Wonder Boy

National Review, May 5, 2003 by Ross Douthat

Being America: Liberty, Commerce, and Violence in an American World, by Jedediah Purdy (Knopf, $24, 352 pp.)

Jedediah Purdy, the American Left's winsome scourge of irony, is a great one for name-dropping. In the course of a three-page preface to this book, he cites Burke, Tocqueville, Shakespeare, and Hannah Arendt; by page 50, he has added Yeats, Whitman, Hamilton, Jefferson, Thoreau, Adam Smith, Oakeshott, the Buddha, Emerson, Montesquieu, and Augustine.

Such a welter of names might lead the reader to suspect that Purdy's book is a work of political philosophy -- and indeed, it sometimes wanders in that direction. It wanders elsewhere, too: through the tactics of the anti-globalization movement, the postmodern ad campaigns of companies like Benetton, and the cost of AIDS drugs in South Africa, as well as through the teeming cities of Egypt and Indonesia, Cambodia and China -- all stops on a tour that Purdy took in the autumn of 2000, "trying to understand the attraction and resentment, the imitation and resentment that America inspires in the world."

All that's missing, in fact, is Purdy's own life story -- but then, he already covered that ground in his debut effort, For Common Things: Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today, in which his attacks on Jerry Seinfeld, Fast Company magazine, and other horsemen of the Apocalypse were prefaced by a description of his homeschooled, achingly authentic West Virginia childhood. (Somehow, his years at Exeter and Harvard received less attention.) His parents didn't just educate him, Purdy wrote -- they "freed him to learn"; and he and his sister "played endless games with sticks, pebbles, old clothes, mud that we slathered across our naked bodies."

The absence of such cloying self-regard is enough to make Being America a better book than its predecessor, but not by much. Purdy has birthed an uneasy hybrid -- part social-studies thesis, part travelogue -- and freighted it with enough pomposity to sink a battleship. The book's overall purpose is never entirely clear, but the author's remark, early on, that "this is a time of American prominence when America means many contradictory things to many people" seems to serve as Being America's touchstone. What does America mean to Americans, Purdy wonders, and what does it mean to the world?

These are important questions, to be sure, but they are also much- answered ones. It will surprise few when Purdy reveals that many Americans have viewed themselves as inhabiting a "universal nation." Nor will many be shocked by the announcement that America is a deeply religious country, with a special faith in Providence -- or by the notion that Americans consider themselves more innocent, less corrupt, than the bloodied powers of the older world.

Americans, Purdy intones, "are migrants, merchants, and amnesiacs." (As his titles suggest, Purdy is fond of such neat trinities.) Americans are also liberals, both in politics and temperament -- "disinclined to impose . . . customs and beliefs" on others, willing to "let go of past wrongs in order to live in the present," and possessed of a "sense of justice."

These are controversial statements, one supposes, for people who have never cracked a history book or opened a newspaper. Perhaps that is Purdy's intended audience. It would explain his habit of boldly going where many have gone before, offering undaring, workmanlike glosses on American intellectual history that seem best suited to an exam-time study guide. His own conclusions, when they intrude on the sonorous summaries of Emerson and Hamilton, Whitman and Lincoln, have all the subversive, startling effect of a mediocre graduation speech. "The thought that power is morally dangerous has almost disappeared from political argument today," he declares, "yet remembering it adds sobriety to strength." Or again, we all "have a pair of obligations: to avoid believing that the least worst is the perfect, and to stay true to what is best in it."

Not content to have discovered American universalism, American innocence, and American liberalism, Being America then takes us abroad, in search of the world's response to our nation of "migrants, merchants, and amnesiacs." Here, the book picks up somewhat: Purdy wanders in Indian shopping malls, interviews Cambodian labor organizers, and encounters politico-religious paranoia among Egypt's Muslims and Coptic Christians alike. While hardly a natural reporter, he has a knack for getting introduced to interesting people, whether they be N. R. Narayana Murthy, a software tycoon dubbed "the Indian Bill Gates," who designs his industrial park to physically resemble Silicon Valley ("to show our foreign clients that we are serious, that we are world-class"), or Steven Dong, a Chinese professor and talk-show anchor hired by the Communist government to improve its public relations, who tells Purdy that China's regime needs better "packaging," and perhaps a celebrity spokeswoman.

This is interesting material, but the author never leaves well enough alone, instead seizing every chance to lecture his readers. Just as Purdy fancies himself the first to have discovered the Puritans, the Federalists, and the Transcendentalists, he imagines that no one before him has heard of Nelson Mandela, or Tiananmen Square, or the Asian financial crisis. He cannot discuss HIV drugs in post-apartheid South Africa without providing a four-page history of AIDS in America, from Ryan White to Philadelphia; nor can he visit Phnom Penh without explaining who the Khmer Rouge were ("a fanatical group of Communists," apparently) and what Pol Pot did to Cambodia.