More often than not, the marvels of Western civilization impressed
Kennan less than did its deficiencies. Writing in 1937, he described man
as “a skin-disease of the earth.” The passage of time reinforced this
view. Technology, principally represented by automobiles, which he
loathed, and by nuclear weapons, which he came to fear, served only to
make matters worse. “Modern urban-industrial man,” he reflected some
forty years later,
is given to the raping of anything and everything natural on which
he can fasten his talons. He rapes the sea; he rapes the soil. . . . He
rapes the atmosphere. He rapes the future of his own civilization . . .
[H]e goes on destroying his own environment like a vast horde of locusts.
When Kennan turned his gaze to his country, his views were equally bleak
and unsparing. As a young man fresh out of Princeton he characterized
Americanism as a “disease” and likened it explicitly to Bolshevism.
American society as a whole was cheap, vulgar, and materialistic. Middle
age found him railing against “the chrome, the asphalt, the advertising,
the television sets, the filling stations, [and] the hot dog stands”
that embodied the “trancelike, unreal” American way of life. As an old
man, he denounced “the shameless pornography, the pathological
preoccupation with sex and violence, [and] the weird efforts to claim
for homosexuality the status of a proud, noble, and promising way of
life” that “in significant degree” had made America a “sick society.”
But when it came to eliciting paroxysms of indignation, nothing topped
California. “I find myself really wishing,” he wrote en route from San
Francisco to Monterey in 1966, “that some catastrophe might occur that
would depopulate this region & permit it to heal its scars & return to
its natural state.” In his dotage, he wrote of America, “I am in utter
despair about this country.” He “long[ed] for the day of the
catastrophe” that would allow the “atrocities of man’s handiwork to
decay into the ruins they deserve to become.”
In the 1950s, Kennan contemplated the possibility of simply fleeing,
“even to the Soviet Union” — any alternative seemed preferable to
allowing his children to “grow up in this cradle of luxury that
corrupted and demoralized them before they even reached maturity.” Cold
War expectations that the United States could deflect the forces of
darkness while leading the free world toward some promised land were, to
Kennan, the height of absurdity.
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