FundamentallySound Blog

Last night Lee and I heard Bernard-Henri Lévy speak at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. With all of his talk of breathing the "air of freedom" in California, and the goodness of "real Americans" I almost thought I heard echoes of neo-conservative speech writers. This Lévy, he was made for the spotlight, if it wasn't for his intensely French accent Hollywood would have already swallowed him whole.

Lévy is a superstar public intellectual in France, jumping from a pop star's party to a war zone in Afghanistan without missing a beat. At the behest of Atlantic Monthly, he spent nine months traveling around America in the footsteps of Alexis de Tocqueville, looking for whatever it is French intellectuals keep looking for in the USA. Granted, I am not yet convinced Lévy is an intellectual, his speaking style is more like a deep south Baptist preacher, winning over the audience not by reasoned argument but by emotional and theatrical brilliance. I don't think there was anything particularly philosophical about the ideas he presented last night either, though he did mention Foucault in passing, not in relation to philosoophy, but because he lived in Berkeley for several years. Ah... It must be that Lévy is as brilliant as Foucalt because both have an interest in northern California!

All that aside, Lévy is fundamentally an optimist, coming to the conclusion that the machinery of Democracy still works in this country and that things will get better. He regaled the audience with stories of the "genuine" kindness of Americans, pointing out the ways in which victims of Katrina were abandoned by the government but saved by the grace of their neighbors. Of course throughout the evening a stack of Lévy's books waited outside the hall door, next to the cash register. Very clever that Lévy, he knows that making Americans feel good about themselves is a surefire way to get them to spend money.

I have to admit, there is a part of me buried deep inside that wants to believe Lévy. I want to believe that this country has a powerful, albeit currently latent, resistance to tyranny, and that we will never allow the seeds of fascism planted by Bush and his tribe to exist more than two four-year terms. But I am not really an optimist, certainly not as much as Lévy. I am not necessarily a pessimist either, but I am not an optimist, nor a patriot. My outlook is more akin to that of the American writer William T. Vollmann, who said, "We're not as bad as the Nazis. Not yet, anyway."