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Angels and Demons
There is a kind of American speech which sounds too inflated to Europeans. At its least in-
spired, American English is a language soggy with superlatives: great, fantastic, awesome,
amazing, wonderful, incredible (but not, on the whole, superb, formidable, splendid, or mag-
nificent). One sometimes wonders if there has ever been an American who was not a very
wonderful person, with the possible exception of Charles Manson.
The novelist Milan Kundera writes in
The topic of Laughter and Forgetting
of a vision
of the world he calls angelic—or, somewhat less politely, “shitless.” This way of seeing is
full of beams, smiles and high-minded platitudes, averse to all that is dark-tinged, recalcit-
rant or disagreeable. The angelic march cheerfully forward into an ever rosier future, radi-
ant and wide-eyed, disowning all complexity and ambiguity in their triumphalist self-con-
viction. Kundera is thinking of the ideological rhetoric of the East European Communist
states, which were still alive and kicking at the time he was writing, but the point has a
bearing on the world's most powerful capitalist nation as well. To the European mind, high-
pitched rhetoric suggests among other things racist rants and ranks of goose-stepping war-
riors. Americans are in love with spectacle, but in the wake of Nazism, spectacle in Europe
can never be quite the same again. Instead, in Britain above all, there is ceremony, which is
rather different.
The opposite of the angelic for Kundera, predictably enough, is the demonic, by which
he means the language of the cynical and nihilistic, one with too little meaning rather than
(like the angelic) one stuffed with sonorous clichés. There is enough demonic discourse in
the States to suit anyone's taste, but the fact remains that the official rhetoric of the coun-
try (which, one should stress, is far from the discourse of everyday life) is too pious, elev-
ated, hand-on-heart and histrionic for us jaded Europeans. A dash of the demonic would do
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