This is a strange land to say the least. At least this is what it looks like in the eyes of a European, that in addition deeply appreciates everything that is European. Yesterday I found myself at the closing dinner of a US-dominated science meeting in Cold Spring Harbor and have to say that I found the overload of what I have always considered fundamentally "american" quite overwhelming.
What do I find "american"? The tendency of excess in everything, the complete absence of measure and the overconsumption in all levels, starting from the amounts of food we were fed by the meeting organizers to the absurdity of keeping the temperature of the auditorium at 14 degrees in early May. The avidity to make money out of everything, to demystify everything and to mock your own living legends, which was manifest yesterday, first in having James Watson giving a small talk about his own genome (!!! comments about this in an upcoming post) and then putting on sale at the Institute's gift shop (its existence alone stands out as obvious "americanism") an advertising poster for Apple computers, picturing James Watson and signed by himself at the rediculous price of $2000!!!
The closing dinner, found me lost in such thoughts and seeking refuge in the company of my "fellow" catalans, my witty boss (shifted towards the wittier with a little bit of wine) and an old colleague from France, named France. After the dinner, we had the honour and the privilege to testify that geeky scientists, are not necessarily geeky all day long, and even if they like to talk about work all the time, they still can have their own special moments. So I witnessed a great part of the meeting participants having a bowl at the concert of "Ethidium Spill" (a group constituted by meeting attendees in itself), which involved crazy dancing, a lot of drinks and even the transient formation of some couples right there at the aftermath of four days of talks, posters and pretending-to-care-about-genomes.
What stroke me though was neither the brief and spontaneous transition of top-notch scientists to party animals (which was expected) nor the proneness of them scientists to get drank at the end of the conference (which was even more anticipated). It was the all-american repertoire of the band, to which I paid special attention not because it was really worth it but merely out of my supposed inherent interest in music, and the frenetic response of the audience to tunes I had always considered as the epitomy of US "college-surf-drive-in-burger" culture. I had only suddenly realized I was in the US.
Moreover, little by little, just by observing the people's reactions, their cheer and enthusiasm, their defiance of any constraint for "comme-il-faut" behaviour, in the end their convenience in not taking themselves at all seriously, I ended up in admiring them. They had spent an entire five days in trying to prove (with very moderate results) that they are in the process of changing the world, they enjoyed each and every moment adulating each other, being flattered by one another and then there they were acting like as they were back in college, naively thinking they still remain the high school kids they once have been, reminiscing their youth to the sounds of what they consider the greatest songs ever, arrogantly believing they live in the greatest country of them all.
And then it occurred to me equally suddenly as clearly. That this is this country's ultimate power. The lack of any constraint, the absence of proper behaviour, the obvious, self-evident right to go on your way, with no obligation to look behind since there is nothing back there for you to look up to. In fact, I think that what we Europeans consider to be the Americans's greatest defect, namely their lack of history and intellectual pillars to stand on, is at the same time their greatest advantage. America has no Socrates or Feidias, Virgilius or Cicero, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Moliere, Flaubert, Beethoven or Dostoyevski, no Pericles, Leonidas, Julius Cesar, Charlemagne. They share no history that goes back to thousands of years and therefore they feel no shadow being cast upon them by the giants of a glorious past. Americans have every right to invent themselves and in fact they keep doing it with great ease and efficiency. They have actually re-invented USA more than once and I think that Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, George Gershwin, Elias Cazan, John Steinbeck, Richard Feynman, John Coltrane, Woody Allen, Martin Scorcese and Curt Cobain would agree with me.
Constantly re-inventing one's identity is, naturally, quite easy if your sense of historicity is exhausted in overpricing Nobel Prize laureate' s autographs, but then again this is probably part of the system that allows our fellow Americans, not to ever get attached to the past and keep moving forward with no sense of continuum whatsoever. The lack of origins should never preclude the trajectory and although the destination might not be the desirable one, it is the journey that matters.
That's something new, a new perspective to view those people, never thought the americans like this. But still, something is missing, something that will explain their tendancy to think of themselfs as gods (like the roman empire, but having done no good for the "barbarians"), giving them every sort of rights, to bombard distant countries, or killing their own people. Remember also that this country invented the high-school masacre.
ReplyDeleteYes, but we have Snoopy.
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