Two months in Benin and I’m finally a real Volunteer. After some awkward schmoozing between the Americans who wear suits to work and the ones who don’t, we swore in at a ceremony at the Ambassador’s house in Cotonou, and afterward footage of us sitting and clapping and yawning was splashed liberally across Beninese television among eschatological declarations of the arrival of eternal harmony between nations.
After the ceremony we went to a Target-like supermarket in Cotonou to buy things for our houses at post. It seemed to exist exclusively for Western expats. Visiting that store and the Ambassador’s house added up to the most vivid culture shock I’ve experienced here — and it came from American culture. I realized how many things I’ve been living without and haven’t missed. Wealth isn’t always a blessing and poverty isn’t a straight-up tragedy. I was reminded that the Sumerians would curse their enemies by saying “May the children of your children live in luxury.”
On a different note, this morning I read a 1964 essay by the great historian Richard Hofstadter that ended my befuddlement about the Tea Party, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” This part seemed particularly prescient:
The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms — he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point…. As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated — if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.
The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman — sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind…. It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self.
