Nabe at the Casa Malaparte in Capri. Quel homme !
4 p.m. in Stanford, CA. I’m sitting at the Coffee House (widely known as CoHo), thumbing through the pages of J’enfonce le clou and sipping a decaf cappuccino. The former is a collection of essays that Marc-Édouard Nabe wrote in the aftermath of 9/11. The latter is a potent laxative, not to be consumed before important meetings or lengthy exams. Nabe is, I think, a bit overrated. Lots of whining about cultural decadence and few solutions. He thinks that writers should be more like terrorists and less like academics. More bomb-throwing and fewer dinners at the Faculty Club. Less striving to be part of ‘The Culture’ and more tearing it down. And lots of other platitudes like that.
Nabe’s got a problem with lots of other writers. Take Mario Vargas Llosa, for instance. Nabe calls him “le nanti d’une Amérique latine en décrépitude.” Vargas Llosa flew first-class to Baghdad after the Americans invaded and wrote an article about his time there for Le Monde –– a bourgeois rag filled with bien-pensants. He lamented the fate of the Kurds and the victims of Saddam Hussein, he worried about the rise of Shiism, he admired the grit of the resisters. Bref, il y a de quoi vomir. Nabe also flew to Baghdad post-invasion to see how the people lived. But no one rolled out the red carpet for him. He spent a few weeks slumming it with the Sufis, boiling water in tin pots and sleeping in a one-room home with fifteen other people. Or so we’re to imagine. He doesn’t go into details, of course. Details are the déclassé vice of the writer-academic, always desperate to prove his street credentials to an entranced bourgeois readership.
Like any self-respecting European, Nabe hates America. He hates the American state and American policies. He hates the American war in Iraq. And he hates Americans themselves. He hates their consumerism, their hawkishness, their disdain for the arts, their unquestioning patriotism, their stupidity. Most of all he hates their stupidity. American stupidity is the worst form of stupidity because it combines a neanderthalic innocence with an unjustifiable self-righteousness. America is the Chernobyl of the cultural apocalypse. It oozes violence and decadence and hatred of the good-and-beautiful-and-true. The fight against America is a spiritual warfare. One must steel his mind against the seductive charms of single-family homes and gas-guzzling Hummers and strip malls. On n’est jamais assez anti-américain.
Things written in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 now have a certain quaintness. All the stuff Nabe worries about –– the humanitarian crisis of the Iraq War, the moral enfeeblement of the West, the mass exportation of a brain-rotted American cultural economy –– all of this has come to pass. And new crises have emerged in their stead. The world feels increasingly bleak and hostile and troubled. My generation, by any measure one of the wealthiest and most educated in human history, is plagued by depression and anxiety and other more novel neuroses. We spent a year of our lives online and indoors. Our attention spans have been steadily shortened by compulsive use of social media. And, as if our adolescences weren’t bad enough, we’re told that our adult lives will be marked by impending ecological disaster.
Surely life in 2004 was easier. Or was it really that bad? The past always looks simpler from the vantage point of the present. And what if Nabe has a point? Between terrorism and wars on terrorism and The Passion of the Christ and American neanderthals and…
Enfin, je me fais chier.