What would New Year’s Eve be without some mixed nuts?

Quem Deus perdere vult, dementat prius. Those whom God would destroy, He first drives mad. Indeed, He may just have the entire American population slated for termination, because it has gone bonkers, if this December 26, 2010 dispatch from an expat abroad is to be believed.

Featured on Alternet, the piece endeavors to persuade Americans to see themselves as Germans see them, i.e.,  blind to the inanities of consumer culture and to the iniquities of existing social relations. “As an American expat living in the European Union, I’ve started to see America from a different perspective,” the dispatch’s author, one Democrats Ramshield, writes. Seeing America from a different perspective apparently means from a perspective not assiduously constructed by hegemonic American media, which, if nothing else, can be counted on to present news liberal larded with jingoistic blather — or, failing that, salacious irrelevancies — all in the service of a sclerotic exceptionalism that would be merely tedious were it not so lethal. What matter niggling abstractions like the wholesale plunder of the productive economy to balance too-big-to-fail banks’ books, when there are hapless babies lodged in wells, hapless golf clubs lodged in sports cars’ windshields (put there by angry spouses of the rich and aimless), or hapless penises lodged in unwonted orifices? No, as Ramshield observes, the American people perish for want of knowledge.

Which is perhaps for the best, seeing as the oppressive national chauvinism, in which Americans are outmatched only by the French, is sure to perish with them. Once the thick haze of my-country-right-or-wrong propaganda has dissipated, the ragtag remnant may at least gain some long overdue clarity. Rather than some New Atlantis, some New Jerusalem, they might come to see the United States as just one spot on the globe among many — a spot that did indeed gestate a political idea of unique promise to humanity in terms of liberty and fulfillment, but which in classic Derridean fashion also bred the conditions of its own demise: cupidity, selfish individualism, depravity, and decadence of every stripe. If it’s true that constant vigilance breeds indifference, then it’s equally true that nothing makes the case for vigilance like constant indifference.

This is how the Germans see the U.S.’s present condition, at any rate. According to Ramshield, Germans consider Americans verrückt, a diagnosis which the former derive from these three symptoms:

1. Less-than-compassionate conservatism. Inadequate health and dental coverage, parsimonious social benefits, nearly non-existent job perks — these, when coupled with a stagnant, fundamentally expropriative economy, which channels the bulk of any productivity gains into the richest one percent’s coffers, throw a pall over the West’s wealthiest polity. “The U.S. has 59 million people medically uninsured; 132 million without dental insurance; 60 million without paid sick leave; 40 million on food stamps,” Ramshield writes. “Everybody in the European Union has cradle-to-grave access to universal medical and a dental plan by law. The law also requires paid sick leave; paid annual leave; paid maternity leave.” Viewed from the Heimat, the willful precarization of such a large number of citizens smacks of malign neglect, if not outright psychopathy.

Never has there emerged an idea so bold that one couldn’t shout it down in the name of mythic national purity.

2. A culture of recrimination. Among Americans’ many dubious talents is the unfailingly power to misrecognize enemies, and to accost them accordingly. Talk of sniper’s nests on the U.S.–Mexico border trumps talk of perp walks for Wall Street tycoons. Memes deployed with the intent of soothing savage plebeian breasts instead rankle in their technocratic casuistry. “Jobless recovery,” “quantitative easing” — what Joe or Jane Six-Pack can find solace in these incantations? No wonder a retrenchment of “first things” proceeds apace: a little bit of “blood and soil” that many of our German friends might recognize, offering substance, solidity, honest value that, to quote Herman Melville’s narrator in Bartleby, the Scrivener, “ring like unto bullion,” or like unto deportees’ leg irons.

Ramshield quotes this passage from a recent article in Der Spiegel that submits our great nation to psychoanalysis:

The Tea Party, that group of white, older voters who claim that they want their country back, is angry. Fox News host Glenn Beck, a recovering alcoholic who likens Obama to Adolf Hitler, is angry. Beck doesn’t quite know what he wants to be — maybe a politician, maybe president, maybe a preacher — and he doesn’t know what he wants to do, either, or least he hasn’t come up with any specific ideas or plans. But he is full of hatred.

Beck’s apparent indecision, outdoing even Hamlet’s, has not prevented him from enjoying tremendous influence (as is discussed in this earlier Generation Bubble piece). Politician, president, preacher — maybe one of the above, two, none, or all three. Modern media school Americans in the delicate art of escaping pigeonholing, and it seems only natural that the aptest pupils would go to the head of the class. Behind the podium or in the pulpit, the effect remains essentially the same: amplification has long stood as the rhetorical strategy of choice, “Give me liberty or give me death!” and “I have a dream” having given way to “Turn his mike off!” Never has there emerged an idea so bold that one couldn’t shout it down in the name of mythic national purity.

3. Dire want in the midst of plenty. Of all the items on Ramshield’s indictment, this appears the least plausible. After all, ordinary experience gives every indication that for the first time in, oh, say, all of recorded history, there has appeared a country with an obese underclass. The elites have become the new starvelings. Hunger art is all the rage as prepsters, hipsters, and fashionistas seek ideal forms of a most strictly Platonic sort. From a young age, however, one is admonished never to judge a book by its cover. Beneath the many folds of today’s lumpenproles hide waifs gasping for nutriment. Inanition now comes in the form of a surfeit of trash, fodder once deemed unworthy of the humblest beast now flogged tirelessly by antic mascots who have shown themselves adepts at neurolinguistic programming.

Even Mr. End-of-History himself, Francis Fukuyama, admits that the great political experiment our founding fathers set in motion has essentially devolved into a plutocracy.

Ramshield links to a November 17, 2010 article in Switzerland’s Berner Zeitung (in German), which calls the attention of the jolly Volk of the land of chocolate and Swatch watches to the fact that people in the land of Big Macs go starving. “Some 14.7 percent of American households this past year” have gone malnourished, the Berner Zeitung article reports. To people of one developed nation considering another, this can only come as a real oddity. In response to this astonishing fact, Ramshield asks, “Given the fact that the Swiss virtually eliminated hunger, how do we as Americans think they will view these pictures, to which the American population has apparently been desensitized?” Image management has long been a robust industry in the U.S. Professionals in the biz have performed wonders when it comes to keeping seams and dirty laundry from public display. That this strange fact of famine in the fattest land was so easily uncovered must mean that few Americans fear the shame that comes with such a dubious accomplishment.

Watching this country wrench itself into basically the sociopolitical equivalent of a split personality, one that increasingly has come to resemble plantations in the antebellum South, you’re left to wonder along with Ramshield,

Perhaps the only way for us to remember what we really look like in America is to see ourselves through the eyes of others. While it is true that we can all be proud Americans, surely we don’t have to be proud of the broken American social safety net. Surely we can do better than that. Can a European-style social safety net rescue the American working and middle classes from GOP and Tea Party warfare?

Hell, even Mr. End-of-History himself, Francis Fukuyama, admits (albeit in a cautious, highly qualified manner) that the great political experiment our founding fathers set in motion has essentially devolved into a plutocracy. This means goodbye social mobility, liberty, sovereignty, and just about everything else Idaho militia men find so sexy about the constitution. Money obeys only one imperative: to make more of itself. On its way to doing so it will trample everything you and I hold dear.

It’s enough to make you crazy.

Anton would love to hear from you. Drop him a line at generationbubble [at] gmail [dot] com.

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