FreeLists / lit-ideas / [lit-ideas] Re: It Doesn't Stay in Vegas

["Andy Amago" <aamago@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Lawrence, are you lamenting that Americans are not warlike enough? We're too 
soft, can't stomach war? Or are we not warlike enough but not as bad as the 
Europeans? 


----- Original Message ----- 
From: Lawrence Helm 
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: 5/1/2006 8:39:40 PM 
Subject: [lit-ideas] It Doesn't Stay in Vegas


I subscribed to Francis Fukuyama?s new journal, The American Interest, and just 
received my first copy.  I?ve read some of the articles and they are very good. 
 Unfortunately there were only teasers on the AI web site 
www.the-american-interest.com until I got to ?It Doesn?t Stay in Vegas,? in 
which the peripatetic Frenchman, Bernard-Henri Levi? is described as duking ?it 
out with Frances Fukuyama over American virtues and vices, neoconservatives, 
religion, the future of American muscular internationalism, and the role of 
intellectuals in a free society.?  The AI website provides this as a ?free 
article? ? a very good choice: http://www.the-american-interest.com/cms/bhl.cfm 
.

Here is an excerpt and Fukuyama at his best: ?The End of History and the Last 
Man ended with ruminations about the possibility that modern democracy would 
yield "men without chests", wedded to ever-increasing peace and prosperity. 
During the Clinton years, in our preoccupation with the NASDAQ and Monica 
Lewinsky, that seemed a fair conclusion. But on further reflection, it has 
seemed to me that America was not remotely in danger of becoming the home of 
the Hegelian last man. Now that the United States has launched two wars in the 
new millennium, it seems like an even less apt concern. The last man actually 
lives in Europe. 
?This, it seems to me, is the essential paradox you deal with in American 
Vertigo: Americans have this incredible energy, they've created a faux paradise 
in the desert at home and now they want to make deserts bloom in the Middle 
East. But they go about it in a clumsy and self-defeating way, and they have 
neither the imperial bloody-mindedness nor the steady judgment to see the 
project through. Maybe so. But if global leadership were left up to Europeans, 
they would either acquiesce in whatever exists, or they would make cynical 
deals to preserve their own narrow interests while talking about universal 
rights and justice.? 
Lawrence