Poor America

“The Kennedys,” “Mad Men,” “Band of Brothers,” “The Pacific” and soon “Pan Am”: Through its hit TV series, America looks back on its recent past at the risk of finding it too distant. Between 1940 and 1970 in the United States, it was noble to take the plunge into politics, fun to work in advertising, good to wage war. When it was OK to drink a lot, pretty to smoke non-stop, elegant to eat too much. Cars were made to go fast like today, the difference being that people actually went fast in them. Having to drive 70 miles per hour when the car can do 140 is like only being allowed to read half a book. Nostalgia, American friend. Across the Atlantic, they’ve had enough of the present that is not a gift. In the Clinton years after the Reagan years, life began to resemble an angry cop, a spoonful of cod-liver oil, a non-alcoholic beer, overcooked noodles, a Monday afternoon in the fall.

What happened to America, which entered the 20th century in brilliant moral and physical elegance and made its famous sparks, to cause it to enter the 21st century in rags resembling a prison uniform? How did this dream nation, which served as a lighthouse for humanity during the entire last century, become, during our time, an object of repulsion, even for itself? Snarling, superstitious, litigious, irrational, homicidal, uneducated: This is the America that was formerly cheerful, ironic, cool, rational, peaceful, educated. The Americans are hungry — the fat ones because they’re on diets, the less fat because they are also on diets. The Americans are thirsty — the alcoholics because they have stopped drinking and the non-alcoholics because they don’t want to become alcoholics. The Americans are depriving themselves of sex because they don’t want to die and of speech because they are afraid of being disliked. The last great American novel dates to 1979: “Sophie’s Choice” by William Styron. Ever since, it’s been Roth’s cat piss and McCarthy’s dog crap. The last great American film was “Apocalypse Now” (1979). In art, after Basquiat died, nothing. Jimi Hendrix brought up the rear in the line of a musical legacy that Lady Gaga ruined.

Hated in practically all countries in the world to the point they don’t build embassies anymore but strongholds, the Americans have just added a vice to their deplorable international situation: poverty. Recently in Paris, during the month of August, I was visited by an American journalist friend. She was not the sort who could, like Hemingway at the beginning of the 1920s, have a dozen oysters and a carafe of Muscadet at the Closerie des Lilas. Luckily I was there to pay the bill. It upset me to see this American carefully watching the taxi’s meter every time we went somewhere in Paris. What would it have been like if I had taken her to visit Montreuil, the city of my childhood? The dollar: new funny money from a degraded nation?

And if America were in the process of becoming once again — after a brief moment of brilliance in the world — what it was at the beginning of its history: a secondary power, provincial, almost unknown, subject to religious fanaticism and withdrawing into itself? The fall of the Dow Jones will be even harder.