Читать книгу Livin' la Vida Barroca. American Culture in an Age of Imperial Orthodoxies онлайн

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The person who fails to acknowledge the “inherent” truth of these orthodoxies is quickly labeled as “naïve or “unserious” and is banished from any significant role in the opinion-making or policy making apparatus of the nation. As a result, the country has no ability to engender and sustain a free-ranging, outcomes-focused conversation about our most pressing social and political problems.

Knowing this but still squeamish about acknowledging it, we have, like the inhabitants of imperial Spain and Portugal before us, learned to cover up the tragedy of our own impotence by basking in largely peripheral esthetics. We celebrate black presidents for their blackness and alleged intelligence and style while largely ignoring whether they have a moral compass, or a the ability—which is about the least one can ask of a person entrusted with such immense power—to sketch out a compelling vision for the future of the nation.

Ours is a society in which the crafty and articulate temporizer has much more social cache than the speaker of plain truths. We call the first thoughtful, reasonable and well-balanced. The second is inevitably described as rash, negative or unrealistic, even when his or her grasp of observables is clearly more detailed and historically-informed that that of the former