[D66] Amrika: utopia achieved

[A.O.]

Boude stelling:


The US is utopia achieved.

We should not judge their crisis as we would judge our own, the crisis
of the old European countries. Ours is a crisis of historical ideals
facing up to the impossibility of their realization. Theirs is a crisis
of an achieved utopia, confronted witht he problem of duration and
permanence. The Americans are not wrong in their idyllic conviction that
they are at the centre of the world, the supreme power, the absolute
model for everyone. And this conviction is not so much founded on
natural resources, technologies, and arms, as on the miraculous premise
of a utopia made reality, of a society which, with a directness that we
might judge unbearable, is built on the ideal that it the the
realization of everything the others have dreamt of - justice, plenty,
rule of law, wealth, freedom: it knows this, it believes in it, and in
the end, the others have come to believe in it too.

In the present crisis of values, everyone ends up turning towards the
culture that dared to forge right ahead, towards that society which,
thanks to the geographical and mental break effected by emigration,
allowed itself to imagine it could create an ideal world from nothing.
We should also not forget the fantasy consecration of this process by
the cinema. Whatever happens, and whatever one thinks of the arrogance
of the dollar or the multinationals, it is this culture which, the world
over, fascinates those very people who suffer most at its hands, and it
does so through the deep, insane conviction that is has made all their
dreams come true. --Jean Baudrillard