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Arts Notebook by Aravinda

The destruction of the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington watched by a horrified world live on television last week was perhaps the most dramatic illustration of life imitating art.

For decades the Hollywood cinema had bombarded the world with images of violence and death of killings, and destruction, of gun-toting terrorists and lone psychotic assassins.

And before the eyes of an unbelieving world, through the means of the most advanced form of mass communications known to man, the very heart of American money and power was shown under attack until it was compelled to lie prostrate in the rubble and debris of New York and Washington, the fashionable and the powerful dethroned in the twinkle of an eye.

Those planes which struck the twin towers of the WTC and brought them down was a defining moment not merely for America but for a global constituency shaped and brought up by American mass culture.

Violence in the popular cinema often becomes a metaphor for America itself. The most advanced forms of technology and the most vivid visual techniques are brought to bear to make violence graphic on the screen, both big and small, until it becomes an end in itself, a symbol and representation of an entire way of life.

The gangster or the assassin therefore becomes by extension an embodiment of the American way, the most powerful country on earth asserting itself by means of the most powerful form of communication known to man. America's physical size, its political power and the arbitrary nature of its screen violence thus become irretrievably enmeshed and entangled.

The mythic Cowboy was a heroic figure in the early cinema imbued as he was with the spirit of the frontier and battling the Establishment in the form of the Big Bad Sheriffs.

However with the consolidation of American capitalism and America's emergence as an imperialist power Hollywood increasingly became the vehicle for national self-aggrandisement: With its growing technical sophistication American cinema communicated this self-image of the country as the international policeman through recourse to growing violence in the cinema.

Titles such as 'The Twering Inferno' and 'Apocalypse Now' have a chilling ring in the context of last Tuesday's terrorist attacks.

New York above all else typifies the ambivalence of America. It is the capital city of American capital (as embodied by the now disembodied World Trade Centre) but it is also the Mecca of the arts and the theatre and smart journalism and the heartland of Bohemia.

It is best known by 'The New Yorker,' that flagship of chic writing, and "The Nation," the best known journal of American radical writing.

With its preponderance of Jewish intellectuals it stands for everything that is fashionable and modish in the culture of our age which is so drastically over-determined by everything which originates in New York.

Jewishness itself by now had come to assume an ambivalent air. An earlier generation of American Jewish intellectuals such as Philip Rahv, Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley and Clement Greenberg among others had been Marxists but following the advent to power of Stalin in the USSR and the Moscow show trials this generation began steadily gravitating towards Trotskyism which had always had a powerful appeal on the intelligentsia in most countries of the world.

Following the Second World War and the emergence of the USA as the principal western power in rivalry to the Soviet Union, socialists everywhere were faced with a dilemma. While a section continued to adhere to Trotskyism, a creed without a country or a powerful political movement (with the exception perhaps of the LSSP in Sri Lanka) another section remained as Communists or fellow travellers the latter grouped round the Congress for Cultural Freedom with inspiration from Moscow.

During these early years the infant Israeli state with its communitarian form of living exerted a powerful attraction on Jewish intellectuals but today with the establishment of Israel as a powerful military state and the collapse of Communism worldwide Jewish intellectuals are again caught in a bind.

Most of them like Norman Podhoretsz, the editor of 'Commentary', have become apologists not merely for Israel but the whole ideology and structure of American society against which they once raised the standard of revolt.

So there is the America of Hollywood and the America of Woody Allen, the America of Walt Disney and the America of Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal. Vietnam may have been an encounter with its conscience for a generation of American liberals but now the country seems trapped in a rightwing time warp. Clinton was only an interregnum and the American Right rides again.

The true tragedy of the US, however, is that by its attempts at world hegemony it should have provoked the ire not of idealists with a programme for change, however radical it might be, but of a bunch of religious fundamentalists whose own goals are no different from those of the American Right.

But for all that last Tuesday something irrevocably was lost to America. The dream of prosperity and the possibility of it in a post-industrial society were badly dented.

The emancipatory vision which had brought the Founding Fathers from across the far seas was dissipated in the harsh glare of imperialist reality. As F. Scott Fitzgerald put it in the final pages of 'The Great Gatsby,' 'I spent my Saturday nights in New York because those gleaming, dazzling parties of his were with me so vividly that I could still hear the music and the laughter, faint and incessant, from his garden, and the cars going up and down his drive.

One night I did hear a material car there, and saw its lights stop at his front steps. But I didn't investigate. Probably it was some final guest who had been away at the ends of the earth and didn't know that the party was over.

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