Charles on… anything that comes along

On a talk show not long ago, a prominent African-American declared that the Roosevelt administration had closely support Hitler until the Pearl Harbour attack. The journalists on his panel made no objection to this. Had none of them heard of Lend-Lease, hadn’t they read about FDR, were they unaware of Nazi hostility toward the United States? Can these high-finish, well-tailored and hairstyled interviewers know so little about history?

America is, of course, the land of the present; its orientation is toward the future. That Americans should care so little about the past is fetching, even endearing, by why should we take the judgements of these splendid-looking men and women seriously? That they had had “backgrounders” or briefings we may take for granted. One is reluctant to conclude that their omniscience is a total put-on. But this, too, may be beside the point. The principal aim of these opinion-makers is to immerse us again and again in a marinade of “correctness” or respectability.

(Saul Bellow, in a piece first published in Forbes magazine, September 1992, reprinted in The Independent 9 April 2005.)

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