The Ghost In The Machine

I confess that all this leaves me more than a little uneasy. The son of an itinerant Southern poet, adman and novelist, I was born in Tennessee, then spent my first 10 years living in Texas, France, Florida, Georgia and Italy. Back then, in the 1950s and 1960s, the states in the United States all felt pretty separate, one from another. You couldn't eat in Oregon like you could eat in Alabama. And travel abroad, well, that was travel to a world where language, food, manners, art—the whole way of life—was distinct from anything you found at home. In the 1970s, you could see the uniqueness of states and regions fading all over America. Local identity, to the extent it existed, was increasingly about distinctions without difference: the boosterism of Rotary Clubs and football teams. The outskirts of every American city sprouted essentially the same shopping malls and drive-thrus. If the Main Streets downtown weren't "boarded up like they never existed," in the words of an Alan Jackson song, they were "renovated and called historic districts."

Over the past year, I've spent time in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and Spokane, Washington, and though I enjoyed myself and my friends in both places, my general impression is that when it comes to art and culture, broadly construed, there's not a whole lot to distinguish those two towns.

I am, to be sure, an outsider. Since 1980 I've mostly lived abroad, in Central America, the Middle East and Europe. But in doing so I've seen firsthand the way what we Americans take for modernity has spread its influence across the seas. Today, on the outskirts of Granada and of Reims, of York and of Verona, you find beltways lined with discount stores and fast-food chains, indistinct and indifferent.

Are we condemned to the future of sameness, passivity and delusion that Forster anticipated a century ago, and that?the American penchant for relentless consumption and remorseless mass marketing helped set in motion? Should we just surrender to the inevitable and call it progress?

Would that life were so simple. The global economic machine is now driven by China and India, as well as the United States and Europe, and the imperatives of their explosive growth can burn up delicate sensibilities as fast as hydrocarbons. It's not really up to the Americans anymore. The Machine is out of their control.

What's needed is a rear-guard action to defend distinctions, to shout, as it were, "Vive la diff?rence!" "I don't think the battle is lost, far from it," says my friend, the French novelist and biographer Pierre Assouline. "If it were, I would not keep fighting." But at the same time we have to have the discretion to choose those things from the onslaught of hybrid sensation that really are new and original, not just bland and accessible. I never learned so much about Iraqi culture as when I studied the fascination that Iraqi poets had with T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land." And I learned still more a few years later when I hung out with kids playing combat videogames in Baghdad after the U.S. invasion. I am intrigued by the films of South Korea, which repackage and stylize American noir in ways that not even the French nouvelle vague thought of doing. A movie like "Babel" (2006), by the Mexican director Alejandro Gonz?lez I??rritu, tries, with considerable success, to make a whole out of this world that is at once so widely divided and so closely tied together. Over the past couple of decades, some of the most interesting literature out of England and France has been written by people who were not originally English or French, and many of whom, for that matter, are Muslim. The Machine is what it is, but sometimes it can be what we want it to be. What the Machine cannot do is stop.

© 2007