Yves here. Varoufakis’s essay on what passes for democracy in America, or perhaps more accurately American society, is not well done but still raises many interesting ideas. He focused on the arts to show that many of the current American influencers, filmmakers, intellectuals, novelists and artists are documenting the dark side of American morality. Still, as Varoufakis briefly explores, Americans have a more nuanced view of our motives and the consequences of their actions than the ancient Greeks. Americans have little enthusiasm for the great form of Greek tragedy. And Greek mythology never produces the happy endings that Americans are addicted to. Even gods whose actions often produce unexpected and unacceptable results.
Written by Yanis Varoufakis. Originally published at Project Syndicate; posted on his website
After celebrating America’s 250th anniversary, I felt the need to resist my usual love of economic and political analysis of the world’s claims made for or against the United States. Instead, I gave myself to an emotional, personal, truly Athenian, take on a global hegemon whose growth and actions shape us all.
My first memory of America as part of my life is painfully back on a hot afternoon in early June 1968. A little over a year after a CIA-backed coup d’état put Greece under totalitarian rule, my mother and I were walking outside the restored ancient stadium where the first modern Olympic Games were held in 1896. dead. My mother’s eyes filled with tears. “He was our last chance,” she said.
The American who died was Robert F. Kennedy, whose mother had, rightly or wrongly, many hopes, not only for our freedom here in Greece but also for world peace. It would be my crash course on the importance of America to all of us, and its internal conflicts. Of course, there have been previous stories of assassinations of Americans, especially those of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. And in the years that followed, these stories revealed everyday horrors from Vietnam and the complexities of Watergate. But these were balanced by America’s sad, subtle, and complex exploration of the beauty of it all.
Is there a better way to capture the criminal madness of the Vietnam War than Francis Ford Coppola Apocalypse Now? Or a better exposé of the corruption found in California than Roman Polanski’s Chinatown? Or of Watergate than of Alan Pakula All the President’s men? Or a better display of CIA weapons than Sydney Pollack’s Three days of the Condor? Or a better depiction of the dangerous underside of the world than Coppola The Godfather or Martin Scorsese Taxi driver?
As I grew older and began to read difficult books, it was American writers who opened windows through which I could see interesting American ideas of contradiction. Thorstein Veblen’s A Theory of the Leisure Class it gave me a better understanding of American capitalism than any economics text, mainstream or controversial. John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath it emphasized to me the horrors of the Great Depression, and the New Deal that followed, in ways that no economist has ever matched. Turning to music, rock ‘n’ roll was my gateway to rhythm and blues, which was my mentor in that American freedom—or lack thereof. Could there be a better summary of how Hegel’s idea of freedom was assimilated into the American South than a line from that great blues song pioneered by Ray Charles and later by Solomon Burke, “None of us is free, if one of us is in prison”? Years later, Donald Judd’s sculptures in Marfa, Texas, helped me see the value of American culture.’ It was then that I began to realize that the American industrial artefacts – the unadorned truth of its industrial objects – had shaped our understanding of our surroundings and the combination of light and volume, even here in Europe. Those were the times when the information of social creation flooded across America, repeating the possibility of catharsis. As Aristotle explains in his book Poemsgrief was by no means entertainment; it was a public court. This is what American writers, artists, and filmmakers did: they put their deepest concerns on trial. They recognize that real tragic heroes—such as Oedipus, Antigone, and Prometheus—are neither inherently good nor evil; like most Americans, they acted according to their deep sense of justice, the “truth” they felt bound to uphold. Their tragedy was that the universe, or rather the parrot, turned their actions into opposing, destructive forces. By seeing the resulting suffering, the audience’s latent pity and fear is cleansed and eliminated. That is the moment of catharsis that America, in the end, was rejected. What robbed the American people of their catharsis was the violent economic transition from surplus producer to deficit generator, symbolized by the Nixon Shock of 1971, which killed the Bretton Woods system. In the 1980s, the movies and books I loved were replaced by paragons of crass jingoism like Rambo, Top shotand Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History.Of course, the power of self-reflection was not completely lost. America’s hard times ended because its elites succeeded in turning US deficits into a source of great, irrational power. As foreign capital eagerly pours profits and rents into New York City, Oliver Stone’s Wall Street captured the effect of the rise of Gordon Gekkos in the film.Stone came at the beginning of an era in which the stability of American power was accompanied by gradual economic growth—a process that deprived many in the US and other Western countries while allowing the owners of the hot dollar to become incredibly rich. For more than four decades, a global war has been waged by working people everywhere, and especially in the US, to prevent a solution to the cleansing of the American crisis. On the contrary. Financialization and, more recently, the rise of cloud capital, Big Tech, and AI, are fueling the divisions in American society that ultimately gave birth to the presidency of Donald Trump. Therefore, America is now producing irrational, crude power and increasing instability. The possibility of a catharsis that marked America’s bicentennial is hard to imagine a century later—to the detriment of all of us.
