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in one store and a battery for it in another. Americans tend to sling together items that
Europeans would keep strictly apart. They do not understand that it has been ordained by
a wise, all-loving Creator that while marmalade is acceptable at breakfast, jam (or jelly) is
not. If you want to wear canary yellow trousers with an electric blue blouse, there is noth-
ing to stop you. If you want to believe in Marx and the tooth fairy simultaneously, then
go ahead. There are no natural fitnesses in things, no given constraints that must not be
transgressed. Things that should not be put together, like the Oval Office and persons of
low intelligence, sometimes are. Occasionally, things that should be put together are not.
Some Americans are ignorant of the natural law that forbids the wearing of jeans without
belts. The widespread American use of the word “whatever” indicates that precision and
distinction are not held in the highest regard. It betrays how close the indiscriminate is to
the indifferent. De Tocqueville thought such eclecticism was also true of American Eng-
lish, which mixed the vulgar and the refined without discrimination. It came, he thought,
from the pitching together of social strata which in Europe would stay strictly separate.
If one thing is valuable, and so is another, then it is arithmetically self-evident that to
have them both is even more of a good thing. Sikh turbans are cool, and so are Scottish
kilts, so why not wear them both together? Why not have it all rather than settle for half?
The European instinct is for either/or, while the American impulse is for both/and. Amer-
icans are open to new configurations of experience, while Europeans suspect that the new
will simply turn out to be a recycled version of the old. America is a genuinely path-break-
ing nation which has always had the boldness to embrace the unfamiliar. This, however,
has come to mean that newness in the States is a value in itself—a curious belief, since fas-
cism was an innovation in its time, and the Spanish Inquisition was remarkably up-to-date.
The course of human history is strewn with repellent novelties.
If something is good, then it also follows that it is good to have as much of it as possible.
Limits are taboo in this sense as well. Why settle for a steak as big as your fist when you
could have one the size of Chris Christie? The American appetite is in this sense no more
restrained than American speech is reticent. The nation sees little beauty in sparseness or
symmetry. Amplitude is valued over leanness. Extravagance wins out over elegance. Nor
does the country seem to appreciate the fact that appetites can be pleasurably enhanced by
being curbed, as the naked body is more seductive when it is suggestively veiled. If there
is so much obesity in the United States, it is among other things because the idea that you
should eat only as much as is good for you suggests a standard independent of one's appet-
ites, which is a distinctly suspect notion. There can be no objective yardstick in the mar-
ketplace. You cannot get outside your own desires and judge them from an external stand-
point, since desire is what you are made of. Desire is its own measure.
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