What Do You Like about America?

A similar version of the following interview with me appeared in Purple magazine, approximately one year after 9/11/2001:

What do you like about America now?

The fact that it isn't like Europe. Also, I like the new bruised America, because it’s now a more emotive America, a more transparent America.

What do you really dislike about America now?

The fact that it isn't like Europe. Well, not really. I guess what I dislike most is it’s stupidity about death. America has projected its fear of death into medicine, science, entertainment—everything.

Does an American counterculture still exist today?

Well, there is a "noir" counterculture in America: bewildered people who find no references to their internal states in the external environment. People who are able to view death more squarely. The reason you haven't heard much from them is because they are alienated from all the discourses. For example, they are against America's involvement in war, but they think that most of the critics of that war are hypocrites. They value pleasure, but most of their pleasures have been tainted by health problems or social judgments and therefore can't be expressed in a celebratory way. They are creative but disenchanted with the traditional venues for art. So, you see, they are truly underground.

But perhaps you and I mean two different things by “counterculture.” America has always had two separate countercultures: the counterculture that concerns itself with politics and the counterculture that concerns itself with pleasure and art. These two didn’t overlap that much as they did in certain other Western countries with which I am familiar, such as France.

In fact, in the United States there has been no resistant political counterculture since the 1960s. But the counterculture of pleasure and art, the counterculture of sensibility, of thrills and of taking chances—now that is something else. It doesn’t need ideas or manifestos per se to exist. It exists quite vividly and continuously in isolated fragments, and I’m glad about that.