If you plucked an average American (mean, median, or modal) out of Kansas City or Aurora, and plopped them down in the middle of Gothenburg, the average American would be very unhappy. Yes, they’d have generous social benefits and lots of vacation, but they’d also be crammed into a small apartment in a very small country. They wouldn’t be able to afford services that average Americans take for granted, like lots of restaurant foods and extremely high levels of customer service, which means they’d spend a lot more time doing basic housework, childcare, and so forth. They would find it very expensive to fuel their car, and the insular, almost formal culture would make them crazy.This is also true the other way, by the way; the average Swede would not be happy living in America. Sure, they’d have a huge house, filled with cheap consumer goods, and they could drive their car everywhere, particularly to their incredible array of dining options. But they’d miss their vacation and find America’s looser safety net both terrifying and inconvenient. They would hate the inefficiency of our government services, and miss their cozy circle of friends and family. Part of the reason that we have different systems from the Swedes and the Germans is that we place different emphasis on various possible sets of amenities, and of course, the availability of various amenities changes what we think of as the basic package for a decent life. In most of America it includes a house, preferably detached, and a car. In Sweden it includes a year of mandated maternity leave and a well-run streetcar system. Losing any of those amenities is usually more painful for people than getting whatever the other folks have—which is why most expats are some combination of young, unhappy in their home country, or wealthy enough to buy the stuff they miss.
It was already possible, by the early ’90s and actually long before them, to trace the terms of the current partisan divide in America. Conservatives — think in Jonathan Haidt–ish terms here — value tradition, authority, and group identity; liberals value tolerance, fairness, and care. Or whatever; you can draw the distinctions however you’d like. The point is, The Next Generation depicts a strict military hierarchy acting with great moral clarity in the name of civilization, all anti-postmodern, “conservative” stuff — but the values they’re so conservatively clear about are ideals like peace and open-mindedness and squishy concern for the perspectives of different cultures. “Liberal” ideals, in other words. You could say, roughly, that the Enterprise crew is conservative as a matter of method and liberal as a matter of goal. They sail through the universe with colonialist confidence sticking up for postcolonial ideals. I mean, Starfleet has a Prime Directive … but it’s explicitly non-interventionist! This is so weird that it’s almost hard to notice; your mind just sort of slides over it. But it’s fascinating in numberless ways. Picard is both indisputably the most patriarchal Star Trek captain and indisputably the least likely to punch anyone in the face.
Boise State University is seeking a specialist in precisely your area of study. Additional specializations in all of the other things you’ve studied, published on, or expressed the slightest interest in at any point in your scholarly career are also highly desirable. We have, in fact, designed this position specifically to match your cv, and fully anticipate offering you both an interview and a campus visit, both of which will go so stunningly well that it will be all you can do not to start pricing houses and friending members of our faculty on Facebook. We will, however, be awarding this job to another candidate entirely, whom we will describe to you in our rejection letter as “a better fit.”
Gluttony, from The 9 circles of hell from Dante’s Inferno recreated in Lego, at Monoscope
Art deco lobby set for Grand Hotel (1932, dir. Edmund Goulding) Set design by Cedric Gibbons.
The culture that inhabits us - and by us, I mean Christians - is a subtle and seductive one. It tempts us to believe we are free of place. It tempts us to believe that we do not have the time to do what needs to be done, so we must constantly hurry. These temptations are often assumed to be congruent with the gospel imperatives to have no permanent home. But in the process we lose the visibility necessary to be witnesses to the One who made it possible to be Christians.
In the first place, it is true that I turned 40 this year, and it is equally true that, for the 40th time, my writing did not make it into the New Yorker’s “Forty Under Forty” issue, or Granta’s “Forty Under Forty” issue, or the LA Times’s “Forty Faces Under Forty” issue, or the Guardian’s annual “Forty American Writers Under Forty to Watch”, or even McSweeney’s “Forty Writers Under Forty Who Live Near Us in Brooklyn and We Hang Out With Quite a Bit or At Least Would Like To”. There are many reasons for that, not the least of which is that they are all shitty magazines dedicated to the death of writing and literature. Would I like to have been included? Of course. We all want external validation of our years of sweat and toil. But to suggest my exclusion from these lists in the last year of my eligibility for them somehow affected my judging of the Paradigm day school Three Under Three writing contest is not just baseless slander, it is armchair psychology of the very worst kind.