America

According to its representations, America has moved from representing Europe's past to representing Europe's future and from the epitome of nature to the epitome of technology, polar opposite views. Four points might be noted, however, that raise questions about the validity of these representations. First, descriptions of America have been fantastical from the beginning. They are inaccurate and often intentionally so. Second, although twentieth-century thinkers blame the United States for the technologization of the world, it is apparent that the technological attitude long predates the founding of the United States. Columbus and the conquistadores neither saw the New World for what it was nor had any desire to do so. Rather, they sought to exploit resources and people, and this is the essence of the technological attitude, the attitude that some claim began only with the United States. Third, twentieth-century thinkers miss the mark in blaming America for problems that have to do with modernity itself. Because the United States was created from scratch by colonists with minimal feudal baggage, the United States emerged as perhaps the purest embodiment of modern values. But there are multinational corporations in Europe and other countries around the world, and most people wherever they live in the world desire the standard of living and freedom that the United States—and many modern countries—have. So while there is a certain justification for seeing the United States as embodying modernity, it is not modernity's sole embodiment.

Fourth, there is a fundamental continuity in the views about America. The Indians have been described as on the one hand, naïve, innocent, childlike, and simple, and on the other as brutish, vulgar, shallow, stupid, and lacking spirituality. These are essentially the same charges that Europe and the world leveled at the United States throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The United States might be all of these things, although probably not more than most countries and possibly less so than many. But the fact that ways of life as opposite as those of the Indians and the United States are described in fundamentally the same terms indicates a problem in the substantive nature of the representations.

As an epilogue, it is worth noting briefly a postmodern view of America. Postmodern thinkers reject the idea of there being any humanly knowable truth and choose to play with images, which they claim is all we are left with. The French postmodern thinker Jean Baudrillard has done this with the United States. In a book entitled America (1986; English translation published in 1988), Baudrillard writes contradictorally, "For me there is no truth of America" and, "I knew all about this nuclear form, this future catastrophe when I was still in Paris, of course." He also mixes all of the main images of America, describing the United States both as "the original version of Modernity" and as "the only remaining primitive society." For him, America is the "Primitive society of the future." He combines five hundred years of images of America in a clever fashion.