In trying to make sense of our current political situation, I recently read Lewis Lapham’s Age of Folly, released last month (and currently 50% off print and digital versions at Verso). Broadly speaking, the book claims to examine the last 25 years of America’s “imperial adventure.” Narrowly speaking, it’s 400+ pages of Lapham waxing poetic about our looming dystopia, namedropping politicians and WASPs, and peppering in the occasional lucid profundity. Here are a few:
- “The settled peoples of the earth seldom recognize the American as both a chronic revolutionary and a born pilgrim. The American is always on the way to someplace else (i.e., toward some undetermined future in which all will be well), and when he meets a stranger on the road he begins at once to recite the summary of the story so far—his youth and early sorrows, the sequence of his exits and entrances, his last divorce and his next marriage, the point of his financial departure and the estimated time of his spiritual arrival, the bad news noted and accounted for, the good news still to come. Invariably it is a pilgrim’s tale, and the narrator, being American, assumes that he is addressing a fellow pilgrim. He means to exchange notes and compare maps. His newfound companion might be bound toward a completely different dream of Eden (a boat marina in Naples, Florida, instead of a garden in Vermont; a career as a Broadway dancer as opposed to the vice presidency of the Wells Fargo bank), but the destination doesn’t matter as much as the common hope of coming safely home to the land of the heart’s desire. For the time being, and until something better turns up, we find ourselves embarked on the same voyage, gazing west into the same blue distance.”
