ABSTRACT
A nation that cannot remember must necessarily be mired in farce, since tragedy will always elude it. This at least, has been history’s judgment of America, that most ahistorical and untragic of nations, ever since 66de Tocqueville made his journey to the New World and marveled at the childlike hubris of a people who lacked all feeling for fate and devoted themselves unthinkingly to religion and industry, as if the old-world wisdom of “dust to dust” had no meaning on new soil. De Tocqueville found much to admire in this radical experiment in democratic optimism, but was dour about the prospects for culture on the continent. If de Toc-queville presaged Nietzsche’s more trenchant lament for the decline of aristocracy, native critics such as Mencken saw in the American “boobo-isie” the climactic victory of Nietzsche’s last men—those world-weary egalitarians addicted to comfort, imaginatively impotent, stingy and suspicious of difference, and capable in literature as in life of only the most precious superficiality.
