USA
Kennan’s third person rumination on himself in 1933 diary entry:
What have I in common with the average Southerner, or the New York Jew, or any one of a hundred types? America is hardly a national conception anymore. It is a sort of international entity.
A Model Married Man, by George Frost Kennan
From a 1933 diary entry by George Kennan (1904–2005), with the heading “January, Riga.” Kennan was working for the State Department at the time, in a diplomatic post in Latvia.
Colorado Springs, February 12
The trashy, impermanent habitation of the American West—trailer camps, condominiums, commercial enterprises—all strewn about, with wide expanses of useless, barren prairie between them, and everywhere, of course, the roads, these 4-lane arteries of dark asphalt, stretching endlessly across the emptiness, traffic lights where they cross, in the middle of nowhere—and everywhere the scurrying beetles of cars, whirring drearily along, turning distance into time.
Strange people, these Americans: they seek out these places, not really to live but to await death, justifying themselves by the fact that the sun shines and that life is easy—a sort of trancelike unreal state of existence, drugged by the sedatives of advertising, TV, and the wheel of the automobile—all enjoyments vicarious. . . .
I studied the faces of the cadets, where I could see them. Westerners, for the most part (I suppose), from non-wealthy families, they reminded me of the St. Johns cadets of 60 years ago.46 The Commandant claimed that many of them did outstanding academic work, and occasionally one did indeed see a promising face, but not very often. They were the sons and products of the great American melting pot, in which so little is left of the original pioneer population, although it still shows the fading imprint, linguistic and cultural, of that population on the surface of its life.
A lost people, we WASPs, living out our lives, like displaced people, in a cultural diaspora, unrelieved even by any consciousness of the existence, albeit far away, of a lost homeland. Our homeland, raped and destroyed by modernity, no longer has any meaning geographically; it has meaning only in time, and has sunk, with scarcely a trace, into history….
People, I am moved to reflect, react more favorably to me as a person than they do to my thoughts. But even then, this view of my person is not one that inclines them even to think of me as a person to whom public responsibility might be given. And perhaps they are instinctively right in rejecting such an association. [Kennan spent “three miserable (for physical reasons) weeks in Paris”>47 doing research.]
En route, March 21
- I love my country or at least a great deal of it, but I consider its political system and the intellectual-philosophic level of its political establishment to be, in combination, inadequate to the demands of the present age, and have little hope for it.
- The country is not all decadent, but the sound stock of it, composed mostly of older people, is so eaten into by decadence that it is doubtful whether it can be saved.
California
Kennan’s thoughts on Southern California & its future on November 4, 1951:
But equally disturbing to me is the utter dependence on the costly, uneconomical gadget called the automobile, for practically every process of life from birth and education, through shopping, work and …
It is not meant as an offense to the great achievements of the Latin cultural world if I say that there will take place here something like a “latinization” of political life. Southern California will become politically, as it already is climatically, a Latin American country
April 24
I sit, in the plane, next to an oriental woman, with a sweet, well-behaved child. I am waited on, or at least offered things, by one colored girl and two or three white ones. I remember that I am to visit, day after tomorrow, the Los Angeles area, where the majority of the births are to people of Latin origin, and where people of British origin, from whose forefathers the constitutional structure and political ideals of the early America once emerged, are not only a dwindling but a disintegrating minority. They are of course lost, as a cultural element and as a source of tradition and identity, but they are no more lost, in this sense, than anyone else.
The Latin, Levantine, African, and Oriental elements that now make up so large a part of this population: they, too, are destined, for the most part, to lose their character, their traditions, their unique coloration, and to melt into a vast polyglot mass, devoid of all three things: a sea of helpless, colorless humanity, as barren of originality as it is of nationality, as uninteresting as it is unoriginal—one huge pool of indistinguishable mediocracy and drabness.
Exceptions may be only the Jews and the Chinese, who tend to avoid intermarriage, and, for a time, the Negroes as well. Could this mean that these three minorities are destined to subjugate and dominate all as an uneasy but unavoidable triumvirate the rest of society-the Chinese by their combination of intelligence, ruthlessness, and ant-like industriousness; the Jews by their sheer determination to survive as a culture; the Negroes by their ineradicable bitterness and hatred of the whites?
On the movie screen, as I write this, a “short” is in progress, a documentary entitled: “The Arabs are Coming.” A misleading title, this. Very few of them will come. They will give orders to us-Chinese, Jews and Negroes included from afar, in all matters that seriously affect their interests, and we will shut our big mouths and meekly obey, because we are the victims of an addiction (the automobile), and they are the people who control the means by which that addiction can be satisfied. They will not come to us. They will merely own us, and prescribe the limits within which our lives are permitted to operate.