occasion, an enterprising lone German bomber flew low up the Mall and dropped his load directly above the Royal Family’s living quarters. The King and Queen were in their drawing room and showered with shards of glass. When American audiences whoop and holler at the vaporizing of the White House in Independence Day, it’s because such thrills are purely the stuff of weekend multiplex diversion.

  Or at least they were until a Tuesday morning one September when a guy in a cave remade the Manhattan skyline.

  Somewhere along the way, back home in Saudi, at summer school in Oxford, or on a VCR hooked up to the generator at Camp Jihad in Waziristan, Osama bin Laden must surely have seen some of those despised Hollywood blockbusters, because he evidently gave some thought to the iconography of the moment. Planning the operation, did he ever consider taking out the Statue of Liberty? Fewer dead, but what a statement! A couple of days after 9/11, the celebrated German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen told a radio interviewer that the destruction of the World Trade Center was “the greatest work of art ever.”16 I’m reminded of the late Sir Thomas Beecham’s remark when asked if he’d ever conducted any Stockhausen: “No,” he replied. “But I think I’ve trodden in some.”17 Stockhausen stepped in his own that week: in those first days after the assault, even the anti-American Left felt obliged to be somewhat circumspect. But at a certain level the composer understood what Osama was getting at.

  Nevertheless, Stockhausen was wrong. The “greatest work of art” is not the morning of 9/11, with the planes slicing through the building, and the smoke and the screaming and the jumping, and the swift, eerily smooth collapse of the towers. No, the most eloquent statement about America in the early twenty-first century is Ground Zero in the years after. 9/11 was something America’s enemies did to us. The hole in the ground a decade 18 In the twenty-first century, that’s what passes for action, for get-tough leadership, for riding herd. When the going gets tough, the tough boot the can another decade down the road. Sure, those jihad boys got lucky and took out a couple of skyscrapers, but the old can’t-do spirit kicked in, and a mere ten years later we had a seven-storey hole on which seven billion dollars had been lavished. But, if we can’t put up a replacement building within a decade, we can definitely do it within two. Probably. As a lonely steel skeleton began lethargically to rise from the 16-acre site, the unofficial estimated date of completion for the brand new “1 World Trade Center” was said to be 2018.19 That date should shame every American.

  What happened? Everyone knows the “amber waves of grain” and “purple mountain majesties” in “America the Beautiful,” but Katharine Lee Bates’ words are also a hymn to modernity:Oh beautiful for patriot dream

  That sees beyond the years

  Thine alabaster cities gleam

  Undimmed by human tears ...

  “America the Beautiful” is not a nostalgic evocation of a pastoral landscape but a paean to its potential, including the gleaming metropolis. Miss Bates visited the Columbian Exposition in Chicago just before July 4, 1893, and she meant the word “alabaster” very literally: the centerpiece of the fair was the “White City” of the future, fourteen blocks of architectural marvels with marble facades painted white, and shining even whiter in the nightly glow of thousands of electric light bulbs, like a primitive prototype of Al Gore’s carbon-offset palace in Tennessee. They were good times, but even in bad

  The Empire State Building, then the tallest in the world, was put up in eighteen months during a depression—because the head of General Motors wanted to show the head of Chrysler that he could build something that went higher than the Chrysler Building. Three-quarters of a century later, the biggest thing either man’s successor had created was a mountain of unsustainable losses—and both GM and Chrysler were now owned and controlled by government and unions.

  In the months after 9/11, I used to get the same joke emailed to me every few days: the proposed design for the replacement World Trade Center. A new skyscraper towering over the city, with the top looking like a stylized hand—three towers cut off at the joint, and the “middle finger” rising above them, flipping the bird not only to Osama bin Laden but also to Karlheinz Stockhausen and the sneering Euro-lefties and all the rest who rejoiced that day at America getting it, pow, right in the kisser: they all laughed at the Twin Towers takedown. Soon they’ll be fighting to get in to whatever reachfor-the-skies only-in-America edifice replaces it. The very word “skyscraper” is quintessentially American: it doesn’t literally scrape the sky, but hell, as soon as we figure out how to build an even more express elevator, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t.

  But the years go by, and they stopped emailing that joke, because it’s not quite so funny after two, three, five, nine years of walking past Windows on the Hole every morning. It doesn’t matter what the eventual replacement building is at Ground Zero. The ten-year hole is the memorial: a gaping, multi-story, multi-billion-dollar pit, profound and eloquent in its nullity.

  As for the gleam of a brand new “White City,” well, in the interests of saving the planet,
Congress went and outlawed Edison’s light bulb. And on the grounds of the White City hymned by Katherine Lee Bates stands Hyde Park, home to community organizer Barack Obama, terrorist educator

  In the decade after 9/11, China (which America still thinks of as a cheap assembly plant for your local KrappiMart) built the Three Gorges Dam, the largest electricity-generating plant in the world.20 Dubai, a mere sub-jurisdiction of the United Arab Emirates, put up the world’s tallest building and built a Busby Berkeley geometric kaleidoscope of offshore artificial islands.21 Brazil, an emerging economic power, began diverting the Sao Francisco River to create some 400 miles of canals to irrigate its parched northeast.22

  But the hyperpower can’t put up a building.

  Happily, there is one block in Lower Manhattan where ambitious redevelopment is in the air. In 2010, plans were announced to build a 15-story mosque at Ground Zero, on the site of an old Burlington Coat Factory damaged by airplane debris that Tuesday morning.

  So, in the ruins of a building reduced to rubble in the name of Islam, a temple to Islam will arise.

  A couple years after the events of that Tuesday morning, James Lileks, the bard of Minnesota, wrote:If 9/11 had really changed us, there’d be a 150-story building on the site of the World Trade Center today. It would have a classical memorial in the plaza with allegorical figures representing Sorrow and Resolve, and a fountain watched over by stern stone eagles. Instead there’s a pit, and arguments over the usual muted dolorous abstraction approved by the National Association of Grief Counselors. 23