donderdag 28 februari 2013

'Deskundigen' 120



De Amerikaanse soft power is, hoewel aagetast... nog altijd sterk aanwezig… Soft power is, in de kern, de overtuigingskracht van een staat, de kracht om het debat naar zich toe te trekken, om de agenda van de wereldpolitiek te bepalen.
Geert Mak Reizen zonder John. Op zoek naar Amerika. 2012

American ideology now claims to know the direction in which history is headed… But it amounts to a nationalist American ideology. The implications of this are dangerous to the United States, to its allies, and to international peace, because of its lack of realism.
William Pfaff. The Irony of Manifest Destiny. The Tragedy of America’s Foreign Policy. 2010

I think that if you look at this obsession that he had with illusions and dreams, and the way that he ties this into the national question of America as a kind of hollow dream or a dream that will never be fulfilled, this sort of very, very tragic and dark vision of what this country is, what this country does to people's dreams. The whole obsession with masks in the Twenties, I mean the idea of life as a kind of a failing theater, really, makes it absolutely imperative that he works in the theater and that he writes plays, because the theater is a perfect metaphor for him for a central question of life, which is the artifice of it, the way that we construct realities to protect ourselves, to make it possible for us to survive, and the horrible effort it requires to keep those realities intact and to enlist other people into our own ‘little plays,’ and how, finally, one loses the vigor and ruthlessness necessary to keep your dreams the dominant reality that surrounds you every waking minute, and as those dreams fall apart you realize that you've lived a lie.

You can't find a better way of expressing that than on a stage, because you're of course watching a constantly decomposing dream that cannot remain intact, that has all these holes in it that the audience is aware of, that frighten and electrify. And I think it makes the theater the perfect medium for somebody who's as heartbroken about disillusionment, who really finally on some level can't reconcile himself to the fact that there's no salvation, that there's no redemption, that there's no life after death, that everything that made life possible, bearable, is really kind of, finally, a lie. And I think that theater is a perfect medium for somebody who's as grief stricken about that as O'Neill was.
Tony Kushner. Eugene O'Neill: A Documentary Film. 2006

Net zo goed als de overgrote meerderheid van de wereldbevolking kunnen ook de ‘Amerikanen’ begrijpen wat Eugene O'Neill bedoelde met het volgende sceptische wereldbeeld:

One's outer life passes in a solitude haunted by the masks of others; one's inner life passes in a solitude hounded by the masks of oneself.



De Amerikaanse toneelschrijver en criticus Robert Brustein zei in dit verband:

The vision of The Iceman Cometh is… the vision of King Lear. Those two plays are twin plays. At the end of King Lear, King Lear looks into the abyss of nothingness that mere humans cannot look at without turning to stone. That's what O'Neill does in The Iceman Cometh. He looks into an abyss of life without illusion, without what he calls pipe dreams and that is death. To have life without illusion is to be in a state of paralysis, is to die, in effect. That's what he says and that's a terrifying insight. It's a very truthful insight.

En de Amerikaanse toneelschrijver John Guare verklaarde over hetzelfde toneelstuk:

And Hickey comes in, and tells everyone that he has discovered the truth -- he has discovered you have to take away all illusions, man has to live illusion-free. And they all, for a moment, face up to the truth and decide to move on, and they see he's mad and they all sink back into their dreams. The play becomes a plea for the life-lie that we have to get through our lives, that life is so intolerable, that if we don't create some sort of illusion in which we live, we cannot survive.

Maar deze eerlijkheid kan de mainstream niet opbregen, die heeft ‘hoop’ nodig dat het leven een happy ending kent, het bestaan een soort feel-good movie is, en dus waren de opiniemakers onmiddellijk na de Tweede Oorlog ervan doordrongen dat ‘popular sentiments should be redirected toward the vision of America that had debuted at the World’s Fair,’ van 1939 waarin de VS was afgebeeld als een eeuwig gelukkig consumptieparadijs. Vooruitlopend daarop verklaarde al in 1942 een medewerker van het vooraanstaande reclame en public relations kantoor Lord and Thomas dat  

We can awaken in the American people the dream they have been looking for and asking for and begging for since the turn of the century. We can explain why the American way of life – with its bathtubs and pop-up toasters and electric refrigerators and radios and insulated homes – is worth sacrificing anything and everything not only to preserve but to take forward in a future more glorious than ever.



En zo zou het worden. Een opgeschoond leven, zonder enige tragiek, alleen maar vooruitgang en lachende, hoopvolle gezichten, Donald Duck, kauwgom, Disneyland, en California-soup.

We have victory to sell in the biggest fight we have ever been in. Victory and the American way of life were ‘sold’ through advertising methods such as posters. The American way of life during the war was that of a hard working and family oriented nation. Posters of Rosie the riveter and a family around a dinner table with quotes like ‘don't let anything go to waist as our boys are out fighting’. These posters were used as a way to reinforce to America what we were fighting for and to keep supporting the war in any way possible.

En voor de Amerikanen ging die oorlog na 1945 in het buitenland gewoon door. Vrede werd het nooit echt. Nooit kreeg men de kans zichzelf eens rustig in de spiegel aan te kijken om zich de vragen te stellen die O’Neil opwierp. In 2007 schreef de Amerikaanse historicus en hoogleraar, wijlen John Patrick Diggins, in Eugene O’Neill’s America. Desire Under Democracy:

O’Neill saw in the will to want and to claim and acquire the playing out of ‘the tragedy of the possessive – the pitiful longing of man to build his own heaven here on earth by glutting his sense of power with ownership and land, people, money – but principally the land and other people’s lives.’ In Desire Under the Elms O’Neill depicts the coveting of someone else’s property and of the wife of another man as stemming from greed, lust, resentment, righteous vengeance, and even from romantic love itself. Under the conditions of modern democracy desire knows no restraint or limitation, no cessation or fulfillment, except the frustration of seeking immortality, which is unattainable. O’Neill probed this theme in Lazarus Laughed, where he mocked the fear of death as the ‘root of all evil, the cause of man’s blundering unhappiness’ and his everlasting submission to authority.


Maar voor Geert Mak en volgens hem miljoenen anderen in de provincie, was Amerika een droomland, met een losse levensstijl… Dat was de toekomst, zo moest je leven, met dat Amerikaanse lef en die benijdenswaardige flair!' Zowel voor hem als, gezien de hoge oplage van Reizen zonder John, voor de mainstream is het erg moeilijk, zo niet onmogelijk, afscheid te nemen van deze illusie. Dit zegt meer over de gelovigen in de mythe dan over de VS zelf De grootste toneelschrijver die de VS heeft voortgebacht, Eugene O’Neill, prikte daarentegen genadeloos door de buitenkant heen om de ware geaardheid van de Amerikaanse maatschappij bloot te leggen. ‘Damn the optimists,’ zei O’Neill in een interview in de New York Tribune. Hij verafschuwde, in de woorden van de Amerikaanse historicus John Patrick Diggins, ‘those who cannot cope with defeat and failure as the price for aiming at the highest aspirations.’ O’Neill vertelde zelf: ‘To me, the tragic alone has that significant beauty which is truth.’ Over het werk van deze Nobelprijswinnaar schreef professor Diggins in Desire Under Democracy:

O’Neill’s characters either resist trying to know who they are and refuse their destiny or, what is more chilling, sense there is no self to be known, no original nature, no essence that enables us to know what we want…  

In beide gevallen is sprake van een gemankeerde cultuur die geen model zou moeten zijn voor de rest van de wereld. Als geen andere toneelschrijver maakt Eugene O’Neill dit duidelijk. John Patrick Diggins:

O’Neill read broadly in American history. He devoured Gustav Meyers’ History of Great Fortunes and Matthew Josephson’s The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861-1901. From such works O’Neill sought to find data on how the rich and powerful gained control of railroads and oil pipelines. His plays also dealt with imperialism, with Admiral Dewey’s visit to Manila, and with the U.S. penetration of the Far East. Unlike most American historians, however, O’Neill hardly saw the corruptions of the Gilded Age of American business as a departure from the virtuous ideals of the American Revolution. One character drawn for a possible play on that subject hopes that America will become the land of liberty and that the ‘impulse toward freedom will eventually lead to insight into what freedom really is.’ But with the possibilities of freedom come the temptations of sin and the ‘vanity of possession.’ To many historians of the American past, freedom is always in the making, rising, developing, even though retarded by economic scarcity or by a ruling elite that refuses to allow the full flowering of democracy. The playwright, perhaps more than the historian, shows us why democracy, even while offering formal freedom, breeds a deeper discontent, leaving people free of oppression yet fettered to desire, a national character, as Tocqueville put it, that ‘is itself dominated by its passion for dominion.’

Maar ook dit inzicht wordt  door de westerse mainstream genegeerd evenals de strekking van twee van O’Neill’s toneelstukken uit de jaren dertig: A Touch of the Poet en More Stately Mansions.  

Both plays  dealt with the conviction that America and American democracy had failed its ideals, a verdict that had been arrived at by Henry Adams and other historians who also bemoaned the forces of materialism and economic determinism and the incapacity of the Constitution to prevent the Civil War…

The country O’Neill writes about in the two plays examined here is both proud and vain. Americans look upon themselves as free, autonomous individuals while unconsciously submitting to the ‘tyranny’ of public opinion. What we think of ourselves may be inseperable from what others think of us… democracy might offer opportunity, but only at the cost of identity, for in an egalitarian society one gets ahead by adapting to the conventions of the day.

Het centrale thema van O'Neill was dat in de Amerikaanse geschiedenis ‘greed and power would prevail over idealism and morality,’ en dat de VS ‘is driven by pride and vanity, conceit toward the self and arrogance toward others,’ precies die karaktergebreken die geleid hebben tot het failliet van de Amerikaanse buitenlandse politiek. Wie wil bezitten, kan onmogelijk liefhebben; O’Neill ‘makes us aware that the self that is engrosswed in its own desires is not free to love.’ Met als gevolg dat de wereld degene die wil bezitten begint te haten, want op aarde weerkaatst alles: men oogst wat men zaait.

O’Neill deals with a theme that not only troubled the intellectuals… far back into classical thought and Christianity: the surrender of reason to passion, the bondage of will to desire, the loss of self to society. The rise of democracy was meant to free humankind from the problems that agonized ancient thinkers. Under liberal democracy in Jacksonian America, the mind was supposedly free from interference and domination, and men and women could be masters and mistresses of their own lives. Emerson, Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller knew that was not the case, and so did Eugene O’Neill.




In het kapitalisme kan de mens niet vrij zijn omdat hij zijn tijd aan een ander verkoopt, die dan met die gekochte tijd doet wat hij wil. In feite gaat dit alles om de tragiek van de machtslust, geld is slechts een afgeleide daarvan. Precies zoals Diggins beschrijft:

O’Neill’s interpretation of the human condition is tragic rather than ironic. His idea of capitalism had little to do with the alienation of the worker, the production and consumption of goods, or the benevolent operations of the ‘invisible’ hand.’ The capitalist desires, above all, not to compete and produce but to control and possess. In his essay on ‘Wealth,’ Emerson wrote of the entrepreneurial class: ‘Power is what they want, not candy.’ O’Neill could not have agreed more.  

Kan een tot de tanden toe bewapende, imperialistische staat de vrede bewaren wanneer het gedreven wordt door machtslust? Door ‘power, not candy’? De geschiedenis bewijst het tegendeel. Daar komt nog een ander wezenlijk probleem bij. John Patrick Diggins:

Driven by the angst of endless desire, the self moves in two opposing directions: it either draws inward within itself and leaves the practical world behind to enjoy contemplation, or it extends outward into the world via hectic activities and pursuits whose ends never bring satisfaction. The self oscillates between those extremes and is always in motion. The conflicting emotions also come between the individual and society… A democratic culture exarcebates this tendency, so that ‘each man is forever thrown back on himself alone, and there is a danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.’

Het laatste is een citaat van de Franse historicus Tocqueville uit zijn beroemd geworden Democracy in America, geschreven in de jaren dertig van de negentiende eeuw, waaraan Diggins toevoegt dat

Tocqueville was as worried about selfishness as O’ Neill was about possessiveness. The French philosopher examined every aspect and implication of the term ‘interest,’ whether ‘enlightened,’ ‘rational,’ ‘vicious,’ or ‘rightly understood.’ For Tocqueville, and earlier as well for John Locke and Adam Smith, the idea that people would conduct themselves according to their own interests and satisfactions meant that political and religious authority would no longer be needed to command obedience. ‘No longer do ideas, but interests only, form the links between men, and it would seem that human opinions were no more than a sort of mental dust open to the wind on every side and unable to come together and take shape.’ Tocqueville hoped that if interest could be critically reflective and citizens made to think about the community at large, human desires could be moderated and the individual could accept restraints upon his passions and appetites. But if not, if self-interest has no capacity for self-control, then it becomes ‘pernicious’ and its practioners ‘petty’ with envy and ‘debauched’ with desire. Tocqueville’s description of uninhibited self-interest captures Sara Hartford’s driving ambition in More Stately Mansions.

De protagoniste van O’Neill’s toneelstuk More Stately Mansions, Sara Hartford, staat model voor de onverzadigbare kapitalistische hebzucht die uiteindelijk niet anders dan tragisch kan eindigen. Oneindig egoisme in een eindige wereld vernietigt immers zichzelf.  De Europese Verlichtingsfilosofen als John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, John Suart Mill en Adam Smith, die de Amerikaanse grondleggers van de staat diep haden beinvloed, en zelfs ook een klassieke liberaal als Tocqueville realiseerden zich dat het ver doorgevoerde individualisme een gemeenschap vernietigt. Zij waren evenwel niet in staat om alle ingrijpende consequenties te voorzien die de industriele revolutie in de massamaatschappij zou veroorzaken. Een maatschappij waarin de massamens niet gedreven wordt door rationele motieven, maar door gemanipuleerde impulsen, onderbewuste instincten, geconditioneerde reflexen, kortom, door begeerte die noodzakelijk is om het alles verslindende kapitalistische systeem in stand te houden.

We must shift America from a needs- to a desires-culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. [...] Man's desires must overschadow his needs,

zoals Wall Street-bankier Paul Mazur al in het begin van de twintigste eeuw de cultuur van het onverzadigbare egoisme heeft geformuleerd. Immers, het kapitalisme kan alleen bestaan door groei van productie en dus consumptie. En dit betekent weer dat

we must learn to sell better and to advertise better. We must convert a basic economic desire—to acquire more and more things—which has no limitation, I assume, among human beings, into actual demand for goods… it is vital that the levels of consumption be high and constantly rising.


In die cultuur is geen ruimte voor ratio en logica, voor zelfbeheersing, en dus voor het zichzelf onderwerpen aan de eisen van de gemeenschap. De scherpzinnige Tocqueville voorzag al ruim 170 jaar geleden de zwarte kant van de Amerikaanse psyche:

Whatever pains are taken to distract it from itself, it soon grows bored, restless, and anxious among the pleasures of the senses. If ever the thoughts of the great majority of mankind came to be concentrated solely in the search for material blessings, one can anticipate that there would be a colossal reaction in the souls of men.

Tocqueville waarschuwde ervoor dat de onverzadigbare hunkering naar status en daarmee naar identiteit nooit bevredigd zal kunnen worden, want des te gelijker men wordt des te heviger het verlangen naar nog meer gelijkheid. Tocqueville:

Among democratic republics men easily obtain a certain quality, but they will never get the sort of equality they long for. That is a quality which ever retreats before them without getting quite out of sight, and as it retreats it beckons them on to pursue. Every instant  they think they will catch it, and each time it slips through their fingers. They see it close enough to know its charms, but they do not get near enough to enjoy it, and they will be dead before they have fully relished its delights.

Het onverzadigbare kan zichzelf nooit verzadigen en het zal pas stoppen wanneer het daartoe gedwongen wordt, dus op het moment dat al het andere is uitgeput of verwoest. In Eugene O’Neill’s America. Desire Under Democracy formuleerde Diggins het als volgt:

Liberal, capitalist democracy makes formal, institutional freedom possible, but it also reveals the human condition in all its alienated longing. With this perspective, Alexis de Tocqueville, Eugene O’Neill, and Karl Marx are all in agreement. ‘No stigma attaches to the love of money in America,’ wrote Tocqueville in Democracy in America, ‘and provided it does not exceed the bonds imposed by public order, it is held in honor.’ But money seeking, Tocqueville adds, has people withdrawing into themselves and ‘constantly circling around in pursuit of the petty and banal pleasures with which they glut their souls.’


Morgen meer.

Amerika staat er over een halve eeuw beter voor dan Europa… Als je invloed en macht wilt hebben, moet je groots zijn. Dat is iets wat we in Europa van ze kunnen leren.
Geert Mak. Nu.nl. 22 augustus 2012





Geen opmerkingen:

Peter Flik en Chuck Berry-Promised Land

mijn unieke collega Peter Flik, die de vrijzinnig protestantse radio omroep de VPRO maakte is niet meer. ik koester duizenden herinneringen ...