MAINSTREAM MYOPIA

Louis Menand writes that “Postwar,” Tony Judt’s new history of Europe since 1945, tells “a remarkable story, and, fortunately, ‘Postwar’ is a remarkable book.” We thought Menand’s New Yorker piece, “From the Ashes,” was pretty remarkable, too — that is, until our friend William Osborne — an American expat composer, musicologist and cultural observer who has lived in Europe for more than a quarter century — offered his take on it.

“Interesting review,” Osborne writes, “but something bothers me about Menand — the essentializing Manhattan worldview, a hidden agenda that everything revolves around American finance and globalization.”
(We hadn’t thought of that.)

Menand writes: “Western Europe rebuilt its economy because U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall proposed a plan of unprecedented financial assistance, and the plan was intelligently implemented.”

(That’s pretty much the standard view.)

Osborne responds: “What myopia! What were the Europeans going to do, sit in their rubble indefinitely and do nothing if the Americans didn’t help them? In reality, the Europeans would have rebuilt anyway. The Marshall Plan was in large part a massive effort to quickly bring Western Europe under America’s sphere of influence and to keep it from taking a third way between America and the Soviet Union. The communists and socialists were very powerful in Western Europe. The United States conducted a massive campaign against them. The Marshall Plan was part of that history. Parts of the work were indeed altruistic, but there was a big hidden agenda.”

Menand writes: “Western Europe became a place of social planning, nationalized economies, and strong states not because democratic socialism was in the Continental genes but because there were no reserves of private capital and few viable non-governmental institutions around to put the world back together again.”

(Again, pretty much the standard view.)

Osborne responds: “Uh yeah, political thought isn’t genetic — and let’s not forget to put in a putdown of social democracy. In reality, socialist thought had deeply influenced Europe’s intellectual life, and many of the programs instituted in Europe were also formulated by the leaders of Roosevelt’s New Deal — a history the American corporatocracy now wishes to erase. The state radio and television networks of Europe, for example, were established through the influence of America. They thrived in Europe, but the rightwingers in our own American society never let us have such benefits ourselves. The neoliberal agenda is now to destroy Europe’s social democracies as well. This is what Mr. Menand and Mr. Judt know full well, and yet they remain carefully silent.”

Menand, left, writes: “The European model, Judt says, was mostly an accident. There was no great political vision; necessity and pragmatism ruled the day. As [Foreign Affairs edtior Hamilton Fish] Armstrong wrote, you cannot eat ideology. A lot of what Americans take to be traditionally European is simply an artifact of the postwar scramble for survival, for example, national branding. The notion that cars made in Germany would ipso facto be better crafted than others, or that Italian-designed clothing, Belgian chocolates, French kitchenware, or Danish furniture were unquestionably the best to be had: this would have seemed curious indeed just a generation before, Judt writes. But it worked: Americans paid a premium for German engineering and Italian styling imagining that centuries of native craftsmanship lay behind them.”

(We bought a Volkswagen once. It was cheap, and it worked great in the snow drifts of Northern Vermont.)

Osborne responds: “That is much overstated. Fine machine tooling does indeed have a long German tradition. And the Italians have been known for elegant design for 500 years. But of course, if you want to destroy cultural identity and create a massive neoliberal global economy, history and culture have to be erased. It’s all just marketing, the sly neoliberal tells us.”

Menand writes: “From the provincial American point of view, the most striking change in the status of Europe is that it is no longer the place where Americans with intellectual, artistic, or just life style aspirations wish or even pretend to wish to be.”

(Scheisse! Call us provincials. We’ll still take the French côte d’azure for our vacations anytime.)

Osborne responds: “OK, Mr. American White Guy, go live in Toledo or Omaha. Forget Paris, Utrecht, Heidelberg, Sienna, Florence, Dresden, Salzburg, Copenhagen, Barcelona, Prague, and Amsterdam. There’s nothing quite like the wisdom of a closet neoliberal East Side Harvard professor writing for The New Yorker.”

Menand writes: “Once, Europe was where all the new stuff seemed to be coming from. Then, some time in the nineteen-sixties, that stopped. Europe’s great cities are still fascinating to Americans, but the fascination is fundamentally touristic. They’re theme parks. Almost no one thinks that you can’t be a real writer or painter or sophisticated bon vivant unless you spend some time living in one of them. This is not a judgment on the splendors of American civilization; it’s just an observation about European civilization, and it bears on what sort of role in the world Europe will play during the rest of the century.”

Osborne responds: “The Harvard professor apparently hasn’t heard of Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, Henze, Stockhausen, Berio, Boulez, Beckett, Pinter, Pirondello, Fellini, Jean Renoir, and on and on. America is not nearly capable of producing intellectuals like these, because it does not even have the cultural infrastructure to support them. In fact, the American system, with institutions such as Hollywood, has already done much to destroy parts of Europe’s fine intellectual life, including its once-wonderful film industry. Someone please take Mr. Menand to a Fellini film or a concert of Berio’s ‘Sinfonia’ or a Beckett play before he turns into a complete Yankee imbecile.”

(Now that we’ve been hipped, we’re going to sit down to lunch and, like the rest of our compatriot imbeciles, devour yesterday’s turkey leftovers.)

— Tireless Staff of Thousands