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American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville
What does it mean to be an American, and what can America be today? To answer these questions, celebrated philosopher and journalist Bernard-Henri Lévy spent a year traveling throughout the country in the footsteps of another great Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America remains the most influential book ever written about our country.
The result is American Vertigo, a fascinating, wholly fresh look at a country we sometimes only think we know. From Rikers Island to Chicago mega-churches, from Muslim communities in Detroit to an Amish enclave in Iowa, Lévy investigates issues at the heart of our the special nature of American patriotism, the coexistence of freedom and religion (including the religion of baseball), the prison system, the “return of ideology” and the health of our political institutions, and much more. He revisits and updates Tocqueville’s most important beliefs, such as the dangers posed by “the tyranny of the majority,” explores what Europe and America have to learn from each other, and interprets what he sees with a novelist’s eye and a philosopher’s depth.
Through powerful interview-based portraits across the spectrum of the American people, from prison guards to clergymen, from Norman Mailer to Barack Obama, from Sharon Stone to Richard Holbrooke, Lévy fills his book with a tapestry of American voices–some wise, some shocking. Both the grandeur and the hellish dimensions of American life are unflinchingly explored. And big themes emerge throughout, from the crucial choices America
faces today to the underlying reality that, unlike the “Old World,” America remains the fulfillment of the world’s desire to worship, earn, and live as one wishes–a place, despite all, where inclusion remains not just an ideal but an actual practice.
At a time when Americans are anxious about how the world perceives them and, indeed, keen to make sense of themselves, a brilliant and sympathetic foreign observer has arrived to help us begin a new conversation about the meaning of America.
The result is American Vertigo, a fascinating, wholly fresh look at a country we sometimes only think we know. From Rikers Island to Chicago mega-churches, from Muslim communities in Detroit to an Amish enclave in Iowa, Lévy investigates issues at the heart of our the special nature of American patriotism, the coexistence of freedom and religion (including the religion of baseball), the prison system, the “return of ideology” and the health of our political institutions, and much more. He revisits and updates Tocqueville’s most important beliefs, such as the dangers posed by “the tyranny of the majority,” explores what Europe and America have to learn from each other, and interprets what he sees with a novelist’s eye and a philosopher’s depth.
Through powerful interview-based portraits across the spectrum of the American people, from prison guards to clergymen, from Norman Mailer to Barack Obama, from Sharon Stone to Richard Holbrooke, Lévy fills his book with a tapestry of American voices–some wise, some shocking. Both the grandeur and the hellish dimensions of American life are unflinchingly explored. And big themes emerge throughout, from the crucial choices America
faces today to the underlying reality that, unlike the “Old World,” America remains the fulfillment of the world’s desire to worship, earn, and live as one wishes–a place, despite all, where inclusion remains not just an ideal but an actual practice.
At a time when Americans are anxious about how the world perceives them and, indeed, keen to make sense of themselves, a brilliant and sympathetic foreign observer has arrived to help us begin a new conversation about the meaning of America.
320 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2006
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663 people want to read
About the author
Bernard-Henri Lévy
107 books240 followersBernard-Henri Lévy is a philosopher, activist, filmmaker, and author of more than thirty books including The Genius of Judaism, American Vertigo, Barbarism with a Human Face, and Who Killed Daniel Pearl? His writing has appeared extensively in publications throughout Europe and the United States. His documentaries include Peshmerga, The Battle of Mosul, The Oath of Tobruk, and Bosna! Lévy is cofounder of the antiracist group SOS Racisme and has served on diplomatic missions for the French government.
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September 16, 2020
Political Dark Matter
Recent elections in the United States and Britain produced results that were surprising to the pundits, manna to publishers and embarrassing for the pollsters. Unexpected forces which are still not entirely understood were at work in the electorate. We know these forces exist only because they are necessary to understand what is otherwise unexplainable.
This political situation is identical to the current scientific state of cosmology, the study of the universe. In cosmology, the way the universe behaves is unexplainable without the existence of forces and substances that we have never directly experienced, or even named. The scientific designations for these are the intentionally unilluminating terms of dark energy and dark matter.
Scientists know dark energy and dark matter exist, even if they don't know anything more about them, because when they look at astronomical history, the light from distant stars which could be millions of years old, it isn't what they expect it to be. Or rather, in this ancient light are clues about what is really going on now that we find difficult to grasp.
Reading Bernard-Henri Levy's American Vertigo is much like reading the astronomers analysis of the light from distant stars. Written in 2004, it is a well-observed and equally well-written snapshot of the now-distant cultural and political star that was the United States. Levy's unique astuteness, his European sensitivities, and his access to many of the 'players' - the Clintons, Obama, the Bushes, Jesse Jackson, and Michael Moore, among many others, but not Trump - across the American spectrum of politics, race, the arts, and economics interests can be appreciated perhaps only now in the light of current political events. Levy spotted the dark matter in America before many others were aware it even existed.
Levy's overarching cultural conclusion about America in 2004 is not very different from that of Umberto Eco's 1990 Travels in Hyper Reality. To put that conclusion briefly, if also bluntly, America is a fake country. It prefers imitation to authenticity. It reveres counterfeit as if it were real. It wants the New to only simulate the Old and then only to give an impression of continuity. Americans may not like the description but Levy gives plentiful evidence to support it.
Levy's visits to places like Cooperstown in New York State, the entirely fictional home of baseball, and the mid-Western faux-pioneer Amana communities, now mere tourist stage sets, are the equivalent of Eco's Disneyland and imitation Pieta exhibitions. The artificiality of these places is precisely why they are preferred. America is a country founded as a non-existent ideal. The ideal is what holds the place together no matter how Reality tries to divide it. These places of American icons are literally fake, but nonetheless more expressive of and closer to the ideal than any original or non-fiction narrative could possibly be.
This preference for the new/old roots, the purpose-built history, the fictional reality, the re-created simulacrum extends well beyond domestic tourism. The American capacity for forgetting its inconvenient past, for example, is likely only exceeded by the Chinese. The Mount Rushmore presidential monument, made famous worldwide by Alfred Hitchcock's film North by Northwest, was built by a member of the Ku Klux Klan, on a site sacred to the local Indians, in an intentional act of racial humiliation. There is hardly the dimmest cultural memory that during the series of massive strikes after WWI in the Pacific Northwest, the equivalent of the Jarrow March in England, the working people of Seattle proudly boasted of the United States as "forty-seven states and the Soviet republic of Washington." Like so much else in America, the past is irrelevant, except as edifying fiction.
America also shares far more with China: an ability not to see what is contrary to the national-line, as it were. In China, no one was aware of the famine which killed 45 million people during the Great Leap Forward. Even as family members died of starvation, the devastation was perceived as only local, random, and temporary. Levy's visits to the string of failed Northern cities from Buffalo through Cleveland and on to Detroit leave his European sensibilities reeling. He is incredulous, not because of some temporary economic downturn but because these cities were allowed to dramatically de-populate as a matter of national trade policy over a period of half a century. This destruction was certainly less intense but no less systematic than the Chinese experience, and certainly, as in China, brought about by deliberate government policies. Compared to such wilful ignorance, the necessity to give equal credence in guided tours of the Grand Canyon to both instantaneous creationism and erosion over millennia is trivial.
As many other cultural commentators, including Alexis de Tocqueville and Simon Weil have noted (see GR review of Weil's On the Abolition of All Political Parties), the political party structure of the United States is non-ideological. There is no political 'home' for socialist (much less Marxist) or capitalist (say liberal economic) theories. Party debates are notably un-intellectual and are dominated by 'personalities'. There are conservatives and liberals scattered through both parties. Consequently, both major parties are inherently "contentless" and their cut and paste policies are frequently internally inconsistent - liberal gun laws, say, with highly conservative views on marriage, and draconian immigration policies coupled with free trade commitments - so that rational political debate is almost impossible.
A little discussed consequence of the non-ideological character of American politics is the great difficulty it takes to establish the political presence of an issue if there is no existing conflict between the parties. New issues, even on relatively minor topics, disturb the artificial equilibrium of established party politics (so do old issues that have passed their sell-by dates whose change or removal would be disruptive to party power, like Cuban policy). Without an ideological conduit to facilitate a rationale for such a new issue and its integration into a 'platform', it may be left orphaned, much like the issues of Native American rights, election district gerrymandering, Black voter suppression, a racially biased police and judiciary, globalisation, to name just a few. Or, indeed, as Levy notes explicitly, a continuous Mexican border fence, which wasn't possible to get on either party's agenda in 2004, yet appeared at least reasonable to consider given the level of manpower used to police the border at the time. Any 'end-run' with these issues outside the party machines is both difficult and dangerous, in fact difficult precisely because it is dangerous to party power structures.
Inauthenticity may be the mark of at least many politicians in all democratic countries. However, in his interview with the poet and writer Jim Harrison in the rather remote Montana town of Livingstone, Levy gets some prescient criticism that would have shocked most contemporary Americans. "The problem with America," Harrison says, "is Yale...Both Bush and Kerry are Yale... This represents the triumph of the greedy pigs over the progressives, that's the absolute truth of America." Harrison's take in other words: having the best and the brightest running the country means that the country is run for the best and the brightest. This is echoed in a number of venues around the country but undoubtedly sounded vaguely anti-democratic and unpatriotic at the time.
Politically as well as aesthetically, therefore, American popular culture represents a triumph of Kitsch, an ever forming and reforming, amoebic pastiche of sentimentality, nostalgic myth, and a pinch of irony. This latter ensuring that no one takes anything all too seriously, a variant on the American politicians' plausible deniability. The People may rule but that doesn’t mean that they have to take responsibility. Political kitsch is perhaps best summarised by the recent introduction of the concept of ‘alternative facts’ by the White House Press Secretary. Such a concept may provoke guffaws among the educated classes but it is implicitly understood by the bulk of the electorate.
Political attitudes generally are highly unstable - as in fashion, or the latest music, and hip vocabulary - even when party loyalties persist (they are also lied about as a matter of course, especially to pollsters, the tongue rarely leaving the cheek). The parties have an inherent tendency to avoid emerging political interests. So the political system in its entirety, run by the best educated and almost solely politically experienced segment of the population, can maintain its mythical claim to democratic integrity. To question the legitimacy of this ‘elite’ verges on the traitorous and could never find its way into mainstream discourse.
Until of course a demagogue like the forty-fifth president comes along and blows the gaff. It was the astronomer, Vera Rubin, who discovered the existence of dark matter in the 1970's. She has never received any accolades for her pioneering work in cosmic physics. It is now estimated that dark matter constitutes by far the majority of the 'stuff' of the universe. Neither did Levy get a prize for his discoveries in 2004 of what also turned out to be the majority of electoral stuff in American politics. Neither in physics, nor in political science do we know what this stuff is. But knowledge of its existence has changed the world we live in decisively. Who can deny that it is definitely more vertiginous?
Recent elections in the United States and Britain produced results that were surprising to the pundits, manna to publishers and embarrassing for the pollsters. Unexpected forces which are still not entirely understood were at work in the electorate. We know these forces exist only because they are necessary to understand what is otherwise unexplainable.
This political situation is identical to the current scientific state of cosmology, the study of the universe. In cosmology, the way the universe behaves is unexplainable without the existence of forces and substances that we have never directly experienced, or even named. The scientific designations for these are the intentionally unilluminating terms of dark energy and dark matter.
Scientists know dark energy and dark matter exist, even if they don't know anything more about them, because when they look at astronomical history, the light from distant stars which could be millions of years old, it isn't what they expect it to be. Or rather, in this ancient light are clues about what is really going on now that we find difficult to grasp.
Reading Bernard-Henri Levy's American Vertigo is much like reading the astronomers analysis of the light from distant stars. Written in 2004, it is a well-observed and equally well-written snapshot of the now-distant cultural and political star that was the United States. Levy's unique astuteness, his European sensitivities, and his access to many of the 'players' - the Clintons, Obama, the Bushes, Jesse Jackson, and Michael Moore, among many others, but not Trump - across the American spectrum of politics, race, the arts, and economics interests can be appreciated perhaps only now in the light of current political events. Levy spotted the dark matter in America before many others were aware it even existed.
Levy's overarching cultural conclusion about America in 2004 is not very different from that of Umberto Eco's 1990 Travels in Hyper Reality. To put that conclusion briefly, if also bluntly, America is a fake country. It prefers imitation to authenticity. It reveres counterfeit as if it were real. It wants the New to only simulate the Old and then only to give an impression of continuity. Americans may not like the description but Levy gives plentiful evidence to support it.
Levy's visits to places like Cooperstown in New York State, the entirely fictional home of baseball, and the mid-Western faux-pioneer Amana communities, now mere tourist stage sets, are the equivalent of Eco's Disneyland and imitation Pieta exhibitions. The artificiality of these places is precisely why they are preferred. America is a country founded as a non-existent ideal. The ideal is what holds the place together no matter how Reality tries to divide it. These places of American icons are literally fake, but nonetheless more expressive of and closer to the ideal than any original or non-fiction narrative could possibly be.
This preference for the new/old roots, the purpose-built history, the fictional reality, the re-created simulacrum extends well beyond domestic tourism. The American capacity for forgetting its inconvenient past, for example, is likely only exceeded by the Chinese. The Mount Rushmore presidential monument, made famous worldwide by Alfred Hitchcock's film North by Northwest, was built by a member of the Ku Klux Klan, on a site sacred to the local Indians, in an intentional act of racial humiliation. There is hardly the dimmest cultural memory that during the series of massive strikes after WWI in the Pacific Northwest, the equivalent of the Jarrow March in England, the working people of Seattle proudly boasted of the United States as "forty-seven states and the Soviet republic of Washington." Like so much else in America, the past is irrelevant, except as edifying fiction.
America also shares far more with China: an ability not to see what is contrary to the national-line, as it were. In China, no one was aware of the famine which killed 45 million people during the Great Leap Forward. Even as family members died of starvation, the devastation was perceived as only local, random, and temporary. Levy's visits to the string of failed Northern cities from Buffalo through Cleveland and on to Detroit leave his European sensibilities reeling. He is incredulous, not because of some temporary economic downturn but because these cities were allowed to dramatically de-populate as a matter of national trade policy over a period of half a century. This destruction was certainly less intense but no less systematic than the Chinese experience, and certainly, as in China, brought about by deliberate government policies. Compared to such wilful ignorance, the necessity to give equal credence in guided tours of the Grand Canyon to both instantaneous creationism and erosion over millennia is trivial.
As many other cultural commentators, including Alexis de Tocqueville and Simon Weil have noted (see GR review of Weil's On the Abolition of All Political Parties), the political party structure of the United States is non-ideological. There is no political 'home' for socialist (much less Marxist) or capitalist (say liberal economic) theories. Party debates are notably un-intellectual and are dominated by 'personalities'. There are conservatives and liberals scattered through both parties. Consequently, both major parties are inherently "contentless" and their cut and paste policies are frequently internally inconsistent - liberal gun laws, say, with highly conservative views on marriage, and draconian immigration policies coupled with free trade commitments - so that rational political debate is almost impossible.
A little discussed consequence of the non-ideological character of American politics is the great difficulty it takes to establish the political presence of an issue if there is no existing conflict between the parties. New issues, even on relatively minor topics, disturb the artificial equilibrium of established party politics (so do old issues that have passed their sell-by dates whose change or removal would be disruptive to party power, like Cuban policy). Without an ideological conduit to facilitate a rationale for such a new issue and its integration into a 'platform', it may be left orphaned, much like the issues of Native American rights, election district gerrymandering, Black voter suppression, a racially biased police and judiciary, globalisation, to name just a few. Or, indeed, as Levy notes explicitly, a continuous Mexican border fence, which wasn't possible to get on either party's agenda in 2004, yet appeared at least reasonable to consider given the level of manpower used to police the border at the time. Any 'end-run' with these issues outside the party machines is both difficult and dangerous, in fact difficult precisely because it is dangerous to party power structures.
Inauthenticity may be the mark of at least many politicians in all democratic countries. However, in his interview with the poet and writer Jim Harrison in the rather remote Montana town of Livingstone, Levy gets some prescient criticism that would have shocked most contemporary Americans. "The problem with America," Harrison says, "is Yale...Both Bush and Kerry are Yale... This represents the triumph of the greedy pigs over the progressives, that's the absolute truth of America." Harrison's take in other words: having the best and the brightest running the country means that the country is run for the best and the brightest. This is echoed in a number of venues around the country but undoubtedly sounded vaguely anti-democratic and unpatriotic at the time.
Politically as well as aesthetically, therefore, American popular culture represents a triumph of Kitsch, an ever forming and reforming, amoebic pastiche of sentimentality, nostalgic myth, and a pinch of irony. This latter ensuring that no one takes anything all too seriously, a variant on the American politicians' plausible deniability. The People may rule but that doesn’t mean that they have to take responsibility. Political kitsch is perhaps best summarised by the recent introduction of the concept of ‘alternative facts’ by the White House Press Secretary. Such a concept may provoke guffaws among the educated classes but it is implicitly understood by the bulk of the electorate.
Political attitudes generally are highly unstable - as in fashion, or the latest music, and hip vocabulary - even when party loyalties persist (they are also lied about as a matter of course, especially to pollsters, the tongue rarely leaving the cheek). The parties have an inherent tendency to avoid emerging political interests. So the political system in its entirety, run by the best educated and almost solely politically experienced segment of the population, can maintain its mythical claim to democratic integrity. To question the legitimacy of this ‘elite’ verges on the traitorous and could never find its way into mainstream discourse.
Until of course a demagogue like the forty-fifth president comes along and blows the gaff. It was the astronomer, Vera Rubin, who discovered the existence of dark matter in the 1970's. She has never received any accolades for her pioneering work in cosmic physics. It is now estimated that dark matter constitutes by far the majority of the 'stuff' of the universe. Neither did Levy get a prize for his discoveries in 2004 of what also turned out to be the majority of electoral stuff in American politics. Neither in physics, nor in political science do we know what this stuff is. But knowledge of its existence has changed the world we live in decisively. Who can deny that it is definitely more vertiginous?
December 8, 2009
French intellectual. Now there's a label bound to raise hackles or elicit sneers in America these days, especially when a French intellectual is writing about his tour of the United States. But Bernard-Henri Lévy didn't come to bury us – or to praise us, for that matter. He came because the Atlantic Monthly invited him to travel around the country during the election year of 2004 and to reflect on what he saw, in the manner of Alexis de Tocqueville's 1835 classic "Democracy in America."
Lévy is a celebrity in France, where he's so famous that he's often referred to by his initials: BHL. He's an activist who founded organizations to combat racism in France and hunger in the Third World, a philosopher who attacked the Marxism that was the dominant strain in French thought, and a journalist whose book "Who Killed Daniel Pearl?" was the subject of both praise and controversy in the United States. He's also well-known for his attacks on what he calls "the thick ignorance of European anti-Americanism." Lévy's own stance is "anti-anti-American," but those two negatives don't neatly add up to a positive.
The first two-thirds of "American Vertigo" is a travelogue that moves east to west and back again, zigzagging along the way, inspired not only by Tocqueville but also by Jack Kerouac and "those road movies that … have shaped my imagination of America." As an atheist, he feels duty-bound to try to understand American religiosity, to comprehend "the mystery of a people who are at once the most materialistic and the most spiritual," so he visits churches. Though disturbed by the triumphalism of the Christian right, he concludes that America is what it has always been, a secular nation. Like Tocqueville, whose original mission was to study the American prison system, he tours prisons – including Rikers Island, Angola and Guantánamo – and is distressed by what he finds there, and by what he sees as its implications for the American future.
He chats with Americans of all sorts: John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama; delegates to the Republican National Convention; neoconservatives Richard Perle, Bill Kristol and Francis Fukuyama; tycoons Henry Kravis, Barry Diller and George Soros; writers Jim Harrison, James Ellroy and Norman Mailer; actors Sharon Stone, Warren Beatty and Woody Allen; American Indian activist Russell Means; Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center; a Mexican-American officer in the Border Patrol; students in a class on Tocqueville at the University of Texas at Austin; cadets at the Air Force Academy; Cuban exiles in Miami; a Vegas lap-dancer; a dealer at a Fort Worth gun show; a female inmate on death row in Nevada.
He finds only a "little cluster of cities" in the United States where he "could spend three weeks or more": Seattle, Boston, Savannah and New Orleans. But his visit to the last was made before Katrina, which provokes him to a postscript on what that disaster revealed about contemporary America's failures: the continuing problems of poverty, racism and violence, and "the methodical weakening of government that the neoconservatives have sought for twenty years, and which has now, perhaps, after Katrina, run into its first check."
All of these failings are dealt with at length in the book's concluding third, in which Lévy reveals that whatever reservations he has about the actuality of America – and he has plenty, especially in a time of a war he opposes and a president he regards as "something of a child," albeit "a cunning child" – he retains an admiration for the ideals of America. He warns against "those jihadists about whom you can't say enough times that they aim to destroy what is best about the United States: freedom of speech and thought, equality, women's rights, democracy." But he also asserts that "no large modern nation today is as uncertain as this one, less sure of what it is becoming, less confident of the very values, that is to say, the myths, that founded it." Hence the "vertigo" of the book's title, the symptoms of which include Americans' sentimental and sometimes indiscriminate veneration of their country's past; the worship of bigness; the "Balkanization" of the country's social, ethnic and cultural groups, which threatens an "implosion of national identity"; and the failure to confront such problems as poverty, the decay of cities and "the sorry state of the American health-care system."
The opportunity to see ourselves as others see us is always welcome, but the premise of updating Tocqueville is tired, and it presents Lévy with too large a task, as he admits when he describes America as "mind-boggling" and "multifarious." The tour of the country is like a slide show that needed a good edit – sometimes revealing, sometimes entertaining, sometimes banal. The visits with writers and politicians and intellectuals, which have the potential of stimulating dialogue, are frustratingly brief and often superficial. And Lévy's meandering prose, with its sentences that trail on forever, frequently suggests someone trying out ideas to see if they stick. When he focuses on particulars, whether he's writing about a city or a person or a social problem, he can be provocative. But when he draws back for a take on the big picture, Lévy doesn't do much more than reiterate the liberal consensus.
"American Vertigo" is a swamp of a book: trackless and confusing and often squishy where you expect it to be solid. But as with any swamp, if you're careful where you step and attentive to the surroundings, you may find things in it that are startling and useful.
Lévy is a celebrity in France, where he's so famous that he's often referred to by his initials: BHL. He's an activist who founded organizations to combat racism in France and hunger in the Third World, a philosopher who attacked the Marxism that was the dominant strain in French thought, and a journalist whose book "Who Killed Daniel Pearl?" was the subject of both praise and controversy in the United States. He's also well-known for his attacks on what he calls "the thick ignorance of European anti-Americanism." Lévy's own stance is "anti-anti-American," but those two negatives don't neatly add up to a positive.
The first two-thirds of "American Vertigo" is a travelogue that moves east to west and back again, zigzagging along the way, inspired not only by Tocqueville but also by Jack Kerouac and "those road movies that … have shaped my imagination of America." As an atheist, he feels duty-bound to try to understand American religiosity, to comprehend "the mystery of a people who are at once the most materialistic and the most spiritual," so he visits churches. Though disturbed by the triumphalism of the Christian right, he concludes that America is what it has always been, a secular nation. Like Tocqueville, whose original mission was to study the American prison system, he tours prisons – including Rikers Island, Angola and Guantánamo – and is distressed by what he finds there, and by what he sees as its implications for the American future.
He chats with Americans of all sorts: John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama; delegates to the Republican National Convention; neoconservatives Richard Perle, Bill Kristol and Francis Fukuyama; tycoons Henry Kravis, Barry Diller and George Soros; writers Jim Harrison, James Ellroy and Norman Mailer; actors Sharon Stone, Warren Beatty and Woody Allen; American Indian activist Russell Means; Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center; a Mexican-American officer in the Border Patrol; students in a class on Tocqueville at the University of Texas at Austin; cadets at the Air Force Academy; Cuban exiles in Miami; a Vegas lap-dancer; a dealer at a Fort Worth gun show; a female inmate on death row in Nevada.
He finds only a "little cluster of cities" in the United States where he "could spend three weeks or more": Seattle, Boston, Savannah and New Orleans. But his visit to the last was made before Katrina, which provokes him to a postscript on what that disaster revealed about contemporary America's failures: the continuing problems of poverty, racism and violence, and "the methodical weakening of government that the neoconservatives have sought for twenty years, and which has now, perhaps, after Katrina, run into its first check."
All of these failings are dealt with at length in the book's concluding third, in which Lévy reveals that whatever reservations he has about the actuality of America – and he has plenty, especially in a time of a war he opposes and a president he regards as "something of a child," albeit "a cunning child" – he retains an admiration for the ideals of America. He warns against "those jihadists about whom you can't say enough times that they aim to destroy what is best about the United States: freedom of speech and thought, equality, women's rights, democracy." But he also asserts that "no large modern nation today is as uncertain as this one, less sure of what it is becoming, less confident of the very values, that is to say, the myths, that founded it." Hence the "vertigo" of the book's title, the symptoms of which include Americans' sentimental and sometimes indiscriminate veneration of their country's past; the worship of bigness; the "Balkanization" of the country's social, ethnic and cultural groups, which threatens an "implosion of national identity"; and the failure to confront such problems as poverty, the decay of cities and "the sorry state of the American health-care system."
The opportunity to see ourselves as others see us is always welcome, but the premise of updating Tocqueville is tired, and it presents Lévy with too large a task, as he admits when he describes America as "mind-boggling" and "multifarious." The tour of the country is like a slide show that needed a good edit – sometimes revealing, sometimes entertaining, sometimes banal. The visits with writers and politicians and intellectuals, which have the potential of stimulating dialogue, are frustratingly brief and often superficial. And Lévy's meandering prose, with its sentences that trail on forever, frequently suggests someone trying out ideas to see if they stick. When he focuses on particulars, whether he's writing about a city or a person or a social problem, he can be provocative. But when he draws back for a take on the big picture, Lévy doesn't do much more than reiterate the liberal consensus.
"American Vertigo" is a swamp of a book: trackless and confusing and often squishy where you expect it to be solid. But as with any swamp, if you're careful where you step and attentive to the surroundings, you may find things in it that are startling and useful.
September 27, 2009
Fresh off my interest in Even Wright’s Hella Nation and Louis Theroux’s The Call of the Weird, I’m back at it again, following alongside two other intrepid narrative journalist, hitting the pavement and dirt roads of America in search of the weird and idiosyncratic in this great land of ours. From sea to shining sea, quite literally.
But while Wright and Theroux spent the pages of their respective books delivering detailed insights into the inner minds of the folks from the various extremes of fringe society, Levy – a Frenchman -- is much more egalitarian in the way he captures a much wider array of Americans from all walks of life; including many from the mainstream.
One of Levy’s earliest words of praise happens when he arrives in Seattle after already seeing much of the East, South, and Midwest. His sings accolades about our fair city when he unflinchingly proclaims,
If I had to choose an American city to live in – if I had to pick a place, and only one, where I had the feeling in America of rediscovering my lost bearings – it would be Seattle. But all in all…If I had to choose one moment in this discovery – if I had to say at what instant everything was settled and, in the blink of an eye, the genius of the place was revealed to me – it would be the moment when, arriving from Spokane on Highway 90 [an Interstate, actually:], having stopped at a motel in Moses Lake for a late-afternoon sandwich, having crossed the orchards of Wenatchee, having passed Mercer Island and then the Homer M. Hadley Bridge, I saw, floating like a torch between two motionless clouds, in a dark-pick sky entirely new to me, the tip of a skyscraper, the Space Needle, already completely lit up, which in my imagination suddenly condensed everything that America has always made me dream of: poetry and modernity, precariousness and technical challenge, lightness of form meshed with a Babel syndrome, city lights, the haunting quality of darkness, tall trees of steel.
Truer words of my city have never been written until this.
Levy has other brilliant moments. Like his fascinating interview with true crime novelist James Ellroy, with his gruesome interest in the most depraved crimes of passion. And also Levy’s rather lengthy reflection at book’s end (a tad too much intellectual posturing if you ask me ) in which he reminds us of our country’s founding fathers and their clear, but oft-ignored (or is that purposely forgotten?) edict separating church from state. That is, freedom of religion goes hand-in-hand with freedom from religion.
Despite the frequent and popularly-held Gallic distaste for all things America and American in recent years, it is certainly refreshing to find a Frenchman who loves this wonderfully diverse country of ours. To him, I raise a glass of the finest Burgundian red. A votre santé, mon ami!
But while Wright and Theroux spent the pages of their respective books delivering detailed insights into the inner minds of the folks from the various extremes of fringe society, Levy – a Frenchman -- is much more egalitarian in the way he captures a much wider array of Americans from all walks of life; including many from the mainstream.
One of Levy’s earliest words of praise happens when he arrives in Seattle after already seeing much of the East, South, and Midwest. His sings accolades about our fair city when he unflinchingly proclaims,
If I had to choose an American city to live in – if I had to pick a place, and only one, where I had the feeling in America of rediscovering my lost bearings – it would be Seattle. But all in all…If I had to choose one moment in this discovery – if I had to say at what instant everything was settled and, in the blink of an eye, the genius of the place was revealed to me – it would be the moment when, arriving from Spokane on Highway 90 [an Interstate, actually:], having stopped at a motel in Moses Lake for a late-afternoon sandwich, having crossed the orchards of Wenatchee, having passed Mercer Island and then the Homer M. Hadley Bridge, I saw, floating like a torch between two motionless clouds, in a dark-pick sky entirely new to me, the tip of a skyscraper, the Space Needle, already completely lit up, which in my imagination suddenly condensed everything that America has always made me dream of: poetry and modernity, precariousness and technical challenge, lightness of form meshed with a Babel syndrome, city lights, the haunting quality of darkness, tall trees of steel.
Truer words of my city have never been written until this.
Levy has other brilliant moments. Like his fascinating interview with true crime novelist James Ellroy, with his gruesome interest in the most depraved crimes of passion. And also Levy’s rather lengthy reflection at book’s end (a tad too much intellectual posturing if you ask me ) in which he reminds us of our country’s founding fathers and their clear, but oft-ignored (or is that purposely forgotten?) edict separating church from state. That is, freedom of religion goes hand-in-hand with freedom from religion.
Despite the frequent and popularly-held Gallic distaste for all things America and American in recent years, it is certainly refreshing to find a Frenchman who loves this wonderfully diverse country of ours. To him, I raise a glass of the finest Burgundian red. A votre santé, mon ami!
March 13, 2008
I saw this guy on The daily show and then saw the book in the library. Very different but interesting. This Frenchman spends a year traveling around the USA to re-create the travels and observations of Tocqueville. Tocqueville is still a vague concept and I have never read his writings. The book is a series of columns – two to three pages each. So are very good and bring a new perspective on the USA that only an outsider can bring. However, the author has their own biases. He does the US as a beacon of hope and a functioning democracy. In many ways it is refereshing to hear an outside talk of the items that are good in the USA in our political process (how can the USA be a better political process than France?). Some good observations – The whole ‘big looser’ television show and the idea of obese Americans – his point that the weight lose industry is just as big as the big snack and fast food companies.
Border Fencing – The issue is not expense. The issue is really perception. Big fences like the Iron curtain.
The whole intelligent design theory was created by Jonathan Wells (PHDs from Berkley and Yale) but with the Moonies developed intelligent design – same liberal argument that journalist give each side equal time even if one has 10 scientists and the other thousands.
Levy attended a workshop for the democrats. He was disappointed as all the talk was fundraising and not issues. “…I yearned for one voice, just one, to articulate the three or four major issues that, give the current political agenda. A defense of the Enlightenment against the creationist offensive. … A new New Deal for the poorest of the poor. An uncompromising defense of human rights and a rejection of the ‘exceptional” status of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.
He also repeats many times about the American way to set up a museum over nothing and the continue over acceptance of fake items (fake tits, fake myths, fake Venice in Vegas) over the real things in life.
Border Fencing – The issue is not expense. The issue is really perception. Big fences like the Iron curtain.
The whole intelligent design theory was created by Jonathan Wells (PHDs from Berkley and Yale) but with the Moonies developed intelligent design – same liberal argument that journalist give each side equal time even if one has 10 scientists and the other thousands.
Levy attended a workshop for the democrats. He was disappointed as all the talk was fundraising and not issues. “…I yearned for one voice, just one, to articulate the three or four major issues that, give the current political agenda. A defense of the Enlightenment against the creationist offensive. … A new New Deal for the poorest of the poor. An uncompromising defense of human rights and a rejection of the ‘exceptional” status of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.
He also repeats many times about the American way to set up a museum over nothing and the continue over acceptance of fake items (fake tits, fake myths, fake Venice in Vegas) over the real things in life.
June 4, 2011
I love the way this author pronounces his name. Bernard Henri Levy. Say it with a french accent now. LOVE IT! He was on a travel podcast I listen to a few months ago and his accent made me swoon. And so smart! I am not a fan of the french, but agh, I love it when it's good. Plus jewish, always a plus.
Anyhoodle. What was this book about? Dude driving around America, seeing what it's all about in the 21stC, following an old French philosopher's trail. Kind of interesting. More political then I was expecting, but politics I agree with, so it wasn't too much of a disappointment. A very recent read, takes place during the 2004 election. A lot of "I remember where I was when..."was going on in my head, which I love!
The last 100 pages went on for a while, reflection. Blah. There was an update on the Naw'leans part, which I appareciated. Philosophy always goes over my head too much and this book had a bit much, but after the crap I have been reading lately, this book was kind of nice.
Grade: C
Anyhoodle. What was this book about? Dude driving around America, seeing what it's all about in the 21stC, following an old French philosopher's trail. Kind of interesting. More political then I was expecting, but politics I agree with, so it wasn't too much of a disappointment. A very recent read, takes place during the 2004 election. A lot of "I remember where I was when..."was going on in my head, which I love!
The last 100 pages went on for a while, reflection. Blah. There was an update on the Naw'leans part, which I appareciated. Philosophy always goes over my head too much and this book had a bit much, but after the crap I have been reading lately, this book was kind of nice.
Grade: C
February 23, 2014
I'm always interested in both road trip books, and books about how others see us (America). American Vertigo gives us a lot of food for thought if we let it, even though I'm not convinced Mr. Levy always puts the correct interpretation on what he's seen.
Most of the book is a series of short sketches, each describing something the author encountered during his American tour in 2004.
The last section, Reflections, is a summing up of the author's experience. I could barely get through this section. I'm not familiar with many of the dozens and dozens (and dozens) of philosophers, intellectuals, or political analysts referenced in this section. With the exception of the postscript about Hurricane Katrina, my eyes glazed over during this section and it was a chore for me to read.
Lots of food for thought. Not much fun.
Most of the book is a series of short sketches, each describing something the author encountered during his American tour in 2004.
The last section, Reflections, is a summing up of the author's experience. I could barely get through this section. I'm not familiar with many of the dozens and dozens (and dozens) of philosophers, intellectuals, or political analysts referenced in this section. With the exception of the postscript about Hurricane Katrina, my eyes glazed over during this section and it was a chore for me to read.
Lots of food for thought. Not much fun.
August 9, 2015
Levy's book is a travel narrative following the footsteps of another famous French interpreter of America - Alexis de Tocqueville.
I liked the topic (having recently read a biography of de Tocqueville), and have also enjoyed some travel writing. But ultimately I couldn't motivate myself to complete the book.
Levy separates the travel narrative from a commentary section. He also takes a naïve outsider perspective despite probably having lots of awareness of many of the things he is encountering -- he lives in an era of modern media and internet. As a result the book felt rather contrived. And in the end his observation section wasn't engaging enough to keep me reading to the commentary section.
Not recommended, but perhaps I missed the point.
I liked the topic (having recently read a biography of de Tocqueville), and have also enjoyed some travel writing. But ultimately I couldn't motivate myself to complete the book.
Levy separates the travel narrative from a commentary section. He also takes a naïve outsider perspective despite probably having lots of awareness of many of the things he is encountering -- he lives in an era of modern media and internet. As a result the book felt rather contrived. And in the end his observation section wasn't engaging enough to keep me reading to the commentary section.
Not recommended, but perhaps I missed the point.
February 6, 2013
Edifying, occasionally rambling account of a modern-day Ameriphile French author-philosopher re-enacting Alexis de Tocqueville's visit to America in the 19th Century. A mite dated, as it's set during the terrorism-centric Bush years, but nonetheless a fascinating look at America from a European outsider.
November 18, 2009
Lot's of poignant run-on sentences about Americanness, but I ultimately lost patience.
February 9, 2017
With no further blithering on my part, here are some quotes which I found notable. Doesn’t mean I agree with them, only that I found them notable…
On the American view of nature
For a European, one of the most enigmatic characteristics of the American ethos is its relationship with nature.
The Floridians don’t tame nature; they push it back. Instead of subjugating it, they drive it away. Florida is vast, and space is of so much less importance than in Europe, that there’s room for both city and nature.
There are the remains of a pioneering spirit that for centuries has accommodated itself to a sense of temporary habitat, perched, as it were, on the side of the road, pressing forward with the frontier, and by definition precarious.
But there is also, anchored deep in the mentality of the country, a slightly supernatural, almost superstitious relationship to what Americans, even the secular ones, are prone to call Mother Nature. As if omnipotence found its limits there, reached its rational confines.
No pity for our enemies, the American of the twenty-first century seems to be saying; no mercy for terrorist, certainly, or even for opponents of the country’s economic supremacy. But let Nature take her best shot.
On a Colorado ghost town and ‘rooted-ness’
Poetry of these ruins. Beauty of these stranded wrecks from the past.
And beauty, especially, of this people so faintly attached to their roots – beauty, once again, of the prodigious freedom with which they treat their places.
America is the place both of the most extreme uprooting and of the most single-minded territoriality; that it’s the one country in the world where you move, change places, change your home most often, and the one where, at the same time, you remain the most strongly attached to your point of origin and childhood.
On Guantánamo
There are two possibilities. Either we believe that America is at war – in which case these detainees must benefit from prisoner-of-war status and from the protections accorded by the Geneva Convention. Or we subscribe to the End of History, to police treatment – and then all the rights normally granted to prisoners by common law need to be recognized. But this intermediate condition, the fact that Guantánamo’s prisoners, having neither the rights of combatants nor the rights of criminals, finally have no rights at all … I have not heard it denounced clearly enough.
On ‘American Empire’
One is confronted, then, with the extreme unconventionality of a model that gathers its sturdiness both from the conviction among the dominated – including China and India – that it’s in the U.S. banks, the U.S. financial system, and the dollar that the best return on their assets lies, and from the other, linked conviction that the rest of the world must continue to send its elite, its researchers, its future executives, its businessmen, to be trained, until further notice, in American universities, scientific institutions, and companies; in short, this paradoxical system, unique in history and, in reality, extraordinarily fragile, that makes America’s strength dependant on the strength of the confidence that is daily invested in it.
On privatization of the prison system, and the death penalty.
“For me, there’s a before and an after; before I was living like a dog, no one cared about me, but the advantage was that they no longer thought about executing me; today the food is better, the cell is cleaner, but I think they’re going to come looking for me.”
The negative side: the abandonment, when the state resigns and the law of profit reigns, of any kind of reform project. These outcast men – or in this case, women – whom the body politic, and thus the community of citizens, may forget to punish but with whom, at the same time, they have utterly lost contact. This is the height of abandonment.
On the Amish, from Iowa incidentally, not where I come from
The real and final pioneers. The only ones who haven’t given in, haven’t summed up their religion as the “In God We Trust” of banknotes.
The silent witnesses (truly silent, since, unlike the Indians or the blacks, they don’t say anything, don’t demand anything, and, above all, don’t reproach others for anything) – the silent witnesses, then, to the values that were those of America but on which America has turned its back since it sold itself to the religion of commodity.
America’s living bad conscience but, once again, silent.
Just here. We don’t criticize anything. But we are Amish. The profound, hidden, forgotten, denied truth of America is alive in us.
On creationism
There are two theories, and you have a choice: that’s the formula of an enlightened obscurantism; that’s the principle of revisionism with a liberal and tolerant face; that’s the act of faith of a dogmatism reconciled with freedom of speech and though; that’s the subtlest, most underhanded, most cunning, and at bottom most dangerous ideological maneuver of the American right in years.
On religious fundamentalism and secularism
What I reproach these churches for is their banality. It’s their propensity for turning God into some kind of “good guy,” friendly and reassuring, free of problems, watching over a sterile universe, bereft of anguish or negativity. It’s the idea of an insipid God, devoid of mystery, whose aims, although previously impenetrable, are now becoming as familiar as those of a near neighbor or friend.
What, after all, is secularism? It is not, as we know, agnosticism. Nor is it atheism. It is the command given to every state not to favor one faith over another.
France has fought for secularism. It has won its secularism after centuries of confusion and wars of religion. The Americans did not need to separate from anything. The wall of separation, to speak like Jefferson, was raised from the beginning. They were born secular, whereas we French had to become it.
… the compromise negotiated by the Founding Fathers is resisting the slings and arrows of time fairly well – never forget that the God mentioned in the Republican and Democratic conventions, the inaugural speeches, the houses of Congress, is a purposefully abstract God, almost deistic, and at core, consensual, recognized by all American faiths, Christian or not.
Signs of vertigo - Obesity
Another sign: obesity. Not the obesity of bodies, obviously
A social obesity. An economic, financial and political obesity. Obesity of cities. Obesity of malls, as in Minneapolis. Obesity of churches, as in Willow Creek. Obesity of parking lots that, in these malls and churches, sometimes grow so enormous that they generate a full-fledged miniature society, an entire way of life with its own rhythms, spaces, distraction and rest areas, cafeterias, shuttles, even – and this takes the cake – specially organized shuttles so that, once your car is parked, shoppers or worshippers can be loaded into yet another vehicle, thus saving them the trouble of walking.
The obesity of enterprises subject to the law of forced growth … “Greed is good; greed is right; greed works; greed clarifies.”
The bigger it is, the better it is, says America today. Large is beautiful, it repeats over and over in a kind of hysterical reversal of the 1960’s slogan.
A synopsis
…this magnificent, mad country, laboratory of the best and the worst, greedy and modest, at home in the world and self-possessed, puritan and outrageous, facing the future and yet obsessed with its memories…
On the American view of nature
For a European, one of the most enigmatic characteristics of the American ethos is its relationship with nature.
The Floridians don’t tame nature; they push it back. Instead of subjugating it, they drive it away. Florida is vast, and space is of so much less importance than in Europe, that there’s room for both city and nature.
There are the remains of a pioneering spirit that for centuries has accommodated itself to a sense of temporary habitat, perched, as it were, on the side of the road, pressing forward with the frontier, and by definition precarious.
But there is also, anchored deep in the mentality of the country, a slightly supernatural, almost superstitious relationship to what Americans, even the secular ones, are prone to call Mother Nature. As if omnipotence found its limits there, reached its rational confines.
No pity for our enemies, the American of the twenty-first century seems to be saying; no mercy for terrorist, certainly, or even for opponents of the country’s economic supremacy. But let Nature take her best shot.
On a Colorado ghost town and ‘rooted-ness’
Poetry of these ruins. Beauty of these stranded wrecks from the past.
And beauty, especially, of this people so faintly attached to their roots – beauty, once again, of the prodigious freedom with which they treat their places.
America is the place both of the most extreme uprooting and of the most single-minded territoriality; that it’s the one country in the world where you move, change places, change your home most often, and the one where, at the same time, you remain the most strongly attached to your point of origin and childhood.
On Guantánamo
There are two possibilities. Either we believe that America is at war – in which case these detainees must benefit from prisoner-of-war status and from the protections accorded by the Geneva Convention. Or we subscribe to the End of History, to police treatment – and then all the rights normally granted to prisoners by common law need to be recognized. But this intermediate condition, the fact that Guantánamo’s prisoners, having neither the rights of combatants nor the rights of criminals, finally have no rights at all … I have not heard it denounced clearly enough.
On ‘American Empire’
One is confronted, then, with the extreme unconventionality of a model that gathers its sturdiness both from the conviction among the dominated – including China and India – that it’s in the U.S. banks, the U.S. financial system, and the dollar that the best return on their assets lies, and from the other, linked conviction that the rest of the world must continue to send its elite, its researchers, its future executives, its businessmen, to be trained, until further notice, in American universities, scientific institutions, and companies; in short, this paradoxical system, unique in history and, in reality, extraordinarily fragile, that makes America’s strength dependant on the strength of the confidence that is daily invested in it.
On privatization of the prison system, and the death penalty.
“For me, there’s a before and an after; before I was living like a dog, no one cared about me, but the advantage was that they no longer thought about executing me; today the food is better, the cell is cleaner, but I think they’re going to come looking for me.”
The negative side: the abandonment, when the state resigns and the law of profit reigns, of any kind of reform project. These outcast men – or in this case, women – whom the body politic, and thus the community of citizens, may forget to punish but with whom, at the same time, they have utterly lost contact. This is the height of abandonment.
On the Amish, from Iowa incidentally, not where I come from
The real and final pioneers. The only ones who haven’t given in, haven’t summed up their religion as the “In God We Trust” of banknotes.
The silent witnesses (truly silent, since, unlike the Indians or the blacks, they don’t say anything, don’t demand anything, and, above all, don’t reproach others for anything) – the silent witnesses, then, to the values that were those of America but on which America has turned its back since it sold itself to the religion of commodity.
America’s living bad conscience but, once again, silent.
Just here. We don’t criticize anything. But we are Amish. The profound, hidden, forgotten, denied truth of America is alive in us.
On creationism
There are two theories, and you have a choice: that’s the formula of an enlightened obscurantism; that’s the principle of revisionism with a liberal and tolerant face; that’s the act of faith of a dogmatism reconciled with freedom of speech and though; that’s the subtlest, most underhanded, most cunning, and at bottom most dangerous ideological maneuver of the American right in years.
On religious fundamentalism and secularism
What I reproach these churches for is their banality. It’s their propensity for turning God into some kind of “good guy,” friendly and reassuring, free of problems, watching over a sterile universe, bereft of anguish or negativity. It’s the idea of an insipid God, devoid of mystery, whose aims, although previously impenetrable, are now becoming as familiar as those of a near neighbor or friend.
What, after all, is secularism? It is not, as we know, agnosticism. Nor is it atheism. It is the command given to every state not to favor one faith over another.
France has fought for secularism. It has won its secularism after centuries of confusion and wars of religion. The Americans did not need to separate from anything. The wall of separation, to speak like Jefferson, was raised from the beginning. They were born secular, whereas we French had to become it.
… the compromise negotiated by the Founding Fathers is resisting the slings and arrows of time fairly well – never forget that the God mentioned in the Republican and Democratic conventions, the inaugural speeches, the houses of Congress, is a purposefully abstract God, almost deistic, and at core, consensual, recognized by all American faiths, Christian or not.
Signs of vertigo - Obesity
Another sign: obesity. Not the obesity of bodies, obviously
A social obesity. An economic, financial and political obesity. Obesity of cities. Obesity of malls, as in Minneapolis. Obesity of churches, as in Willow Creek. Obesity of parking lots that, in these malls and churches, sometimes grow so enormous that they generate a full-fledged miniature society, an entire way of life with its own rhythms, spaces, distraction and rest areas, cafeterias, shuttles, even – and this takes the cake – specially organized shuttles so that, once your car is parked, shoppers or worshippers can be loaded into yet another vehicle, thus saving them the trouble of walking.
The obesity of enterprises subject to the law of forced growth … “Greed is good; greed is right; greed works; greed clarifies.”
The bigger it is, the better it is, says America today. Large is beautiful, it repeats over and over in a kind of hysterical reversal of the 1960’s slogan.
A synopsis
…this magnificent, mad country, laboratory of the best and the worst, greedy and modest, at home in the world and self-possessed, puritan and outrageous, facing the future and yet obsessed with its memories…
November 20, 2020
What possessed me to choose a French intellectual for summer reading? Now I have to go back and re-read Hobbes, Nietzsche, Spengler, Hegel and Wittgenstein and then read de Tocqueville, Chateaubriand, Fukiyama, Kierkegaard, the National Security Council and Samuel Huntington, and then I have to read Christopher Hitchens, Plato. Socrates, Machiavelli...you get the idea, not to mention you really need a understanding of European American political science and current events and I hardly know who Charlie Rose is. That said, interesting reading even if I only absorbed 20% of it.
March 18, 2023
That which separates America from every country that existed before it, is that its roots are not of blood and soil, but the Idea of a government forged in freedom, for the people and by the people, and it is also for that reason that America perpetually faces an identity crisis, with varying convulsions and seesawing. That is true of America now, 20 years ago, 82 years ago before WWII, at the Civil War certainly, and of course, at its very founding. Because of this identity crisis, Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French public intellectual (just a curious title, it must be said), finds America embroiled in a bit of vertigo, and anyone who visits it, like his compatriot before him, Alexis de Tocqueville, who traveled America between 1831 and 1832 (primarily to visit our prisons) and wrote about it in, Democracy in America, they, too, will have a sense of vertigo. Aptly then, BHL (as Lévy is referred to as and how I will henceforth refer to him) titled his 2006 book, American Vertigo: Traveling American in the Footsteps of Tocqueville.
As I insinuated, BHL, after traveling through America, could have written his reflections on America and that sense of an identity crisis causing vertigo, at any point in his intellectual life from the 1970s on, but he did so in the aftermath of 9/11, post-invasion of Iraq (an invasion he opposed, but he’s interestingly gentle on the neoconservatives), and just before Hurricane Katrina, quite the auspicious time in which to unravel the complexities of America’s identity. And certainly interesting as a Frenchman in particular, given the fissure between the U.S. and France at the time over the Iraq War. Francephobia had not been so salient since, I don’t know, early on with WWII? BHL also undertook his journey, it should be said, to get a sense of the real America, far from its anti-Americanism his countrymen favored and caricatured, and especially to ascertain, I think, if America, as it emerged into the 21st century, was indeed tantamount to Rome, but in its “fall” phase. If America in its decadence (most pointedly expressed in its abundant consumerism and materialism, and in the caricature, physically via increasing obesity rates) and apparent wanton imperialism with a war of adventure in Iraq, was a nation in decline, in its last throes, as it were.
Like Tocqueville before him, BHL does investigate a series of prisons, which I’m always skeptical of doing because obviously, if the administration at a prison, or the military at Guantanamo Bay, are allowing you to visit, you’re going to see the most sanitized version of the prison. What they want you to see, in other words. That said, BHL’s takeaway isn’t about the conditions of the prisons on the inside per se, but rather, that American society has taken our prisons and pushed them to the side of civilization, the most obvious example of this being Alcatraz, or more modern, Rikers Island, but all the same, “out of sight, out of mind” is the American motto when it comes to our penitentiary system. The same, incidentally, is true, BHL believes, of our view of nature and its “beasts.” Unlike European cities, BHL says that America is unique in that, say, the Everglades, are a stone’s throw from a city like Homestead, Florida. We keep nature preserved and close. The same, apparently, is true of our prisons.
The eve of the presidential election between incumbent George W. Bush and his Democratic challenger John Kerry might seem, now 19 years later, far removed from our time — what, with the so-called moral majority ascendant, the U.S. still reeling from 9/11 and its consequences, and a politics that still seems, nonetheless, “normal” as far as that goes — but aside from the overarching theme of American identity crisis and vertigo (particularly, in the eye’s of the left, how America could elect a buffoon like Bush, which I don’t need to paint the obvious parallels to 2016) I put forth, there’s the fact that America has always had an existent tension BHL evidences between its Puritanical, sexless roots, and its more sordid side, between an America seemingly awash in American flag and Americanism paraphernalia (not just a feature of a post-9/11 American consciousness, either, as we know today) and those wronged in the past pushing America to live up to its Ideals (African Americans, Native Americans, women, the LGBTQ community, etc.), and how America writ large ought to function, oscillating between a large welfare and social safety net state and a more limited government, with all sorts of contradictions in between. Many of the players BHL mentions in this book, are and were still relevant in our time and our own post-2016 autopsy: Hilary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Bill Kristol (who went from a dominant so-called neoconservative voice in the Bush years to a “conservative” outcast never-Trumper under the Trump years), and a rising star by the name of Barak (sic) Obama, who was just coming off of his “no red states or blue states” keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. BHL, it should be noted, planted his flag in the idea that Obama (who he called the “Black Clinton”) would represent the end of “identity-based ideologies” rather than the furnace for its most fervent manifestation his presidency ended up being.
Other minor figures of intrigue pop up in BHL’s travels and one-on-one meetings, such as Rod Dreher, the conservative columnist, who is treated as an oddity in this book, because he’s homeschooling his children and believes in scientific creationism (that’s perhaps the biggest break with now compared to then; we don’t quite have the same robust discussions about religion and religion in schools, for example, that we did then, albeit, the same impulse and fights over what to teach in school are still occurring, just about different material). He’s been an at times supporter of Trump, or at least his policies, and at times, distant with him.
The one that made me laugh the most was BHL waxing lovingly over Charlie Rose and his love in turn of his childhood home, Henderson, North Carolina. Rose, for a long time, was one of the most prominent American journalists and TV hosts, who interviewed scores of presidents and stars. In 2017, in the wake of the #MeToo movement, and allegations of sexual assault against Rose dating back to the 1990s, he lost his show, his job, and all of his prestige.
As an aside, perhaps the most interesting different (but not in kind) currant BHL mentions is baseball being the “civic religion” in his journey and observations to today, where obviously and clearly, football has become the “civic religion.” Similarly to how we enshrined baseball into our civic religion, BHL notes how important myth (even about baseball) is to our understanding of ourselves, our need to form a shared memory, even if one doesn’t and can’t possibly exist, and an outgrowth of this is the proliferation of museums, BHL notices, of big and small, valuable and seemingly tawdry, a symbol of our national hoarding of anything remotely passing for our pass (and that shared memory). The agitations, or aforementioned convulsions, to this attempt at shared memory is that different groups perceive America’s history differently and express as much, then when BHL was traveling (like to South Dakota and Mount Rushmore and his dialogues with Native Americans), and now, salient as ever, with things like the 1619 project.
Even BHL’s hypothesis that Bush winning reelection and defeating Kerry is like the “last death throes of the conservative majority” rings familiar to today’s ears. People have hypothesized the same with Trump, 12 years after the fact of Bush’s reelection. And less a last death throes of a conservative majority, Trump’s victory ushered in a different kind of “conservativism” entirely, an utter rejection of Bush’s stated form of “compassionate conservativism” and of neoconservative wars of adventure.
Finally, one more point worth engaging with from BHL is his dealing of Francis Fukuyama and his theory arising from, The End of History and the Last Man, that the collapse of the Berlin Wall essentially ushered in a post-history society, a “final form of government” where “nothing can challenge the capitalist, liberal order that is in the process of imposing itself today.” Of course, as we’ve seen, not just in the United States with Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, but the world over, citizens, demagogues, tyrants, and governments are certainly trying their ample best to reverse and tear down that “capitalist, liberal order” they blame for all the ills of modern society.
I found BHL’s book, for the most part (I hedge only that he’s a philosopher, so, it can be rather tedious to read at times), to be a fun journey through America. As I always like to preface, I’m not the patriotic type, and yet, I still find myself feeling some sort of pride and some sort of way when an “outsider” describes America and the best of our abstractions, our people, our cities, our way of life, and our history and what its meant (and continues to mean) for the world. BHL said there’s just something about America writers of his ilk have yearned to understand and investigate, and in the modern context, in a Jack Kerouac On the Road way. America, unlike anywhere else, invites such journeying and investigation.
It’s not likely that a political book about a particular political time in America would seem resonate 17 years after the fact, but BHL’s book, American Vertigo, finds salience to today’s America because history does indeed repeat and rhyme; we have the same fights and discussions and we’re still battling for our American identity, our shared American memory, and our sense of place in the world, and perhaps our duty to the world. In these ways, BHL believes America is actually better than its detractors give it credit for, but also not the harbinger of the “end of history” rather than the unfurling of something new (and old?) altogether. I think that’s a fair characterization of his concluding reflections at the end of the book.
As I insinuated, BHL, after traveling through America, could have written his reflections on America and that sense of an identity crisis causing vertigo, at any point in his intellectual life from the 1970s on, but he did so in the aftermath of 9/11, post-invasion of Iraq (an invasion he opposed, but he’s interestingly gentle on the neoconservatives), and just before Hurricane Katrina, quite the auspicious time in which to unravel the complexities of America’s identity. And certainly interesting as a Frenchman in particular, given the fissure between the U.S. and France at the time over the Iraq War. Francephobia had not been so salient since, I don’t know, early on with WWII? BHL also undertook his journey, it should be said, to get a sense of the real America, far from its anti-Americanism his countrymen favored and caricatured, and especially to ascertain, I think, if America, as it emerged into the 21st century, was indeed tantamount to Rome, but in its “fall” phase. If America in its decadence (most pointedly expressed in its abundant consumerism and materialism, and in the caricature, physically via increasing obesity rates) and apparent wanton imperialism with a war of adventure in Iraq, was a nation in decline, in its last throes, as it were.
Like Tocqueville before him, BHL does investigate a series of prisons, which I’m always skeptical of doing because obviously, if the administration at a prison, or the military at Guantanamo Bay, are allowing you to visit, you’re going to see the most sanitized version of the prison. What they want you to see, in other words. That said, BHL’s takeaway isn’t about the conditions of the prisons on the inside per se, but rather, that American society has taken our prisons and pushed them to the side of civilization, the most obvious example of this being Alcatraz, or more modern, Rikers Island, but all the same, “out of sight, out of mind” is the American motto when it comes to our penitentiary system. The same, incidentally, is true, BHL believes, of our view of nature and its “beasts.” Unlike European cities, BHL says that America is unique in that, say, the Everglades, are a stone’s throw from a city like Homestead, Florida. We keep nature preserved and close. The same, apparently, is true of our prisons.
The eve of the presidential election between incumbent George W. Bush and his Democratic challenger John Kerry might seem, now 19 years later, far removed from our time — what, with the so-called moral majority ascendant, the U.S. still reeling from 9/11 and its consequences, and a politics that still seems, nonetheless, “normal” as far as that goes — but aside from the overarching theme of American identity crisis and vertigo (particularly, in the eye’s of the left, how America could elect a buffoon like Bush, which I don’t need to paint the obvious parallels to 2016) I put forth, there’s the fact that America has always had an existent tension BHL evidences between its Puritanical, sexless roots, and its more sordid side, between an America seemingly awash in American flag and Americanism paraphernalia (not just a feature of a post-9/11 American consciousness, either, as we know today) and those wronged in the past pushing America to live up to its Ideals (African Americans, Native Americans, women, the LGBTQ community, etc.), and how America writ large ought to function, oscillating between a large welfare and social safety net state and a more limited government, with all sorts of contradictions in between. Many of the players BHL mentions in this book, are and were still relevant in our time and our own post-2016 autopsy: Hilary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Bill Kristol (who went from a dominant so-called neoconservative voice in the Bush years to a “conservative” outcast never-Trumper under the Trump years), and a rising star by the name of Barak (sic) Obama, who was just coming off of his “no red states or blue states” keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. BHL, it should be noted, planted his flag in the idea that Obama (who he called the “Black Clinton”) would represent the end of “identity-based ideologies” rather than the furnace for its most fervent manifestation his presidency ended up being.
Other minor figures of intrigue pop up in BHL’s travels and one-on-one meetings, such as Rod Dreher, the conservative columnist, who is treated as an oddity in this book, because he’s homeschooling his children and believes in scientific creationism (that’s perhaps the biggest break with now compared to then; we don’t quite have the same robust discussions about religion and religion in schools, for example, that we did then, albeit, the same impulse and fights over what to teach in school are still occurring, just about different material). He’s been an at times supporter of Trump, or at least his policies, and at times, distant with him.
The one that made me laugh the most was BHL waxing lovingly over Charlie Rose and his love in turn of his childhood home, Henderson, North Carolina. Rose, for a long time, was one of the most prominent American journalists and TV hosts, who interviewed scores of presidents and stars. In 2017, in the wake of the #MeToo movement, and allegations of sexual assault against Rose dating back to the 1990s, he lost his show, his job, and all of his prestige.
As an aside, perhaps the most interesting different (but not in kind) currant BHL mentions is baseball being the “civic religion” in his journey and observations to today, where obviously and clearly, football has become the “civic religion.” Similarly to how we enshrined baseball into our civic religion, BHL notes how important myth (even about baseball) is to our understanding of ourselves, our need to form a shared memory, even if one doesn’t and can’t possibly exist, and an outgrowth of this is the proliferation of museums, BHL notices, of big and small, valuable and seemingly tawdry, a symbol of our national hoarding of anything remotely passing for our pass (and that shared memory). The agitations, or aforementioned convulsions, to this attempt at shared memory is that different groups perceive America’s history differently and express as much, then when BHL was traveling (like to South Dakota and Mount Rushmore and his dialogues with Native Americans), and now, salient as ever, with things like the 1619 project.
Even BHL’s hypothesis that Bush winning reelection and defeating Kerry is like the “last death throes of the conservative majority” rings familiar to today’s ears. People have hypothesized the same with Trump, 12 years after the fact of Bush’s reelection. And less a last death throes of a conservative majority, Trump’s victory ushered in a different kind of “conservativism” entirely, an utter rejection of Bush’s stated form of “compassionate conservativism” and of neoconservative wars of adventure.
Finally, one more point worth engaging with from BHL is his dealing of Francis Fukuyama and his theory arising from, The End of History and the Last Man, that the collapse of the Berlin Wall essentially ushered in a post-history society, a “final form of government” where “nothing can challenge the capitalist, liberal order that is in the process of imposing itself today.” Of course, as we’ve seen, not just in the United States with Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, but the world over, citizens, demagogues, tyrants, and governments are certainly trying their ample best to reverse and tear down that “capitalist, liberal order” they blame for all the ills of modern society.
I found BHL’s book, for the most part (I hedge only that he’s a philosopher, so, it can be rather tedious to read at times), to be a fun journey through America. As I always like to preface, I’m not the patriotic type, and yet, I still find myself feeling some sort of pride and some sort of way when an “outsider” describes America and the best of our abstractions, our people, our cities, our way of life, and our history and what its meant (and continues to mean) for the world. BHL said there’s just something about America writers of his ilk have yearned to understand and investigate, and in the modern context, in a Jack Kerouac On the Road way. America, unlike anywhere else, invites such journeying and investigation.
It’s not likely that a political book about a particular political time in America would seem resonate 17 years after the fact, but BHL’s book, American Vertigo, finds salience to today’s America because history does indeed repeat and rhyme; we have the same fights and discussions and we’re still battling for our American identity, our shared American memory, and our sense of place in the world, and perhaps our duty to the world. In these ways, BHL believes America is actually better than its detractors give it credit for, but also not the harbinger of the “end of history” rather than the unfurling of something new (and old?) altogether. I think that’s a fair characterization of his concluding reflections at the end of the book.
July 6, 2020
Despite being written about a 2004 American tour, this book seems up to date except for the last section "Has America Gone Mad?". This is pretty funny considering the current atmosphere.
I made sure to read "What Does It Mean to Be an American" on July 4.
used library book sale
I made sure to read "What Does It Mean to Be an American" on July 4.
used library book sale
August 5, 2020
I have constantly run across people quoting Alexis de Tocqueville's DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA. It has been on my shelf for at least 10 years to read but it is fat and the print is small. However I decided this would be the summer. But it was fat and the print was small. So in the meantime I ordered a book called AMERICAN VERTIGO in which Bernard Henri Levy (a French writer and philosopher) in 2004-2005 came to the US to follow in Tocqueville's footsteps by touring the country, meeting people and trying to understand who and what America is. I believe the book is called AMERICAN VERTIGO because in the introduction Levy says that the "fragile equilibrium of the executive, legislative and judicial powers" had started to erode long before 9/11. It is mostly a driving trip across the country and he says "The endless intermeshing of roads that I sometimes feel, along with the railroad helped make the US, made them united, and at the same time, helped preserve the country's uncompromising and vigorous diversity."
Since it is the summer of 2020 and we are re-evaluating our history in response to those left out with the toppling of monuments, I will start with his comments on Mount Rushmore. The book is a lot of small chapters on different topics as he crosses the country. This chapter is called "Rushmore as a Myth". He says: "Borglum the designer of Rushmore was a member of the Ku Klux Klan and his first project was a memorial in Georgia to the glory of the Confederate heroes Lee, Davis and Jackson. He chose this site and his sponsors the South Dakota Historical Society could think of nothing better than to stick their memorial in this highly disputed area in the heart of what the Indian nation holds as most sacred. All of this is an outrage as well as a memorial. Do Americans know? Do they feel even obscurely, that their Founding Fathers are here also Profaning Fathers?"
Apparently Tocqueville came to the US to study prisons but went much further to evaluate and try to understand the citizens of America. So Levy feels that he must study prisons also and visits 5 prisons across the country as well as Guantanamo. Here is what he has to say on prisons: "Guantanamo--There are in this prison, characteristics, which remind me immediately of Riker's Island. Its policy of isolation and banishment, like that of Alcatraz. An indifference to human rights and to the rule of law, which perhaps is not unexpected from a country that, in Nevada, Texas and elsewhere, invented the legal and moral monstrosity that the idea of a private-enterprise prison represents. The absence of perspective and of horizon, the methodical state of uncertainty as to their fate in which the detainees are kept---this literally unlimited detention, which makes me think of the programmed despair of the prisoners at Angola. And then the multicultural comedy of caring for the spiritual needs of the prisoner even as he's being treated like a wild beast, there is something that must remind you of the hypocrisy of the Quaker soul uplifters of the Philadelphia penitentiary. What you cannot possibly say is that Guantanamo is a UFO fallen from some unknown obscure disaster. What you are bound to recognize is that it is a miniature, a condensation of the entire American prison system." In talking about private prisons he says "With the very existence of prisons subject only to the logic of money, we have taken one more decisive step on the path to civilized barbarism."
Later in talking about poor people the subject of prisons comes up again. "I kept coming across people who seem to have once and for all cut loose the moorings that tied them to the American Way of Life and its customs. And above all, there remain, from Riker's Island to the women's penitentiary in Nevada, those terrible prisons that the kind of inhabitants they now seem to be recruiting (a great many petty delinquents; many prisoners who have been charged but still await trial; many young blacks and Hispanics, out of work for a long time, pathetic drug users or dealers, immigrants of varying degrees of legality without any rights---I'm not sure whether they would be in prison at all in France. Does this mean that as the far left wing in America would have it, that America has opted for a repressive treatment of poverty? It has chosen to set up a penal state in opposition to the social state, the model of the penitentiary state against that of the providential state, proposing a net of control that involves first police, then prison, as against a minimum income and guaranteed medical care?" Subjects Levy is bringing up in 2004 that progressives are bringing to our attention in this year of the pandemic. Is it cheaper to warehouse the poor in prisons or to give them medical care and a minimum income?
He discusses the military and one last sentence in the whole paragraph jumped out at me. "Aren't the most sensitive missions--for instance the protection of government buildings and the US Embassy--entrusted to hired mercenaries recruited by private security companies? " In the past week Trump has sent these same mercenaries into Portland, Oregon to supposedly protect federal property but not against foreign terrorists instead against the citizens of the US who are legally protesting. These troops who are not part of the US military and are not trained in riot control but are basically Trump's private army invading US cities so the US now has private armies and private prisons and not much has been done to stop it.
Just as Levy is nearing the end of his American journey Katrina strikes New Orleans. "Death on September 11 struck indiscriminately. It didn't make exceptions for individuals, let alone for races. Here it revived the spirit and the letter of segregation, which we thought had been stifled along with the thing itself. And that is why it is right to say both that the hurricane of August 28 is an anti-9/11 and that this original sin of America that is the methodical humiliation of the black community is far from expiated."
He watched the police and military actions during Katrina and noted the "Violence of policemen, deployed to assist people but whose first reflex was often to attack and even shoot---and the violence of those National Guard members we watched in their Humvees, clutching their weapons, spontaneously rediscovering the gestures of war while dealing with fellow citizens they were meant to protect." In discussing New Orleans 2005, it does bring to mind 2020 and the reasons behind "Defund the Police".
Levy: "Just as 9/11 revealed the country's vulnerability to foreign attacks, so the anti-9/11 (Katrina) has unearthed yet another inner vulnerability, which American society didn't want to know anything about either: a vulnerability that is all the more treacherous since, this time, it put on the mask of violence." Violence a thread that runs through the American experience from the beginning.
We read history to make sense of today. Things that happened in 2004-2005 we lived through and remember not as particularly historic times such as now 2020, but surprisingly when studied show us what we were isn't too far from where we are. "Faced with a calamity of this magnitude (he is speaking Katrina but I am thinking pandemic) can relief be left to the goodwill of the people alone? Isn't there a threshold of distress beyond which you'd like to see the authorities recall that it is also their duty to protect their citizens?" "Since government in America exists on many different levels, all of which entered into a head-on and suicidal collision in New Orleans, this signifies that it's the entire balance of power, as the American ideology of the last 20 years has measured it out, that crumbled along with the levees of Lake Pontchartrain--a balance that must be re-arbitrated urgently in favor of federal authority." The neoconservatives who have instituted the methodical weakening of government since at least the Reagan years hit a check with Katrina but didn't stop there and this has led to the lack of leadership and preparedness for the nationwide catastrophe that we have faced in 2020. America is indeed dizzy as it now comes face to face with racial injustice and income discrepancies, an economic crisis as severe as 1929 and 2008 even if it isn't reflected in the stock market and a pandemic of epic proportions that is killing people.
It is always interesting to see how a foreigner sees the US and although I don't have a huge interest to see what was happening in 1831, perhaps I will take on Tocqueville's DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA one of these days.
Since it is the summer of 2020 and we are re-evaluating our history in response to those left out with the toppling of monuments, I will start with his comments on Mount Rushmore. The book is a lot of small chapters on different topics as he crosses the country. This chapter is called "Rushmore as a Myth". He says: "Borglum the designer of Rushmore was a member of the Ku Klux Klan and his first project was a memorial in Georgia to the glory of the Confederate heroes Lee, Davis and Jackson. He chose this site and his sponsors the South Dakota Historical Society could think of nothing better than to stick their memorial in this highly disputed area in the heart of what the Indian nation holds as most sacred. All of this is an outrage as well as a memorial. Do Americans know? Do they feel even obscurely, that their Founding Fathers are here also Profaning Fathers?"
Apparently Tocqueville came to the US to study prisons but went much further to evaluate and try to understand the citizens of America. So Levy feels that he must study prisons also and visits 5 prisons across the country as well as Guantanamo. Here is what he has to say on prisons: "Guantanamo--There are in this prison, characteristics, which remind me immediately of Riker's Island. Its policy of isolation and banishment, like that of Alcatraz. An indifference to human rights and to the rule of law, which perhaps is not unexpected from a country that, in Nevada, Texas and elsewhere, invented the legal and moral monstrosity that the idea of a private-enterprise prison represents. The absence of perspective and of horizon, the methodical state of uncertainty as to their fate in which the detainees are kept---this literally unlimited detention, which makes me think of the programmed despair of the prisoners at Angola. And then the multicultural comedy of caring for the spiritual needs of the prisoner even as he's being treated like a wild beast, there is something that must remind you of the hypocrisy of the Quaker soul uplifters of the Philadelphia penitentiary. What you cannot possibly say is that Guantanamo is a UFO fallen from some unknown obscure disaster. What you are bound to recognize is that it is a miniature, a condensation of the entire American prison system." In talking about private prisons he says "With the very existence of prisons subject only to the logic of money, we have taken one more decisive step on the path to civilized barbarism."
Later in talking about poor people the subject of prisons comes up again. "I kept coming across people who seem to have once and for all cut loose the moorings that tied them to the American Way of Life and its customs. And above all, there remain, from Riker's Island to the women's penitentiary in Nevada, those terrible prisons that the kind of inhabitants they now seem to be recruiting (a great many petty delinquents; many prisoners who have been charged but still await trial; many young blacks and Hispanics, out of work for a long time, pathetic drug users or dealers, immigrants of varying degrees of legality without any rights---I'm not sure whether they would be in prison at all in France. Does this mean that as the far left wing in America would have it, that America has opted for a repressive treatment of poverty? It has chosen to set up a penal state in opposition to the social state, the model of the penitentiary state against that of the providential state, proposing a net of control that involves first police, then prison, as against a minimum income and guaranteed medical care?" Subjects Levy is bringing up in 2004 that progressives are bringing to our attention in this year of the pandemic. Is it cheaper to warehouse the poor in prisons or to give them medical care and a minimum income?
He discusses the military and one last sentence in the whole paragraph jumped out at me. "Aren't the most sensitive missions--for instance the protection of government buildings and the US Embassy--entrusted to hired mercenaries recruited by private security companies? " In the past week Trump has sent these same mercenaries into Portland, Oregon to supposedly protect federal property but not against foreign terrorists instead against the citizens of the US who are legally protesting. These troops who are not part of the US military and are not trained in riot control but are basically Trump's private army invading US cities so the US now has private armies and private prisons and not much has been done to stop it.
Just as Levy is nearing the end of his American journey Katrina strikes New Orleans. "Death on September 11 struck indiscriminately. It didn't make exceptions for individuals, let alone for races. Here it revived the spirit and the letter of segregation, which we thought had been stifled along with the thing itself. And that is why it is right to say both that the hurricane of August 28 is an anti-9/11 and that this original sin of America that is the methodical humiliation of the black community is far from expiated."
He watched the police and military actions during Katrina and noted the "Violence of policemen, deployed to assist people but whose first reflex was often to attack and even shoot---and the violence of those National Guard members we watched in their Humvees, clutching their weapons, spontaneously rediscovering the gestures of war while dealing with fellow citizens they were meant to protect." In discussing New Orleans 2005, it does bring to mind 2020 and the reasons behind "Defund the Police".
Levy: "Just as 9/11 revealed the country's vulnerability to foreign attacks, so the anti-9/11 (Katrina) has unearthed yet another inner vulnerability, which American society didn't want to know anything about either: a vulnerability that is all the more treacherous since, this time, it put on the mask of violence." Violence a thread that runs through the American experience from the beginning.
We read history to make sense of today. Things that happened in 2004-2005 we lived through and remember not as particularly historic times such as now 2020, but surprisingly when studied show us what we were isn't too far from where we are. "Faced with a calamity of this magnitude (he is speaking Katrina but I am thinking pandemic) can relief be left to the goodwill of the people alone? Isn't there a threshold of distress beyond which you'd like to see the authorities recall that it is also their duty to protect their citizens?" "Since government in America exists on many different levels, all of which entered into a head-on and suicidal collision in New Orleans, this signifies that it's the entire balance of power, as the American ideology of the last 20 years has measured it out, that crumbled along with the levees of Lake Pontchartrain--a balance that must be re-arbitrated urgently in favor of federal authority." The neoconservatives who have instituted the methodical weakening of government since at least the Reagan years hit a check with Katrina but didn't stop there and this has led to the lack of leadership and preparedness for the nationwide catastrophe that we have faced in 2020. America is indeed dizzy as it now comes face to face with racial injustice and income discrepancies, an economic crisis as severe as 1929 and 2008 even if it isn't reflected in the stock market and a pandemic of epic proportions that is killing people.
It is always interesting to see how a foreigner sees the US and although I don't have a huge interest to see what was happening in 1831, perhaps I will take on Tocqueville's DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA one of these days.
April 1, 2013
The title of Bertrand-Henri Lévy’s "American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of de Tocqueville" is both accurate and deceiving. Lévy’s prison tours are a thin pretext for his travels through the United States in 2004, an afterthought in the dizzy-inducing whirlwind of a trip.
Whereas Jean Beaudrillard spun, in "America," his account in terms of space (the desert), Lévy narrates the country as movement (the road). The result reflects the approach: Lévy breezes through the land in fragments and enumerations. Similar to any lengthy road trip, as soon as I settled into the book I found myself paying attention only intermittently, skipping passages, skimming through the snapshots of what could also easily have been bullet points. Lévy occasionally does venture into analysis, as when he discusses the Americans’ inclination to create history out of everything ("a country where everything ends up as a memorial"). But soon, he’s off to the next stop, and the thought is gone.
Similarly, Beaudrillard’s musings may have been over-philosophized, but that’s perhaps because he’s a superior, more original philosopher. When a list of observations becomes too long for Lévy to handle (cue the vertigo), he sweeps into a conclusion that sounds pre-conceived, as if he were superimposing on reality his idea of America as he knows it from movies and television. For Lévy the simulacrum comes first and when reality’s complexity intervenes, he resorts to the simplified version.
Worse, as he criss-crosses the country, on what Garrison Keillor named the "Freaks, Fatties, Fanatics & Faux Culture Excursion," Lévy carries with him an air of condescension. He tries to mask it with attempts at eloquence and what he passes for analysis, but he simply cannot shake it. Perhaps it’s because he visited the States in a presidential election year, when the country does become a circus of sorts. Or it’s because W was still President, and the French had only disdain for him and the Iraq war. Regardless of his motive, the quelle-horreur view of America’s collapse persists throughout.
As another afterthought, indignation seeping from the first 240 pages takes, in the concluding chapter "Reflections," a sharp U-turn. It turns out America’s paradoxes and contradictions make it a stronger, more resilient place than it appears to a casual traveler. Yes, the evidence presented spurs a curiously opposite conclusion.
Being a naturalized American, my irritation with the book never reached the heights of Keillor’s; my scorn reflects my European sensitivity. If learning how to do things entails also learning how not to do them, Lévy’s "American Vertigo" provides an excellent tool for every travel writer.
Whereas Jean Beaudrillard spun, in "America," his account in terms of space (the desert), Lévy narrates the country as movement (the road). The result reflects the approach: Lévy breezes through the land in fragments and enumerations. Similar to any lengthy road trip, as soon as I settled into the book I found myself paying attention only intermittently, skipping passages, skimming through the snapshots of what could also easily have been bullet points. Lévy occasionally does venture into analysis, as when he discusses the Americans’ inclination to create history out of everything ("a country where everything ends up as a memorial"). But soon, he’s off to the next stop, and the thought is gone.
Similarly, Beaudrillard’s musings may have been over-philosophized, but that’s perhaps because he’s a superior, more original philosopher. When a list of observations becomes too long for Lévy to handle (cue the vertigo), he sweeps into a conclusion that sounds pre-conceived, as if he were superimposing on reality his idea of America as he knows it from movies and television. For Lévy the simulacrum comes first and when reality’s complexity intervenes, he resorts to the simplified version.
Worse, as he criss-crosses the country, on what Garrison Keillor named the "Freaks, Fatties, Fanatics & Faux Culture Excursion," Lévy carries with him an air of condescension. He tries to mask it with attempts at eloquence and what he passes for analysis, but he simply cannot shake it. Perhaps it’s because he visited the States in a presidential election year, when the country does become a circus of sorts. Or it’s because W was still President, and the French had only disdain for him and the Iraq war. Regardless of his motive, the quelle-horreur view of America’s collapse persists throughout.
As another afterthought, indignation seeping from the first 240 pages takes, in the concluding chapter "Reflections," a sharp U-turn. It turns out America’s paradoxes and contradictions make it a stronger, more resilient place than it appears to a casual traveler. Yes, the evidence presented spurs a curiously opposite conclusion.
Being a naturalized American, my irritation with the book never reached the heights of Keillor’s; my scorn reflects my European sensitivity. If learning how to do things entails also learning how not to do them, Lévy’s "American Vertigo" provides an excellent tool for every travel writer.
December 26, 2010
I lost steam for this book when I got to the "reflections" section, and it took me forever to finish it. That's the only reason for the 3 stars vs. 4. Up until then, it was interesting- a Frenchman travels through the U.S. and reports on what he sees- focusing mostly on politics and the prison system. His travels took place during Bush's reelection, so a large part of the book is heavily focused in that direction. (And he is clearly left-leaning). The last fourth of the book was spent summarizing and discussing political philosophy in pretty serious depth. That's where he lost my interest. He's obviously very intelligent and educated and the book is well-written (although it could have used fewer run-on sentences). To be fair, he definitely accomplished his goal of recreating Tocqueville's famous travels to America, with an updated critique on the politics and penal system. But this part of the book seemed more geared toward people who study politics on an academic level. To me, the book was most interesting when he was focused on the little things- the people living every day lives in small towns and big cities. I liked his observations and his occasional comparisons to the French and Europeans. Sometimes it's hard to see ourselves objectively and he was good at pointing out the differences that we probably don't think about or notice. For example, how museum-crazy we are. We really do have museums for everything here, I just never thought much about it before. He knows his American history inside and out, and I learned a lot of historical facts as well. He found America equal parts charming and annoying, I think. And at times I found myself feeling defensive, and, could it be... patriotic? But he was pretty accurate and fair in identifying our shortcomings. He never spent very long on one topic (except politics) or one place, so the book is very accurately named. He also named 2 "perfect" cities in America that he could find no fault with and absolutely fell in love with. But I'll leave that for you to discover.
April 27, 2016
Following in the footsteps of Tocqueville, Levy's goal was to provide us with an update on "Democracy in America". While he does provide us with an ability to see our political system and our prison system (among other things) from the point of view of an outsider, his Eurocentric and liberal bias really gets in the way of any true revelations. In the end, his inability to clearly present an unbiased view of America left me more annoyed than enlightened.
No, it's not just that American Vertigo presents Americans in a less than perfect light. I can deal with that. After all, I picked this book up precisely because I was interested in how America really appears to the outside world. What I cannot abide, however, is authors who string together multiple questions as if they are attempting some type of rhetorical dialogue...
Really? Doesn't that seem like lazy writing? Aren't we reading your book to gain your perspective and insight? Shouldn't you give us some, rather than bombarding us with questions?
Yeah, like that. At one point, I believe there are no less than five questions lined up end to end.
What is far worse, however, is that his questions are really the only direct form of prose he has. The rest of his writing is vague, obscure, and I hate to say - a bit sloppy. His vocabulary is huge, which doesn't help, but it is more his style of writing that is the problem. He writes episodically - short, choppy passages describing a place or an event. He'll recount discussions with people without really introducing them - as if he assumes you'll automatically know who it is. Maybe we should - many of them are famous politicians, after all. But, his loose descriptions of people make it hard to discern even when he shifts to another person. If I had read this book in 2007, perhaps it would have been easier - with these events and people fresh in my mind. Somehow, I doubt it.
No, it's not just that American Vertigo presents Americans in a less than perfect light. I can deal with that. After all, I picked this book up precisely because I was interested in how America really appears to the outside world. What I cannot abide, however, is authors who string together multiple questions as if they are attempting some type of rhetorical dialogue...
Really? Doesn't that seem like lazy writing? Aren't we reading your book to gain your perspective and insight? Shouldn't you give us some, rather than bombarding us with questions?
Yeah, like that. At one point, I believe there are no less than five questions lined up end to end.
What is far worse, however, is that his questions are really the only direct form of prose he has. The rest of his writing is vague, obscure, and I hate to say - a bit sloppy. His vocabulary is huge, which doesn't help, but it is more his style of writing that is the problem. He writes episodically - short, choppy passages describing a place or an event. He'll recount discussions with people without really introducing them - as if he assumes you'll automatically know who it is. Maybe we should - many of them are famous politicians, after all. But, his loose descriptions of people make it hard to discern even when he shifts to another person. If I had read this book in 2007, perhaps it would have been easier - with these events and people fresh in my mind. Somehow, I doubt it.
November 10, 2011
I found this book to be a paradox in a way - I didn't like it, wouldn't recommend that any of my friends go out and read it, yet still very much want to talk with someone who's also read it to see what they thought.
Why? Well, the book has an incredibly interesting topic - the narrative of a French journalist's multiple treks across the US in 2004, inspired by Alexis de Toqueville's Democracy in America. He uses his journalistic credentials to interview an array of American leaders and politicians left, right and center - just about everyone who's since run for president, cable TV talking heads, what's left of the intellectual political philosophers (apparently not much), mayors, governors, and miscellaneous politicos. Just as often as not though, his interactions are drawn from everyday Joes from parts of the country like Arab Detroit, Cuban Miami, patrols along the Mexican border, Sun Belt retirement communities excluding anyone under 55 years, mega-churches, mega-malls, mega-prisons - even Guantanamo - and plain vanilla suburbs, getting insights along the way to which the bulk of Americans, myself included, are largely oblivious.
Unfortunately, Lévy sacrifices depth for breadth with his innumerable 2-3 page recantations of these interviews and wanderings, even if many of these would be fascinating as stand-alone commentaries given a bit more substance and a lot less of the author's own narrative behind them. The question I keep coming back to - and this is the part that makes me want to find someone else with an opinion of this book - is this: how representative are Lévy's random and disjointed experiences and commentaries of America as a whole? Is one coherent viewpoint even possible? And if not Lévy's picture(s), what or whose contemporary equivalent would be better?
Why? Well, the book has an incredibly interesting topic - the narrative of a French journalist's multiple treks across the US in 2004, inspired by Alexis de Toqueville's Democracy in America. He uses his journalistic credentials to interview an array of American leaders and politicians left, right and center - just about everyone who's since run for president, cable TV talking heads, what's left of the intellectual political philosophers (apparently not much), mayors, governors, and miscellaneous politicos. Just as often as not though, his interactions are drawn from everyday Joes from parts of the country like Arab Detroit, Cuban Miami, patrols along the Mexican border, Sun Belt retirement communities excluding anyone under 55 years, mega-churches, mega-malls, mega-prisons - even Guantanamo - and plain vanilla suburbs, getting insights along the way to which the bulk of Americans, myself included, are largely oblivious.
Unfortunately, Lévy sacrifices depth for breadth with his innumerable 2-3 page recantations of these interviews and wanderings, even if many of these would be fascinating as stand-alone commentaries given a bit more substance and a lot less of the author's own narrative behind them. The question I keep coming back to - and this is the part that makes me want to find someone else with an opinion of this book - is this: how representative are Lévy's random and disjointed experiences and commentaries of America as a whole? Is one coherent viewpoint even possible? And if not Lévy's picture(s), what or whose contemporary equivalent would be better?
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February 6, 2012It is an ambitious project indeed, to follow in Tocqueville's footsteps and "update" the definitive portrait of the American self from the 19th century.
At times, Levy is insightful. His outsider's point of view can be penetrating and hold a mirror to us Americans that can be difficult to look away from.
At time, as you might expect, he misses the mark. His commentary in these instances is based more in his already formed conceptions, his wish-it-were-different/how-it-should-be longings than a detached analysis.
Levy, for all of this books weaknesses, shows himself to be an admirer of the United States. The underlying theme that runs throughout this text is that America and Europe are tied, for better or worse, to one another. Indeed, it is his contention that the United States and Europe serve as essential pieces in each other's cultural, existential DNA; that neither great society can really be who they are meant to be without a close familial relationship with the other. Just as a person must come to terms with their own family, antagonisms and joys and all, so must these two pillars of the Western cultural tradition find a common path to tread if we are both to find that "shining city on a hill" that Winthrop disembarked England to find so many years ago.
At times, Levy is insightful. His outsider's point of view can be penetrating and hold a mirror to us Americans that can be difficult to look away from.
At time, as you might expect, he misses the mark. His commentary in these instances is based more in his already formed conceptions, his wish-it-were-different/how-it-should-be longings than a detached analysis.
Levy, for all of this books weaknesses, shows himself to be an admirer of the United States. The underlying theme that runs throughout this text is that America and Europe are tied, for better or worse, to one another. Indeed, it is his contention that the United States and Europe serve as essential pieces in each other's cultural, existential DNA; that neither great society can really be who they are meant to be without a close familial relationship with the other. Just as a person must come to terms with their own family, antagonisms and joys and all, so must these two pillars of the Western cultural tradition find a common path to tread if we are both to find that "shining city on a hill" that Winthrop disembarked England to find so many years ago.
November 4, 2009
Bernard Henri-Levy is a reputed French intelluctual, but I found him in this book being a better prognosticator than intellecutal of things to come. For example, he called Barack Obama being a President someday and this book was written in 2005. He essentially traveled the same path as Alexis De Tocqueville did in the 1800's while writing I am told his seminal masterpiece, "Democracy in America." He makes very interesting observations about the United States pertaining to our obsession to preserve the past, our unflinching patriotism, as well as our paradoxical view on religion and difference between right and wrong. He loses me however in his attempts to impress the reader of his English vocabulary which is not his primary language. I don't like it when intellectuals lose context because they have to use hard to find words in the English language. But overall, aside from this which is why I gave the book 3 stars and not higher, the book has substance for any curious scholar and/or history buff like myself to chew on.
July 27, 2008
Always enjoy a good travelogue, this paralells Toquevilles' famous journey to which Henri-Levy makes several references along the way. In the end, I am delighted to know that Bernie does not find Americans any fatter than the rest of the Western world and equally delighted to learn of his man love for Charlie Rose.
Suggested pre-reading: Toqueville -Democracy in America -um, obviously. You may also wish to brush up on your modern French philosophers(all of them in general)to keep up with the heavy mental lifting at the end. Hit Foucault in particular to more fully enjoy the prison convo along the way. Also, wouldn't hurt to revisit the 19th c. Germans as well. Oh crap, and then there are the contemporary American intellectuals.
*Highlights: Sharon Stone...no need to say more.
Reflections: This book was written two years ago, some of the "snapshots" I found particularly interesting in hindsight i.e. Barak Obama.
Suggested pre-reading: Toqueville -Democracy in America -um, obviously. You may also wish to brush up on your modern French philosophers(all of them in general)to keep up with the heavy mental lifting at the end. Hit Foucault in particular to more fully enjoy the prison convo along the way. Also, wouldn't hurt to revisit the 19th c. Germans as well. Oh crap, and then there are the contemporary American intellectuals.
*Highlights: Sharon Stone...no need to say more.
Reflections: This book was written two years ago, some of the "snapshots" I found particularly interesting in hindsight i.e. Barak Obama.
October 27, 2015
A French intellectual's view of that US
Bernard Henry Levy (BHL to the cognoscenti) is a consummate French intellectual. Travelling through the U.S. in the footsteps of development Tocqueville is a very intellectual thing to do. Predictably, this gives us a very intellectual view of America, where Manifest Destiny and the positions of the New Conservatives matter more than daily lives on the ground. Not much dirt under the fingers here. Still, on its own terms, the book does offer an interesting reflection on the various currents of political thought in the U.S.. BHL ads the anti-Americanism which often handcuffs his French colleagues to provide a mostly sympathetic view of the US public discourse on issues as diverse as terrorism, immigration and religion. The author is superbly informed and analyses each topic with clarity. Importantly, BHL is not afraid to disagree with the dominant lines of thoughts, stating his own controversial (and hence interesting) views.
Bernard Henry Levy (BHL to the cognoscenti) is a consummate French intellectual. Travelling through the U.S. in the footsteps of development Tocqueville is a very intellectual thing to do. Predictably, this gives us a very intellectual view of America, where Manifest Destiny and the positions of the New Conservatives matter more than daily lives on the ground. Not much dirt under the fingers here. Still, on its own terms, the book does offer an interesting reflection on the various currents of political thought in the U.S.. BHL ads the anti-Americanism which often handcuffs his French colleagues to provide a mostly sympathetic view of the US public discourse on issues as diverse as terrorism, immigration and religion. The author is superbly informed and analyses each topic with clarity. Importantly, BHL is not afraid to disagree with the dominant lines of thoughts, stating his own controversial (and hence interesting) views.
November 26, 2013
I found this book interesting and entertaining, but only after I read it for a second time. I think you should know a fair amount about US cities, history, and politics to enjoy this. But not too much, as I can't imagine many Americans would be very interested in BHL's scattered observations and critique.
He gives a nice overview of the state of affairs though, discussing everything from prisons (to stay true to Tocqueville) to the war in Iraq, from Woody Allen to Mount Rushmore, and from JFK to the Amish.
For a philosopher I find some chapters somewhat shallow and definitely too short, but that also makes it readable. It is becoming dated fast though, especially the parts about politics and elections. It was a time when Bush was reelected and Democrats hopes were dim - despite the fact that BHL was already aware of the rising star of Obama.
He gives a nice overview of the state of affairs though, discussing everything from prisons (to stay true to Tocqueville) to the war in Iraq, from Woody Allen to Mount Rushmore, and from JFK to the Amish.
For a philosopher I find some chapters somewhat shallow and definitely too short, but that also makes it readable. It is becoming dated fast though, especially the parts about politics and elections. It was a time when Bush was reelected and Democrats hopes were dim - despite the fact that BHL was already aware of the rising star of Obama.
April 30, 2019
Always good to read what a sympathetic Frenchman has to say about America. Tocqueville is just a pretext for a cross-country journey beyond the 19th century's original bounds, which is OK with me. Overall, he argues that America re-take its place as benevolent world empire rather than retreat into isolationism. Lots of prescient insights on culture and politics -- for example, he's not bothered as many Europeans are by the rise of American megachurches. He sees them as merely the laboratory for new developments in culture and feels they pose no risk of establishing an American theocracy. However, I do wish he'd said something about the environment and climate change, the biggest world problems today and ones where America plays a huge role now as obstructor to solutions but could play the opposite role, of leader on solutions.
January 7, 2010
The author travels the United States on a grant from an American magazine. The idea is to recreate Tocqueville's classic, "Democracy in America." Unfortunately, I don't believe that the author ever comes to understand America as Tocqueville did, and he seems more interested in writing biting criticism than in engaging in serious analysis. Another problem is that he jumps to a new topic on almost every other page, so he never develops anything in depth. I also felt that he interviewed a very unrepresentative sample of Americans to reach his conclusions.
The last chapter, in which he develops his conclusions was by far the best. However, I couldn't shake off the feeling that he never really captured America's essence the way Tocqueville did.
The last chapter, in which he develops his conclusions was by far the best. However, I couldn't shake off the feeling that he never really captured America's essence the way Tocqueville did.
May 5, 2016
First of all I did not like this book . The author ( a prominent right wing French men ) criticize everything that the right American wing stands for , from guns to religion and so on . In every chapter eh explains what wrong with America ( even though he says he loves America ) and never bother describing too much about cities in the south but always refers the United States as " Boston " while we all know that those European like cities are not the real America . He seems to only like cities that are more European than the rest of America . There are many more topics to cover and he Dident focusing more on the neo conservative and religion that anything else . The author seems to follow the steps of Tocqueville but he is not able to .
August 18, 2007
This book is like a sandwich. The type of sandwich where you don't like the bread but can't get enough of the main ingredients. Levy's voyage through America in the steps of de Tocqueville is brilliantly recounted with insight, humor, and a fair amount of open-mindedness. Problem is he brackets his travelogue with an introduction and a long conclusion that were so tedious my eyes would water over. Levy is a name-dropper and, as philosophers do, lacks conciseness. Sentences looked like paragraphs and the translation took away the fluidity of the text. Luckily the bulk of the book is of his travels so it's still definitely worth the read. I would just recommend skipping his "reflections."
March 28, 2009
Frenchman Levy takes a road trip around the US soon after 9/11 and reflects on the country's relationship with its own identity and memories. He focuses especially on the prison system, as Tocqueville did, museums (I agree with a former comment that this didn't seem worthy of so much attention), and the strange juxtoposition of puritanism and openness, and a troubled self-image that were present in many of the folks he met. The chapters are tight and punchy with an easily digestible theme, but perhaps because of that it also feels a little insubstantial. Good food for thought, even if you don't agree with his conclusions.
March 7, 2014
After having read Garrison Keillor's famous lambasting of this book, I was tempted to second-guess my appreciation for this work. To be sure, Henri-Levy made some snap judgments based on quick observations, and his lecture at the end of the book seemed as if it would have been written regardless of his road trip. Nevertheless, I think an open-minded reading of this narrative is guaranteed to lead to rich conversation. Despite the book's flaws, there is much worthy of discussion here, ranging from what democracy meant during the Bush years to controversies surrounding Guantanamo and Hurricane Katrina.
October 13, 2014
Here is a French "intellectual" commenting on his travels throughout the U.S. He finds "ultrakitch" in Memphis (Elvis's mansion), a "mausoleum of merchandise" (Mall of America in Minneapolis,), fakery (baseball museum in Cooperstown, N.Y.) and hideousness (Las Vegas). Best cities for him are Seattle and Savanna. I found his observations insightful and refreshingly frank. Introduction, though, was a turnoff. Many long convoluted sentences full of commas, semi-colons, parentheses and dashes inhibited reading ease. A reader could well skip to Chapter 1 as I did where shorter sentences and lucid text begin.
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