Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac celebrates the birthday of one of my all time "heros" today:
It's the birthday of Jean-Paul Sartre, born in Paris, France (1905). His father died when he was 15 months old. When he was eight, he started writing plays, which he performed with hand puppets in the bathroom. In college, he fell in love with philosophy and literature. He kept a portrait of James Joyce on his dorm room wall. He met Simone de Beauvoir there, who became the love of his life. They promised never to tell each other lies, and also agreed that if they wanted they could take other lovers.
Sartre became a teacher. At a time when the European teaching style was lecturing from a distance, he drank with his students at local bars, played cards and ping-pong with them, and joined them for picnics on the beach. In his spare time he began to write a novel called Nausea (1938). The book was his first major success, and it made him famous. People called him the French Kafka. He went on to write Being and Nothingness (1943), about the meaning of freedom. He wrote, "Hell is other people." And, "If you are lonely when you're alone, you are in bad company."
Look beyond the break for his opinion of America.
Here are some books by this author. I am rereading Frantz Fannon's The Wretched of the Earth for the nth time trying to get a grasp on what is happening to our country as we committ torture, loose our freedoms, and wage an imperialist war. Fannon has a lot to teach us. It was the French who fannon was instructing about how their colonial hold on Algeria was extracting a huge price from the French Middle Class. Sound familiar? Fannon's book has a preface by Jean-Paul sartre that will knock your socks off. He says:
Europeans, open this book and look inside. After taking a short walk in the night you will see strangers gathered around a fire, get closer and listen. They are discussing the fate reserved for your trading posts and for the mercenaries defending them. They might see you, but they will go on talking without even lowering their voices. Their indifference strikes home: their fathers, creatures living in the shadows, your creatures, were dead souls; you afforded them light, you were their sole interlocutor, you did not take the trouble to answer the zombies. The sons ignore you. The fire that warms and enlightens them is not yours. You, standing at a respectful distance, you now feel eclipsed, nocturnal, and numbered. It is your turn now. In the darkness that will dawn into another day, you will have turned into the zombie.
I wonder what he would write to Americans today? Here is what he wrote to us in 1947, I think it still applies:
Americans and Their Myths
Everything has been said about the United States. But a person who has once crossed the Atlantic can no longer be satisfied with even the most penetrating books; not that he does not believe what they say, but that his agreement remains abstract.
When a friend tries to explain our character and unravel our motives, when he relates all our acts to principles, prejudices, beliefs, and a conception of the world which he &rinks to find in us, we listen uneasily, unable either to deny what he says or entirely accept it. Perhaps the interpretation is true, but what is the truth that is being interpreted? We miss the intimate warmth, the life, the way one is always unpredictable to oneself and also tiresomely familiar, the decision to get along with oneself, the perpetual deliberations and perpetual inventions about what one is, and the vow to be "that" and nothing else in short, the liberty. Similarly, when a careful arrangement of those melting-pot notions--puritanism, realism, optimism, and so on--which we have been told are the keys to the American character is presented to us in Europe, we experience a certain intellectual satisfaction and think that, in effect, it must be so. But when we walk about New York, on Third Avenue, or Sixth Avenue, or Tenth Avenue, at that evening hour which, for Da Vinci, lends softness to the faces of men, we see the most pathetic visages in the world, uncertain, searching, intent, full of astonished good faith, with appealing eyes, and we know that the most beautiful generalizations are of very little service: they permit us to understand the system but not the people.
The system is a great external apparatus, an implacable machine which one might call the objective spirit of the United States and which over there they call Americanism-a huge complex of myths, values, recipes, slogans, figures, and rites. But one must not think that it has been deposited in the head of each American just as the God of Descartes deposited the first notions in the mind of man; one must not think that it is "refracted" into brains and hearts and at each instant determines affections or thoughts that exactly express it. Actually, it is something outside of the people, something presented to them; the most adroit propaganda does nothing else but present it to them continuously. It is not in them, they are in it; they struggle against it or they accept it, they stifle in it or go beyond it, they submit to it or reinvent it, they give themselves up to it or make furious efforts to escape from it; in any case it remains outside them, transcendent, because they are men and it is a thing.
There are the great myths, the myths of happiness, of progress, of liberty, of triumphant maternity; there is realism and optimism--and then there are the Americans, who, nothing at first, grow up among these colossal statues and find their way as best they can among them. There is this myth of happiness: black-magic slogans warn you to be happy at once; films that "end well" show a life of rosy ease to the exhausted crowds; the language is charged with optimistic and unrestrained expressions-"have a good time," "life is fun," and the like. But there are also these people, who, though conventionally happy, suffer from an obscure malaise to which no name can be given, who are tragic through fear of being so, through that total absence of the tragic in them and around them.
Can we identify with that characterization of us today? I think it is prophetic in a way. We are now so seperated from the substance of our myths that we are convinced we can preserve freedom by giving it away. The TV still presents our life to us as a set of myths. None of which have anything to do with the reality of being a nation whose government has failed miserably and now who are desperately trying to fix it. Think about this next excerpt in the context of the presidential election and the primary that preceeded it:
There is the myth of equality--and there is the myth of segregation, with those big beach-front hotels that post signs reading "Jews and dogs not allowed," and those lakes in Connecticut where Jews may not bathe, and that racial tchin, in which the lowest degree is assigned to the Slavs, the highest to the Dutch immigrants of 1680. There is the myth of liberty--and the dictatorship of public opinion; the myth of economic liberalism--and the big companies extending over the whole country which, in the final analysis, belong to no one and in which the employees, from top to bottom, are like functionaries in a state industry. There is respect for science and industry, positivism, an insane love of "gadgets''--and there is the somber humor of the New Yorker, which pokes bitter fun at the mechanical civilization of America and the hundred million Americans who satisfy their craving for the marvelous by reading every day in the "comics" the incredible adventures of Superman, or Wonderman, or Mandrake the Magician.
Hasn't changed that much has it? Certainly not for the better. He goes on to talk about hypocracy around sexual taboos and the loneliness of people playing the games that are played in bars. He concludes with:
Perhaps nowhere else will you find such a discrepancy between people and myth, between life and the representation of life. An American said to me at Berne: "The trouble is that we are all eaten by the fear of being less American than our neighbor." I accept this explanation: it shows that Americanism is not merely a myth that clever propaganda stuffs into people's head but something every American continually reinvents in his gropings. It is at one and the same time a great external reality rising up at the entrance to the port of New York across from the Statue of Liberty, and the daily product of anxious liberties. The anguish of the American confronted with Americanism is an ambivalent anguish; as if he were asking, "Am I American enough?" and at the same time, "How can I escape from Americanism?" In America a man's simultaneous answers to these two questions make him what he is, and each man must find his own answers.
So how do we answer Sartre's question today? Here's how he ends his preface to The Wretched of the earth:
Will we recover? Yes. Violence, like Achilles' spear, can healthe wounds it has inflicted. Today we are in chains, humiliated, sick wih fear: at our lowest ebb. Fortunately for us, this is still not enough for the colonial aristocracy: it cannot accomplish its rearguard mission in Algeria until it has finished the colonolizing the French
I'll break in here and rephrase that for emphasis. In our case it is this: "We will not finish subjugating the Iraqi people until we finish subjugating our own people." He goes on:
Every day we shrink back from the fight, but rest assured it will be inevitable. The killers, tghey need it; they will swoop down on us and lash out haphazardly. The time for illusionists and wizardry is over: either you fight or rot in the camps. This is the last stage of the dialectic: you condemn this war but you don't yet dare declare your support for the Algerian fighters; have no fear, you can count on the colonists and mercenaries to help you make up your mind. Perhaps, then, with your back to the wall, you will finally unleash this new violence aroused in you by old, rehashed crimes. But, as they say, that is another story. The history of man. The time is coming, I am concinced, when we shall join the ranks of those who are making it.
That was not for the Algerians who eventually send the French colonialists back home. It was for the French and he also had this to say:
It is not right my fellow countrymen, you know all the crimes committed in our name. It is really not right to breath a word about them to anybody, not even to your own soul, for fear of having to pass judgement on yourselves. At first you had no idea , I am prepared to believe it, then you suspected, and now you know, but you still keep silent. Eight years of silence have a damaging effect. And in vain: the binding glare of torture is high in the sky, flooding the entire country; under this blaze of light not a single laugh rings true any longer, not a single face that is not painted to mask the anger and the fear, no longer a single act that does not betray our disgust and our complicity. Today whenever two Frenchmen meet, there is a dead body between them. did I say one...? France was once the name of a country; be careful lest it become the name of a neurosis in 1961.
And what is it we Americans have become in 2008? I'll leave that for you to decide. It seems that Sartre's words had an effect on the French since they did not join us in our present folly.