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.
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…
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.’
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 enAdam 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:
Een reactie posten