The End of the Road

Fatal Conceits from Bill's ranch, musings on the Idea of America and plenty more...

(The view over the Tacuil vineyards, neighboring Bill’s farm in Gualfin)

Joel Bowman, scribbling this Sunday from Buenos Aires, Argentina...

Welcome to another Sunday Sesh! 

As faithful (and unfaithful) readers of these pages well know, this is the time of the week we ordinarily dedicate to heaping scorn and mockery on those public figures most deserving of it. 

But today... something a little different. 

Rather than spending this past week hunched over our laptop, scrolling through vexing headlines, “circling back” through inane White House press minutes and pontificating over the end of the world as we know it, your editor unplugged completely and headed instead to the end of the road... literally. 

Gualfin, Bill Bonner’s vast estancia, lies high in the northernmost reaches of Argentina, in the remote Salta province, bordering Bolivia and Paraguay (to the north) and Chile (to the west). Its mountains are rugged... its Malbec grapes, potent... its internet connectivity, mercifully unreliable. 

Driving from one property to the next, between extreme altitude vineyards, often hours apart, we barely had time to open our laptop. It’s amazing what a little digital downtime, coupled with some lively conversation with our gracious hosts and some good ol’ fashioned oxygen deprivation, can do to clear the cluttered mind. 

So if today’s essay comes across as uncharacteristically optimistic, a tad sanguine even, or just plain light-headed, please forgive us. We’ll return with our curmudgeon, “doom and gloom” commentary next week, after we catch up on what’s happening in the down and dirty world of high finance and lowly politics. 

But for now, something a little lighter...

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We’re All Americans Now

By Joel Bowman

Unknown to those born in the United States, there exists a curious momentum in America apparent only to her visitors. In the widened eyes of these newcomers, the country appears to be hurtling forward in time at blistering, maniacal pace, her citizens unconsciously bound to a collective destiny of grand, mythological proportions, a mishmash of waiters and engineers and hookers and playwrights and teachers, of slick and desperate criminals and orange-hued T.V. evangelists, of frat boys and southern belles and Marlborough men and block-jawed G.I.s, of cowboys and surfers and poets and junkies, all marching arm in arm along a great concrete road that hasn’t quite set.

~ From an inconsequential novel, titled Morris, Alive

“It’s still the greatest show on earth,” a friend explained, describing his fond attachment to the ground beneath his feet. “Whatever its faults, and there are many, there’s nothing else quite like it. America: the greatest [expletive] show on earth.”

That our enthusiastic interlocutor is a well known movie director and actor, and that the ground beneath his feet is composed mostly of Venice Beach sand and the lapping Pacific tide, only underscores his point. Like Hollywood itself, as seen on the glimmering silver screen, the “Idea of America” is part mythology, part super-sized reality.... its setting, part period drama, part futuristic sci-fi... its protagonist, part supervillain, part superhero. 

Paradoxical and unique, this “Idea,” boldly written - nay, declared - into existence, in 1776, concerns both notions of individual sovereignty and collective destiny, the multitude and the singular, e pluribus unum. And unlike other, comparatively modest experiments concurrently underway around the world, say, east of the Urals or south of the Himalayas, west of the Nile or north of the Mekong, this particular enterprise in human action concerns both citizens “at home” and “aliens” abroad, and to an extent so as to make even the most aspirational empires on history’s grand stage tremble, cower, wince and cringe. 

But who are we, you may be wondering, an Australian-born scribbler, writing from Argentina’s capital, to weigh in on what constitutes the “Idea of America?” What right have we to opine on such matters? To trespass on, much less occupy, such hallowed philosophical territory.

Excellent point, Dear Patriot! Allow us, if you would kindly holster your sidearm, a moment to plead our case... or rather, to stake our humble claim. 

A World Inside a Country

Unique among such historical notions, the “Idea of America” to which we refer is simply that... an idea. As such, it is not to be located on any map, the imagined political borders of which ebb and flow with the vicissitudes of time, and anyway could not contain it. Nor is it bound up in flags, anthems, official emblems and state seals; assorted simulacra, hoary pomp, mere representations of the real McCoy. Nor does it reside in some congressional hall, at the bottom of a ballot box or in the earnest hearts and minds of any righteous group calling itself “the majority.” 

We’ll come to all that, in due course. For now, let us simply draw a line under one particularly germane attribute of this idea, one which affords it a truly universal appeal. 

Perhaps you have noticed (or not) the curious tendency of Americans to hyphenate their demonym; this teacher is an Irish-American; that nurse an African-American; this policeman is an Italian-American; that artist a Chinese-American... and so on down the line... Jewish-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Canadian-Americans, et al. 

If you call yourself American (whether hyphenated or not), this may not seem anything strange. But to those of us who live, work and play in any of the other ~200+ nation states on the planet, it’s more than a quirky peculiarity. It is a one-way oddity!

To borrow the phrasing of another foreign-born member of the chattering class, the late English-American essayist, Christopher Hitchens, America is unique to the extent that it is “internally international,” brimming with hyphenated patriots from sea to shining sea. She is sui generis (as the Canadian-Jewish-American author, Saul Bellow, was fond of saying) in a manner that no other nation, Old World or New, can quite claim to be. There are single school districts in Brooklyn that teach and test in more languages than are spoken in many countries. All of which makes, in the end, the question of “what is American?” the more difficult to pin down. 

In fact, much of what we might consider “quintessentially American” is not really of America at all. From the exuberance pouring forth in what Susan Sontag (the daughter of Lithuanian and Polish Jews) called the “spirit of Philadelphia,” to practically everything that came afterward.  

Founders Alexander Hamilton and James Wilson were foreign born (Nevis and England, respectively), as were a third of George Washington’s appointees to the nation’s original Supreme Court. Thomas Paine, without whose provocative pamphlets, Common Sense and The American Crisis, one could scarcely imagine the American Revolution in the same light, had not even set foot in the colonies until he was almost two score years old. 

“America,” writes (resident Irish-American) Bill Bonner in the foreword to his aptly-titled compendium of essential essays, The Idea of America, “is a nation of people who chose to become Americans. Even the oldest family tree in the New World has immigrants at its root.”

Bill might well have been echoing the sentiments of another Irish-American, President John F. Kennedy, who observed that, “Every American who has ever lived, with the exception of one group, was either an immigrant himself or a descendant of immigrants.” 

From her most prominently “American” musicians... Joni Mitchell hails from Canada, so too does Neil Young; Eddie Van Haalen was born in the Netherlands...

To the visionary architects who cut her emblematic city skylines... Ludwig Mies van der Rohe hyphenates as German-American; Ieoh Ming Pei as Chinese-American...

From her leading entrepreneurs and inventors... Nikolai Tesla was Serbian-American while Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, is South African-American. One half of Google, Sergey Brin, was born in Moscow, Russia, while the inventor of the original blue jeans, Levi Strauss, was raised in Bavaria, Germany...

To the stars of her silver screen... Bob Hope was born in England... Audrey Hepburn in Belgium... Bruce Willis in Germany...

Whimper… or Bang?

Plenty are those who were swept along with the “Idea of America” though they began their journey elsewhere. “I am as American as April in Arizona,” joked Russian-American emigree Vladimir Nabokov, who also claimed he was “one-fifth American,” on account of his having gained some 40 lbs after adopting an all-American diet. 

From buildings to blue jeans to bake sales, even the phrase “as American as apple pie” rests on dubious etymological grounds. The original recipe hails from England, with heavy influences from the French and the Dutch. In fact, apples themselves weren’t even native to North America, arriving as they did in the arms of European settlers. While we’re at it, wheat comes from the Middle East... cinnamon from Sri Lanka... nutmeg from Indonesia...

“There is a whole world in America,” observed the American-British author, Henry James (one of the few writers to journey across The Pond in the other direction, proving himself the exception to the rule). And yet, later in James’s life, in a private letter, he would confess, “If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American. I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land.” 

As many and varied are the pathways to the Idea of America, of equal importance is what that idea - and its future - portends for the rest of the world, whether her destiny ends with the proverbial whimper or a bang. 

Whether one cares to notice or not, where goes America... so too goes much of the rest of the world. Economically... culturally... politically. Just as there are American greenbacks changing hands from the avenidas of Buenos Aires to the streets of Harare, the lodestar of the west also exports her most precious commodity of all, the idea that undergirds her founding and that reaches forth into the unknown. 

What does this all portend for the years ahead? And why should we care?

It was the Greek statesman, Pericles, who once said, “Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you.” So too for America and her noble experiment. Whether Democrat or Republican, man or woman, black or white, citizen or alien... for better and for worse, we’re all Americans now. 

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And now for some more Fatal Conceits…

Your editor sat down with Bill Bonner up in the Calchaqui Valley earlier this week to record a special “on location” impromptu episode of the Fatal Conceits show. 

Time was short, as we had a lunch to attend with friends and some more “due diligence” to do on some of the local wines, but Bill was kind enough to share his thoughts on dollar hegemony, weaponized currency, inflation Putin’s Price Hike, Argentina’s mental math and plenty more. Check it out, here…

Nota Bene: Readers interested in sampling some of Bill’s extreme altitude Tacana Malbec can follow this link for more information. As Bill mentions in the video, the Bonner Private Wine Partnership is a project that works with local winemakers and growers from all over the world, including from Gualfin, the end of the road. 

And that’s all from us for another week. As always, likes, shares and comments in the section below are always welcomed.

Bill returns tomorrow with his regular, daily missives.

Until the next Sesh...

Cheers,

Joel Bowman