University of Virginia Library

colloquium

'The death
of America
rides in on
the smog'

By Paul Hurdle

Whole crisis of Christianity in America
that the military heroes were on one side,
and the unnamed saints on the other! Let
the bugle blow. The death of America
rides in on the smog. America - the land
where a new kind of man was born from
the idea that God was present in every
man not only as compassion but as
power, and so the country belonged to
the people; for the will of the people - if
the locks of their life could be given the
art to turn - was then the will of God.
Great and dangerous idea! If the locks did
not turn, then the will of the people was
the will of the Devil. Who by now could
know where was what? Liars controlled
the locks.

Brood on that country that expresses
our will. She is America, once a beauty of
magnificence unparalleled, now a beauty
with a leprous skin. She is heavy with
child - no one knows if legitimate - and
languishes in a dungeon whose walls are
never seen. Now the first contractions of
her fearsome labor begin - it will go on:
no doctor exists to tell the hour. It is
only known that false labor is not likely
on her now, no, she will probably give
birth, and to what? - the most fearsome
totalitarianism the world has ever known?
or can she, poor giant, lovely tormented
girl, deliver a babe of a new world brave
and tender, artful and wild? Rush to the
locks. Deliver us from our curse. For we
must end on the road to that mystery
where courage, death, and the dream of
love give promise of sleep.

"The Metaphor Delivered" from The
Armies of the Night by Norman Mailer,
1968.

Mailer's remarks which preface this
article attempt to provide a metaphor - a
verbal image - for America. Yet although
he imparts an urgent sense of expectancy,
he is not quite sure what to expect. Could
it not be that since the image of
"America" somewhere deep in Americans
demands a singularly special meaning we
find so many, and so many negative,
opinions on that image? Mailer also
suggests that the sensibilities of the
American have been violated. I would
suggest that the American in the sixties
has come of age, and that the conflict
between his basic feelings and the image
he projects to non-Americans is, in the
nationalistic sense, akin to the problems
of maturation in the personal, psychological
sense. The more power and position
an individual obtains, the more his
position becomes objectified. Other individuals
react to his image rather than to
him, and it becomes easy for that image
to take on a static, absolute nature. If the
image eventually fails to relate to his
subjective self, therefore, it is hard to
destroy or alter it to his advantage.
Indeed, he may have forgotten what his
original, innocent self was. Perhaps
psychologically this is close to T.S. Eliot's
"disassociation of sensibility" in the field
of literary criticism. It is presented in the
nationalistic sense by Ronald Segal in his
one-sided and often mindless attack on
America, America's Receding Future
(catch the very title to begin with!). He
argues that judges, legislators, and businessmen
so removed the Constitution and
Bill of Rights - often considered to
present the prototypical American image
- from the original revolutionary spirit of
America that they became the objects or
tools of influence rather than approximations
of national feeling. Creed does not
conform with experience, which leads to
a sense of madness:

The central theme of the public pronouncements
of the sixties is the paradox
of what America is and ought to be. But
is the American image fundamentally
unsound, or has it just been stuck on a
shelf above the growing demands for
relevance by Americans? Can it be
retrieved? Is optimism to be equated with
self-delusion?

Bill Olson in The Virginia Weekly
agrees that Americans have only pretended
not to see the difference between
American image and substance. This is
due, he says, to living "in the twilight of

nineteenth century Romanticism, arrogantly
clinging to a faith in the reality of
subjectivism." Americans mistakenly
think that their imaginations can shape
reality. Yet his argument has weaknesses.
First of all, many Americans, rather than
making America's image fit their own
feelings, gloss over these feelings, and
accept a sanctified, pre-packaged image of
America that the heretical cries of "other
Americans," such as black Americans,
seem to violate. Second, did not the
imagination of Martin Luther King shape
the reality of America? Olson does have a
point when he says that Americans
believe that "if we change the name of
something we alter its essence." Linguis-