“America, I’ve given you everything and now I am nothing. It occurs to me that I am America”- says Allen Ginsberg in his autobiography Kaddish. After reading this statement, can we think of America as an individualist country? Anybody having read a bit about American history can recall terms such as the pioneer, the self-made man or the frontier-man, all of them reflecting the topic of individuality and the difference with the other: the “self” and “the other”. The American dream could be reached by means of trusting oneself and challenging one’s own limits. No way: the American dream is actually reached once you have defied yourself and have discovered where your place is within society and how to deal with the community. In America, as elsewhere, it is not possible to be purely individualist.
Nevertheless, progress is seen in a country where individual freedom and a certain establishment or collective agreement is respected, and this is also the case of the United States, at least in theory. Together with the Civil Rights and a Constitution where “all men are created equal” (this statement having its “buts”, though), all of them contributing to the progress of the community to make it develop in good terms, since every individual must feel identified with the country. The consequence of a pluralized interchange of single individuals with distinctive features is in the end what decides the configuration of what we have come to know as the United States.
Ginsberg seems to make a patriotic claim to his land with the phrase pointed at at the beginning, If he gives everything for his fatherland, he is nothing, may this be because he is nothing but America or because he loves his country so much that he sacrifices everything, resembling the way a martyr gives his/her life for God, glad to do it. In these terms, and as it has been commented on many times before, America is a kind of protecting god for its citizens, whose manierist expressions of patriotism know no limits. Actually, the limit itself is one’s transcendence, linked to the idea of private and public religion. And actually, it is probably within Europe where individuals are much more themselves and develop their personalities with total freedom, completely free from this American determination of being a new country, as well as from the responsibility of having to configure our own collective to show the rest. The claim in the Old World would be therefore “Europe, I’ve given you everything and now I’m a European yet an individual citizen, owner of my history and my independence. I am my balanced personality of past, present and future, and there is a Europe living in me”.
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Maybe Proverbs 29v18a might be pertinent to the article's bewailment of a lack of common identity?... 'Where there is no vision, the people perish'
Yes, thank you, though the 'article' is actually not moaning over a lack of common identity as such. My impression on Ginsberg's sentence was rather a vindication of European collective conscience as opposed to his Beat- claim for the praise of the American (patriotic)hero. Patriotism seems for me to have a slightly different meaning when read in an American or a European context. Currently both of them are compatible, for sure, but they clash at a certain point, which is where I wanted to point at. As you mention, blindness means death, and my suggestion to that is that a blind Europe -that is, a Europe unaware of its own roots and features- is no more the Old World, but a dead one.
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