The musings of a “luscious locked” Frenchman masquerading as the
new Tocqueville in order to ponder the singularity of America is
not normally considered news. Except when that Frenchman is BHL —
the brand name of philosopher, journalist, director, and
millionaire celebrity Bernard-Henri Levy. Then it’s definitely
news.
Best known in the U.S. for his nonfiction novel Who Killed
Daniel Pearl? BHL is the kind of charming, French-style
intellectual that makes bookish American coeds swoon. That he’s
heir to a lumber man’s millions doesn’t hurt either.
Philosophically, BHL has modeled himself after his former mentors
— the post-structuralist literary theorist and babe-magnet Jacques
Derrida, and the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser (later
committed to an insane asylum for murdering his wife). However,
besides inheriting substantial sums of money, Levy has little in
common with his literary godfather de Tocqueville. Nor is his book,
American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of
Tocqueville in any way comparable to Democracy in
America.
What book would be? Ostensibly dispatched on a mission to study
the U.S. penal system with its extraordinarily low rates of
recidivism, Alexis de Tocqueville was far more intrigued by the
success of the American experiment in democracy (an experiment the
French had so thoroughly botched four decades earlier) with its
attendant and contradictory aspects of self-reliance, majority
rule, social conformity and egalitarianism than with the whores and
freaks that seem to have occupied BHL in his journeys.
Granted Levy is a more entertaining and charismatic author (and
character) than Tocqueville. After all, how many men are mistaken
by their wife-to-be for Jesus Christ? Also like the Christian
savior, BHL is quite happy to preach to his disciples. Particularly
those on the Left.
In a recent Nation piece Levy recounts how nothing made
a more lasting impression on him in his year-long gad about the
U.S. than the semi-comatose state of the American Left. Of course,
you’d never know it from reading American Vertigo. The
main impression one takes from Levy’s travelogue is of an America
populated by grotesquely obese fundamentalist yahoos and
lap-dancing strippers. He seems to have avoided middle-class
Americans as one would one avoid a South American leper colony,
while spending a curious amount of time among hookers, soused
Mardi-Gras revelers, drag queens, and swingers. He visits Mount
Rushmore, but to him the monument is but a monstrosity erected by a
Klansman on sacred ground expropriated from native Americans,
overshadowing the pathetic Wounded Knee memorial. Throughout his
account all that Americans hold dear is slighted or ignored.
America’s entrepreneurial spirit, and its almost religious regard
for free enterprise, egalitarianism, pragmatism, and fundamental
freedoms, in other words, all those things that attracted and
fascinated Tocqueville seem to have eluded Levy’s observations.
Whereas Tocqueville button-holed everyone he came in contact with,
Levy seems to have sought out only film stars, politicians and
cross-dressers. In the book’s most humorous passage, Levy writes of
meeting John Kerry shortly after his election defeat, and finding
him “haggard, ghostly, faintly whispering in my ear: ‘If you hear
anything about those 50,000 votes in Ohio, let me know.’”
LEVY HAS NOW LAUNCHED a new mission, this one in an effort to save
the Democratic Party from itself. Among his observations is the
startlingly obvious one that liberals are bereft of ideas and seem
devoted to concentrating all their minimal intellectual energies at
raising money. He finds American writers and artists stubbornly
more concerned with writing and art than politics. What about
eliminating the death penalty? Levy asks irritably. “I might be
mistaken, but it seems to me a large part of the country is waiting
for this.” He is wrong, of course, and had he spent less time in
the titty bars he might have learned that two-thirds of Americans
support the capital punishment.
Fair enough, but what about Guantanamo? he asks. And Abu Ghraib
and the special prisons in Central Europe? Why are not public
intellectuals like Gore Vidal and Tony Kushner clamoring for
President Bush’s impeachment for his “gross lies”? Why are
Americans so cursed with the ethics of sobriety? Why? Why? Why?
Not to worry though, Dr. Levy’s on the case. His prescription
for the American Left is that it ape the anti-Semitic French Left,
with its utter lack of ideas for dealing with (or even
acknowledging) the crucial issues of crime, unemployment and
immigration, and its Socialist party weaker now than anytime in
history. By all means, look to Paris with its crime rate higher
than that of New York, and where on election night one can still
gaze upon the hammer-and-sickle hanging limply from the sills on
the Champs-Elysees.
There was a time when BHL fiercely combated anti-Americanism in
his native land, and when he was among the first to speak out
against Serbian and Taliban atrocities. But now even liberals don’t
seem to like the guy, and they nearly always love America’s
critics. In a recent review of American Vertigo in the
New York Times, Garrison Keillor ripped Levy up and down,
and signed off with this advice for the Frenchman: “For your next
book, tell us about those riots in France, the cars burning in the
suburbs of Paris. What was that all about? Were fat people
involved?”
Perhaps our nouveau Tocqueville should look to his own backyard,
and by that I don’t mean the backyard of his 18th century palace in
Marrakech or his apartment on the Left Bank or that villa in the
south of France. And perhaps before calling for the impeachment of
a U.S. president, BHL should spend just a little more time at
ground zero and a little less time at the Penthouse Club.
