Americans No More: The Death of Citizenship. - book reviews

National Review, Oct 28, 1996 by Reid Buckley

NEXT to God and religion, the concept most likely to give offense in America today may be patriotism.

Outwardly manifested patriotic sentiment, like religious sentiment, embarrasses sophisticated company. Among the reasons: folk with the education, the knowledge, and presumably the vested interest in the United States most to hold our country in high regard are in significant numbers alienated from contemporary American society, whose morals, mores, intellectual flatulence, greed, and materialism they find personally repulsive. Equally, though for inverse reasons, the charter member of the Anti-Defamation League, the militant in the ranks of the ACLU, black separatists, the Chicano raising the fist of la Raza, the Radcliffe graduate to whom feminism will forever be the story of her life, the Hollywood producer of the Oliver Stone stamp, cannot love America because of its inherent fascism, white male Anglo complacency, and ineradicable racism.

The consequence of this alienation is a radical decline in the virtue that is indispensable to the coherence of a nation, which we call citizenship. Georgie Anne Geyer's new book, Americans No More, is excruciating to read on two counts. The first is this: in unsparing detail, it documents the decline, debasement, and dissolution of citizenship, leaving this reader depressed and also feeling guilty.

There is waning cohesive public spirit in the country as the middle class become ever more disgusted with the political process, throwing up their collective hands in disgust and immuring themselves behind the gates of affluent suburban security. Tocqueville defined the genius of our democracy as the eagerness of the average American to join with other citizens in order to do good. That civic-mindedness is fast diminishing. There is no center left, just as there is no public square in which the populace commingles peacefully and joyfully. We are the atomized, boobtubed, wheeled society. There is no downtown Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles, Detroit: when the bustle of the business day ceases, what remains are canyons of fear, despair, and vice.

As a society, we are disintegrating into hostile factions rooted in ethnic and economic group interest, and including an increasingly criminal underclass which views itself as the institutional victim of an oppressive establishment. Since 1965 we have been at the mercy of invading hordes from foreign lands. Citizenship has been cheapened. One need not speak the English language to gain admittance. One need know virtually nothing of the theology, philosophy, history, theory, practice, or norms of our distinctively American republic, which, like it or not, depends on the Judaeo - Christian view of creation and owes its existence to the slow political evolution of the British serf in the direction of sovereign citizenship. In fact, one may actively despise this tradition, one may insult it and blaspheme against it, and nevertheless be granted admittance. We have so lost faith in ourselves and in the peculiar providence of our origins that whereas the city of San Jose removes a beloved crcche from its park to appease the inquisitors of secularism, town fathers pay tens of thousands of dollars to erect a ten-foot-tall, cast-iron statue of Quetzalcoatl, a pagan and bloody god belonging to a superseded culture. And not only is the country being flooded by millions of illegal immigrants; these squatters are being accorded privileges that properly should be available to citizens only, such as state-supported education, free school lunches, free medical care, and so forth, including the vote. You got it right. In an excess of sentimental idiocy, well-meaning liberal enclaves across the country (Wassau, Wisconsin; Takoma Park, outside Washington, D.C.) have accorded immigrant newcomers who are not yet citizens a voting say in local affairs.

We are fast becoming Balkanized, Miss Geyer argues, a country with no common vision and no common faith. Chapter by chapter she details this decay, which approaches the irreversible and portends more Los Angeles riots, more TWA Flight 800s, more Oklahoma City bombings, heading toward the last radical rupture -- what we see in Yugoslavia, Lebanon, India, and in hellish nations such as Rwanda or Ethiopia.

Miss Geyer is at her best when she is debunking the public misunderstanding of the words inside the base of the Statue of Liberty, ''Give me your tired, your poor . . . ,'' which, she explains, were written by Emma Lazarus, a Zionist, and were never intended to characterize American immigration policies; or when she is examining the new totalitarian spirit in this country deriving from post-modernism and deconstructionism by way of multiculturalism.

But I said this book was excruciating to read on two counts. Here is the second. Miss Geyer is prolix. She piles example on example with the effect of smothering the point she is making. A hundred pages should have been edited out of this book. Her allusions are sometimes so esoteric that a po' country boy like me fails to make the connection: as when she pins down her argument by saying, ''And at that moment I thought of my respected friend Askar Akaev, the president of faraway Kirghizstan, who essentially had told me the same thing.'' On top of which, Miss Geyer is an atrocious writer. I mean bad. She cannot leave well enough alone: all her sources are introduced as ''fine,'' ''wise,'' ''penetrating,'' ''brilliant,'' ''seminal.'' She is enamored of apocalyptical adjectives. Everything is ''dramatic,'' ''incredible,'' ''terrifying,'' ''tragic,'' ''diabolic.'' From page 21 alone: ''I was in India that hot, ominous summer . . .'' (When was an Indian summer cool, or unominous?) ''Those events had their zenith [one attains or rises to one's zenith], though surely not their end [she means limit], in the Armageddonesque [aaargh] explosion of hatred that shook India to [guess where?] its ethnic roots.''