Greg's Reviews > Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays

"Some thing only dimly remembered tells us something interesting about ourselves. Something only dimly remembered tells us that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy, nor power for power's sake. American's are uneasy with their possessions. Guilty about power. All of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power, but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy, it is the instinct that drove America to the Pacific all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, to live by one's own rules. Of course we do not admit that. The instinct is socially suicidal and because we recognize that this is so, we have developed workable ways of saying one thing and believing quite another."

From the essay, '7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38'. Slouching Towards Bethlehem