America
is looked upon as a paradise by people from all over the world.
The pastoral ideal of the Founding Fathers like Thomas Jefferson
has faded. American writers such as Henry David Thoreau, F
Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway lamented this. The Civil
War spurred industrialization and urbanization, leading to
air, water and soil pollution. Abraham Lincoln's definition
of democracy seems hardly valid now, since the political system
is controlled by powerful corporations and lobbies. Liberty,
equality and fraternity, the triple ideals of people are getting
eroded. The American family, as an institution, is breaking
up, as shown in the plays of Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams,
and Edward Albee. The drug culture, with its credo, "steal from him before he steals from you," has taken hold of the youth. Mass media, with its strong nexus to politics and Big Business, manipulates public opinion and makes the worse appear the better reason. The youth are driven to despair and insanity. While Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton committed suicide, many others frequent psychiatrists. Allen Ginsberg's `Howl' is an indictment of an entire system and culture. The pursuit of materialism has transformed a paradise into a "madness-inducing machine." The far side of the cherished American Dream is a frightening nightmare.
For many people around the world, America is a new Garden of Eden, a second paradise. It is a land of abundance, a haven of freedom, and, not the least, a land of opportunity. No wonder if the United States attracts people from all over the world. An immigrant visa, or a green card, or US citizenship has become a status symbol for thousands of young men and women in our country in the last few decades. For
the less fortunate people who are unable to emigrate to the
US, the consolation is the study of American civilization,
with deferred hopes of making it to the paradise some day.
Our enthusiasm for American Studies seems to have made many
of us focus our attention, by and large, on the idea of the
paradise that is America. Either by design or default, we
hardly venture in our academic pursuits to peep into the other
side of the paradise. A study of the American civilization
which is confined only to one side, howsoever important that
might be, can only be a partial understanding of that culture.
It remains a broken arc, not the perfect round, as Robert
Browning would say. |
