Legal Commentary

Since Paul has already identified the truly important material in this week's NY Times book review, it remains for me to note David Brooks's piqued reaction to Simon Schama's "The American Future: A History."  Brooks disdainfully places it in the "brilliant book" category -- "the sort of book written by a big thinker who comes to capture the American spirit while armed only with his brilliance," and one can feel the indignant irritation radiating off the screen.  The genre includes Bernard-Henri Levy's psychological road trip across America, "American Vertigo," in which the redoubtable Frenchman goes on safari through l'Amerique profonde and reports back on the zoological curiosities encountered along the way. 

I've not read Schama's book, but I am actually more interested here in Brooks's reivew.  I did read portions of Levy's book, and I also recall Garrison Keillor's angry and rather ungracious review of it a few years ago.  I wonder how much longer we are destined for this predictable game -- one which de Tocqueville began, and played well to be sure, but whose staleness seems to increase with each new iteration.  Are we forever condemned to play the earnest, irritated, self-important simpletons?  They tweak.  We react.  And they give off that familiar culturally knowing chortle at the reaction -- as regular and predictable a pattern as one can find in Henry James's renditions of Americans abroad (the majority of which are now more than a century old).  Che noia. 

It does not help in the least when Brooks trots out the exceptionalist nonsense that "of all the books it is impossible to write, the most impossible is a book trying to capture the spirit of America."  Gimme a break.  This bit of embarrassingly pious drivel is attributed to Jacques Barzun, a particularly odd source of inspiration, since Barzun has shown little reluctance to write "books of brilliance" -- but maybe a declinist intellectual history of the entirety of "Western Cultural Life" just isn't nearly as audacious as capturing the ineffable spiritual essence of a comparative baby on the historical scene.  

Here's my strategy for breaking this obnoxious and tiresome cycle.  Now that we have been provisionally re-admitted to the global confraternity of cosmopolites, having put our anti-deluvian renaissance squarely in the rear-view mirror, perhaps it's time to turn the tables.  I suggest a new genre -- one in which those with pretensions to be American public intellectuals tool all around south-western France (avoiding Paris, of course -- we are only interested in la France profonde) and write "spiritual essence" books of brilliance that explain France to the French (or, insert here your own favorite European stalking horse).  Then we can at last play the provocateur, and we can respond to the eminently predictable indignation with a well-placed "Quelle mouche t'a pique', mon cher?"  Do you think summer money might be available for this sort of enterprise?