The Affirmative Spirit - Across the Pond: An Englishman's View of America - page 73

alarms. Her teacher's response was “My, Alice sure loves to learn!” There are other ways
to describe the havoc she created.
In one sense, however, this endemic upbeatness is all to no avail. One index of national
happiness ranks the United States at a paltry number 150 among the world's nations. Amer-
icans are less likely to move upwards from their social class of origin than a whole array of
other countries. Since these are discouraging statistics, they are best ignored. Brooding on
them will make your hair fall out. In fact, for some Americans this is a genuine risk. Be-
ing negative generates vibes which can give you cancer, scupper your chances of financial
success, and drive your spouse to commit adultery with a whole soccer team.
Illness, however trivial and curable, is a foretaste of death, and thus a souvenir of our ul-
timate powerlessness. There are two ways of handling that impotence, the first of which is
to repress it. Reminding people that they are frail, vulnerable creatures is not the best way
of squeezing a profitable day's work out of them, or having them confront enemy bullets
in defence of the realm. The other way is the path of tragedy, which draws its power not
from sidestepping human frailty but from confronting and embracing it. It does not regard
suffering as positive, any more than the New Testament does. Instead, it holds that if one
has the misfortune to be visited by some affliction, one must try not to disavow it but to
pass all the way through it, in the hope that one might eventually emerge somewhere on the
other side. One must try to let go of oneself in the faith that one might find oneself again.
This is not the same as seeking out suffering in order to improve your character or enhance
your virility. People who do that are not tragic but absurd.
Cultures that can maintain a pact with failure are those than can thrive. Civilisations are
to be judged by how far they honour their father and their mother. The Biblical injunction
has nothing to do with the family. It had to do in its day with how one treated the old and
useless of the tribe, those who were unable to labour. The United States, unlike the writ-
ings of Samuel Beckett, is not especially enamoured of pacts with failure. It is a profoundly
anti-tragic nation, which has recently lived through one of the darkest episodes of its his-
tory. It is besieged by those who feel themselves to be on the sticky end of its formidable
power, and who are now striking murderously back. Militarily speaking, the country is su-
perbly well equipped to deal with these dangers. Spiritually speaking, its anti-tragic view
of existence leaves it peculiarly disarmed.
Not that the States is without its tragedies. I was once in a bookstore in the Midwest
when it was proudly announced over the public address system that the author of a topic
entitled Barns of Indiana was present in the store, and was willing to sign copies of his
topic. I emerged from around a bookcase to see a small, crumpled, shy-looking man sitting
at a table, pen poised hopefully in hand, beside a pile of topics that seemed to stretch to the
ceiling. Not a soul was within twenty yards of him, though the place was fairly crowded.
After lingering in the store for another hour or so, I made my way to the entrance only to
catch sight of the author still sitting at his table, visibly more crumpled in appearance, pen