America Present Volume

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Nobody saves america by sniffing cocaine,
Jiggling yr knees blankeyed in the rain,
When it snows in yr nose you catch cold in yr brain.
—Allen Ginsberg (b. 1926)

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Unfortunately, nearly all the “sights” in america fall under the head of conditions. Hollywood, Reno, the sharecroppers’ homes in the South, the mining towns of Pennsylvania, Coney Island, the Chicago stockyards, Macy’s, the Dodgers, Harlem, even Congress, the forum of our liberties, are spectacles rather than sights, to use the term in the colloquial sense of “Didn’t he make a holy spectacle of himself?” An Englishman of almost any political opinion can show a visitor through the Houses of Parliament with a sense of pride or at least of indulgence toward his national foibles and traditions. The american, if he has a spark of national feeling, will be humiliated by the very prospect of a foreigner’s visit to Congress—these, for the most part, illiterate hacks whose fancy vests are spotted with gravy, and whose speeches, hypocritical, unctuous and slovenly, are spotted also with the gravy of political patronage, these persons are a reflection on the democratic process rather than of it; they expose it in its underwear.
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)