AMERICAN ELEGY: Reflections on 250 Years of the Dis-United States of America, short hits about touchstones of US culture

AMERICAN ELEGY: Reflections on 250 Years of the Dis-United States of America
ED SIMON
Ig Publishing(non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$19.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 3.75- of five

The Publisher Says: Before there was the United States, there was America. The former is a country, a nation, a geographic reality, but the latter is an idea. Invented more than discovered, “America” signified a revolutionary ideal of freedom, liberty, equality, and justice, what Tom Paine in Common Sense meant when he wrote that “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

Among the greatest expressions of that faith was the Declaration of Independence with its promise to forge a nation dedicated to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. American society and culture have always existed within the gulf of our stated aspirations and the actual reality, which has necessitated the forging of prophetic voices from Walt Whitman to Toni Morrison, Herman Melville to James Baldwin. Now, just as we prepare for the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the United States is succumbing to authoritarianism and the noxious blood-and-soil nationalism which curses the faith in the universal and indispensable America.

In response to this moment, noted cultural critic Ed Simon offers a rejoinder in American Elegy: Reflections on 250 Years of the Dis-United States of America. Compiling an assemblage that’s less a canon than a cultural mixtape, Simon presents fifty short chapters that are asynchronously organized works of flash criticism, meant to draw connections across time periods, which each celebrate an aspect of the “America” that’s larger, deeper, and broader than the mere United States. Here the Great American Novel meets the Great American Songbook; sign language converses with the blues; method acting shares the stage with Afrofuturism, and Superman plays baseball. Defining “literature” as broadly as possible, each of the works profiled critiques the status quo and imagines a better world.

As cynical politicians deny the diversity, complexity, and actual beauty of American culture in favor of myths about the nation being made great again, Simon provides not just an elegy, but a challenge and celebration, as well as a repository, an archive, and a call to start over. In the tradition of Gary Wills and Greil Marcus, American Elegy charts a course to a land still undiscovered.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The most valuable concept I came out of this read in possession of is how deeply rooted the fallacy of conflating the term "America" with the United States is. This is a project of lessening urgency as Little Vladdy Pu-Pu's stooge squatting in government housing has wrought havoc on the country's international standing. Most places in the world do not respect the US as much as they did between 1940 and 1990.

Viewing the development of the US cultural identity in the short bursts that he does makes this effort at self-justification for "Americanness" a great browser's book. The brevity of the chapters militates against depths of argument or thoroughness of contextualization. It relies instead on the cumulative effect of tendentious, surface-level prose about the Usual Suspects of US culture...Twain, Walt Whitman, Saul Bellow...to achieve it aim of challenging the monomyth of US manifest destiny in matters societal. Kind of an odd choice, its effectiveness relies on we-the-reader agreeing that the touchstones *are* touchstones....

I enjoyed reading the book, though I wonder if it will succeed in its stated aim of acting as a "call to start over." I was not so called, but I'm a curmudgeonly old man who really needs a nap.