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terminism. Nor do Americans see illness as a moral failing. Some of them, however, seem
to feel that it is morally offensive to take a negative view of it. Developing cancer may not
be anti-American, but complaining about it certainly can be. Barbara Ehrenreich notes in
her invaluable
Smile or Die
that breast cancer is often referred to in the United States as
a “gift.” Some sufferers wouldn't be without it, just as they wouldn't be without their Sia-
mese cats or Shetland sweaters. Instead of being life-changing in the sense of killing you, it
is life-changing in the sense of making you a more caring, sensitive person. There are those
of us who would prefer to be brutal, insensitive and alive.
Given the American penchant for euphemism, it is a wonder that dying is not spoken
of as “transformatively transitioning,” as in “Seven of the rebels were wounded, and three
others were transformatively transitioned.” In the same upbeat vein, being thrown out of
work is sometimes redefined by the magic of the signifier as a “career-changing opportun-
ity.” Only whiners would object that some changes are undesirable. Some Americans seem
to hold the bizarre view that change is a good in itself, as though swapping your brandy and
soda for a cup of cold vomit is bound to represent an imaginative leap forward. They would
be astounded by Samuel Johnson's remark that all change is a great evil. They would also
be right to reject it, though not because all change is a great good.
The Pleasures of Indolence
It is no secret that Americans are deeply anxious about their bodies. In fact, if U.S. tele-
vision ads are to be believed, they are worried about them to the point of mass psychosis.
A nation's media is not of course a faithful image of its actual life. If that were the case,
all Americans would be in a permanent state of orgasmic joy, would never cease to grin
manically or have toddlers tumble joyously all over them, and would have teeth so spark-
ling that those around them would need shades. When I once visited an American dentist
plagued by acute toothache, I was surprised to find that the first question on the form I had
to fill out was “What do you feel about your smile?” This seemed rather like being asked
how you felt about your hairstyle when admitted to hospital for brain surgery.
The media, needless to say, do not habitually tell it like it is. Even so, they distil
something of a culture's abiding preoccupations, in however monstrously distorted a guise.
In this sense they are rather like dreams, which present real thoughts and desires in garbled,
disfigured form. If the social unconscious of the United States is to be credited, all is not
well with the flesh and blood of the Land of the Free. Americans today have a problem
about being incarnate creatures, rather as their Puritan forefathers did. They would not
readily agree with Thomas Aquinas that human rationality is an animal rationality, and that
it is the body, not some disembodied mind or spirit, that is the criterion of human identity.
Aquinas would have believed in the existence of the disembodied soul of Jimi Hendrix, but
he would not have believed that it was Jimi Hendrix. American culture is typically more
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