A
A Texan from Connecticut
Guest
Note: Even though this was written as a book review for "American
Pictures", this hits the nail on the head in regards to the reality of
America which is far different than the fantasy that the right wing
has been peddling for generations.
http://www.american-pictures.com/english/reviews/bookrevw/hoernle.html
American Pictures:
a Foreigner's Perspective on Social Injustice in the United States
by Nils Hoernle
"The more cars (for lonesome flight rather than the cozy strolling of
streets as in Europe), the more weapons (rather than communication),
the more fortresses (instead of sharing), the more military build up
(instead of sharing with the Third World through its proposed New
Economic World Order) all the more does private industry enrich itself
on this systematic subversion of society. The higher the barriers big
business constructs between people, the higher the stocks will rise an
Wall Street ..."
The U.S. is a relatively young and immensely complex nation whose
problems and their underlying causes cannot be easily outlined in one
book, yet Jacob Holdt's 'travel book' entitled American Pictures comes
closer to completely describing, analyzing and documenting our
society's injustices than perhaps any other contemporary work. It is
remarkable in that it is an emotionally charged visual and verbal
experience which not only causes the reader to feel these injustices
but leaves him with a rational understanding of why economic equality
is a necessity. The numerous photographs which comprise a large part
of American Pictures bear witness to Holdt's portrayal of this
country's social, economic, and political shortcomings, serving as
grotesque testimony before a worldwide audience to the huge gap
between the American government and media's self-image as a country
which leads the fight for freedom and democracy 'with liberty and
justice for all' on one side and a country of bigotry, selfish greed,
racism, and rampant exploitation which leads to both physical and
mental oppression and poverty on the other. Though for the many
browsers of this book the pictures will suffice to carry its initial
emotional impact, it is the text which delivers its main punch --
characterizing a violent and oppressive American society from its
colonial beginnings through the period of chattel slavery to its
present position as an aggressive world power.
American Pictures is in many respects a 10-year travel diary which
charts Jacob Holdt's introduction to American society from his
often-times naive and self-righteous cultural relativist stage through
his mental and emotional development via numerous incredible
experiences and human contacts to his much more advanced ideas and
insights into the causes and solutions of the problems which threaten
to destroy American society. Having grown up in Denmark's welfare
state he is completely unprepared for the poverty and the overwhelming
indifference towards it that he encounters during his travels in
America. His vagabonding takes him through the forced labor cmps of
blacks, Mexicans and poor whites trapped behind the 'cotton curtain'
in the South, where he is shocked to find still intact the
master-slave relationship which he later realizes characterizes every
facet of interaction between whites and blacks in America. He next
travels to the Northwest where he becomes embroiled in a shoot-out
with FBI agents at Wounded Knee while trying to help native Americans
keep their lands out of the clutches of mineral-hungry corporations.
It is his selfless love for humanity which allows him to move back and
forth between the worlds of the fabulously wealthy and the destitute
with surprising ease, thus enabling him to live with the Southern
"aristocracy", get drunk with millionaires, and befriend street
people, drug addicts, gays, lesbians, transsexuals, pimps and
prostitutes. Before leaving the country he even attempts to bring
about reform in the American prison system. The reader soon realizes
that Holdt is better qualified than are most Americans to treat such
complex issues as alcoholism, malnutrition, unionization, American
religion, the K.K.K., black pride and integration.
It is not so much the absolute conditions of the people Holdt
encounters in America that are the tragedy of this country, but rather
the disparity between rich and poor, white and black, management and
labor, educated and ignorant, etc., which reveal the true inhumanity
of our society. His remarkable ability to capture its cruel irony and
hypocrisy by juxtaposing the vast extremes of material wealth and
intangible advantages such as education, health care, and equal
opportunity in his pictures and essays reveals a society that blames
its victims in its stubborn refusal to see them as such, thus making
them prime targets for exploitation. He finds in America a government
that jumps to the whip of big business but rolls over and plays dead
in response to the screams of the impoverished.
Throughout his book Holdt emphasizes the idea that people are formed
by the environment they live in. He illustrates this with numerous
examples of how the ghetto has shaped its inhabitants and how
America's chattel slavery has shaped the American black. By
contrasting American blacks with Africans and with other former black
slaves in non-capitalistic countries, he finds again and again that it
is the various stresses peculiar to a society or system of government
(and hence of slavery) that have led to the present attributes of
these peoples. Thus even within America he notices differences in the
attitudes and behavior of blacks in the North and South. His
vagabonding in both Northern city slums and rural Southern "slave
camps" enables him to directly experience the deep humanity of the
people relegated to the lowest realms of society. He is taken in by
black members of the underclass who have no running water,
electricity, food, or furniture but who, in spite of his white skin,
treat him like a human being. He describes the subhuman conditions in
which these people live and eventually comes to understand the
psychological defeat they have undergone with respect to finding a
meaningful place in American society. Some seem so broken in spirit
that they simply deteriorate, while others, in an effort to retain a
measure of self-respect, refuse to join as productive elements a
society that treats them like trash. As one black women says to her
West Indian neighbor -- "You West Indians will scrub floors and do
anything to make it in this country. It may be that you end up ... in
most top black positions, but I would never for anything in the world
break my ass for the white man in order to get there. You have no
pride ....." He witnesses how so many in the "underclass" turn to
drugs and physically deteriorate in response to the deterioration of
spirit which they could not bear while 'clean'. Those more resilient
to these effects of oppression often take their cues from the American
capitalist system and find ways to exploit each other, often becoming
pimps, prostitutes, or hustlers. Those who escape these alternatives
are more often forced into crime as the only realistic means of
survival. Thus from the time ghetto children are old enough to see,
hear, and feel they have already begun to absorb these destructive
patterns of behavior from their chaotic environment, and the ghetto
child who has not witnessed a shoot-out by the first grade is a rare
find indeed. If any members of the younger generation do manage to
survive the repression of the ghetto, they then have to contend with
the American system of education, which after having taught in
American public schools, Holdt describes quite simply as "designed to
make some into an elite and dispose of other's as trash."
He then shows how our society further condemns the poor with its
stingy welfare policies which in effect pronounce a death sentence on
families in which there is a man present, thus fostering the
destruction of the black family unit begun during the period of
slavery. Eventually these detrimental aspects of ghetto life become
ingrained in the culture and are reinforced as each successive
generation gets further indoctrinated into its patterns of violence
and self-destruction.
As a consequence of his many "psychic leaps" from the despondency of
the ghetto to the luxurious wealth of the bankers, corporate
executives and businessmen, Holdt soon begins to perceive the
emptiness inherent in the lives of the affluent, yet often finds them
to be sympathetic and concerned about the needs and lives of those
less fortunate than themselves, stemming perhaps from the lack of
human contact and isolation which results from their material
vulnerability and which ultimately confines them to their lonely
strata at the uppermost tiers of society. Because of constant fear of
kidnappers and burglars, many of the parents and children Holdt
encounters in these homes are permanently isolated from large segments
of the populations resulting in the development of a deep-seated fear
and distrust of the underclass. This effectively rules out the
possibility of positive interaction and thus allows for the
perpetuation of malignant myths about those they have only encountered
as the master in the master-slave relationship. As a result Holdt
witnesses the same alcohol and drug dependency in the isolated and
closed upperclass society that he found in the ghettos, emphasizing
the point that the stresses involved in acquiring vast fortunes and
holding on to them are just os detrimental to the spirit as are the
struggles of the poverty-stricken to survive. He is forced to conclude
that "wherever the master-slave relationship is found neither master
nor slave is really happy. Neither role permits either to became fully
human and therefore serves to cripple and paralyze their minds and
behavior." Holdt seeks in vain to bridge this vast chasm which exists
between the wealthy whose lives have little meaning outside of their
material abundance and the often intense humanity of the poor.
In contrast to the emptiness characterizing the lives of the rich, the
wealthy Southern "aristocrats" he finds in Georgia have bridged this
gap. By administering paternalistic concern for their former slaves
they satisfy their consciences in feeling that they are doing a
service to humanity, while at the same time deriving direct emotional,
social, and "comic" interaction from them. They thereby see themselves
as "philanthropists" and as such feel morally and spiritually
fulfilled. As such, however, they merely perpetuate the repressive
stratification of society.
When he first discovers the many injustices in America Holdt looks for
groups of people to blame, at times singling out white liberals who
"do great and exhausting work in the ghettos, but whether they
breastfeed or bottlefeed the underclass the result is the same: they
are actually blaming the victims themselves by trying to adjust them
to their unhappy casteless fate in an unjust caste society, instead of
changing that society." As he continues to vagabond across the country
he begins to realize that nearly everyone is a victim and thus begins
instead to ask "Where is the rainmaker who created the mud puddle?" If
by the end of his travels he has found the answer to this metaphorical
questions it is surely that the fault lies in the greed, selfishness
and mass consumption inherent in the U.S. capitalist system itself.
"When love is made a sales item, all our humanity is sold out. ...
"Disposable" society, backyard-dumping both things and human beings,
has in this way killed love in society by isolating and alienating
enormous population groups from each other."
Holdt further implicates the system in his characterization of the
large U.S. cities:
"The elevated highways symbolize the struggle against an inhuman
systems and are equally significant of the powerlessness of those who
ride them over increasingly misanthropic and deserted cities wherein
they as a result of such distorted priorities no longer dare move on
foot. Trapped by their own systems these lonesome whites must speed
down the superhighway to get safely from the protected suburbs to
their work downtown without being confronted by the rats, the misery,
and the violence in the poor neighborhoods. Once in a while, however,
up on their highways they do get shot at from the ghettos below such
as I heard it happened in East St. Louis. In these barren,
anxiety-ridden and seemingly 'neutron-bombed' landscapes it becomes a
deadly necessity to have a car. The reasonable answer therefore is to
create even more concrete spaghetti and human sterility while there is
not enough money for public transportation for the poor."
With all the emotion and bitterness characteristic of the oppressed,
Holdt extends the misguided rationalization inherent in the
capitalistic mentality to explain how media reinforces our empty
society, and he further links this mentality with the U.S.'s support
of bloody and repressive regimes in Central America and in the Third
World all of which is permitted by the mindlessness and indifference
of the majority of Americans. Thus the documentary photographs in
American Pictures serve to dig a grave for the American version of
capitalism and the essays drive the nails into the coffins leaving it
up to the reader to decide whether or not it should be buried.
American Pictures is an extremely difficult book for any American to
read, but it, is perhaps most distressing for the whites it was
intended to educate, as Holdt often does not hesitate to put much of
the blame for our society's injustices on the white middle and upper
class segments of the American population. This has surely had the
effect of souring many a potential reader toward Holdt, his book, and
the many harsh and distasteful realities inherent in American society
and government. But the genuinely human readers who recognize the
importance of this work will not be discouraged by the guilt,
responsibility and sadness which it instills in them, instead acting
to alleviate these by making an effort to correct society's ills. As
Holdt points out, "the failure to feel guilt is the basic flaw of the
psychopath, who is capable at committing crimes of the vilest sort
without remorse or contrition." Thus for many would-be philanthropists
this book often has the effect of causing our self-righteous
indignation over this outsider's critique of our society to melt away
in the heat of emotion as we struggle to find a finger-hold by which
to grab a brick from the prison of guilt he is building around us so
that we might eventually rationalize our way out. But every argument,
every brick, is quickly cemented over until we are trapped inside the
prisons alone with ourselves and the pain which comes from knowing and
finally having to face the cruel fact that we are guilty. The
admission of this oppressive guilt burns away the layers of
rationalization which we had previously used as excuses to protect
ourselves from the realization that our very life-styles and
unconcerned attitudes not only allow but are the direct cause of our
great injustices towards society's discarded people. In this way
American Pictures allows the reader to be 'reborn' as a thinking,
feeling human being in a position of renewed but humble strength,
allowing him to see the oppressed as equal human beings and thereby
bring about change for everyone's mutual benefit, as opposed to the
"infernalism or paternalism" that results when we consider ourselves
to be superior.
Pictures", this hits the nail on the head in regards to the reality of
America which is far different than the fantasy that the right wing
has been peddling for generations.
http://www.american-pictures.com/english/reviews/bookrevw/hoernle.html
American Pictures:
a Foreigner's Perspective on Social Injustice in the United States
by Nils Hoernle
"The more cars (for lonesome flight rather than the cozy strolling of
streets as in Europe), the more weapons (rather than communication),
the more fortresses (instead of sharing), the more military build up
(instead of sharing with the Third World through its proposed New
Economic World Order) all the more does private industry enrich itself
on this systematic subversion of society. The higher the barriers big
business constructs between people, the higher the stocks will rise an
Wall Street ..."
The U.S. is a relatively young and immensely complex nation whose
problems and their underlying causes cannot be easily outlined in one
book, yet Jacob Holdt's 'travel book' entitled American Pictures comes
closer to completely describing, analyzing and documenting our
society's injustices than perhaps any other contemporary work. It is
remarkable in that it is an emotionally charged visual and verbal
experience which not only causes the reader to feel these injustices
but leaves him with a rational understanding of why economic equality
is a necessity. The numerous photographs which comprise a large part
of American Pictures bear witness to Holdt's portrayal of this
country's social, economic, and political shortcomings, serving as
grotesque testimony before a worldwide audience to the huge gap
between the American government and media's self-image as a country
which leads the fight for freedom and democracy 'with liberty and
justice for all' on one side and a country of bigotry, selfish greed,
racism, and rampant exploitation which leads to both physical and
mental oppression and poverty on the other. Though for the many
browsers of this book the pictures will suffice to carry its initial
emotional impact, it is the text which delivers its main punch --
characterizing a violent and oppressive American society from its
colonial beginnings through the period of chattel slavery to its
present position as an aggressive world power.
American Pictures is in many respects a 10-year travel diary which
charts Jacob Holdt's introduction to American society from his
often-times naive and self-righteous cultural relativist stage through
his mental and emotional development via numerous incredible
experiences and human contacts to his much more advanced ideas and
insights into the causes and solutions of the problems which threaten
to destroy American society. Having grown up in Denmark's welfare
state he is completely unprepared for the poverty and the overwhelming
indifference towards it that he encounters during his travels in
America. His vagabonding takes him through the forced labor cmps of
blacks, Mexicans and poor whites trapped behind the 'cotton curtain'
in the South, where he is shocked to find still intact the
master-slave relationship which he later realizes characterizes every
facet of interaction between whites and blacks in America. He next
travels to the Northwest where he becomes embroiled in a shoot-out
with FBI agents at Wounded Knee while trying to help native Americans
keep their lands out of the clutches of mineral-hungry corporations.
It is his selfless love for humanity which allows him to move back and
forth between the worlds of the fabulously wealthy and the destitute
with surprising ease, thus enabling him to live with the Southern
"aristocracy", get drunk with millionaires, and befriend street
people, drug addicts, gays, lesbians, transsexuals, pimps and
prostitutes. Before leaving the country he even attempts to bring
about reform in the American prison system. The reader soon realizes
that Holdt is better qualified than are most Americans to treat such
complex issues as alcoholism, malnutrition, unionization, American
religion, the K.K.K., black pride and integration.
It is not so much the absolute conditions of the people Holdt
encounters in America that are the tragedy of this country, but rather
the disparity between rich and poor, white and black, management and
labor, educated and ignorant, etc., which reveal the true inhumanity
of our society. His remarkable ability to capture its cruel irony and
hypocrisy by juxtaposing the vast extremes of material wealth and
intangible advantages such as education, health care, and equal
opportunity in his pictures and essays reveals a society that blames
its victims in its stubborn refusal to see them as such, thus making
them prime targets for exploitation. He finds in America a government
that jumps to the whip of big business but rolls over and plays dead
in response to the screams of the impoverished.
Throughout his book Holdt emphasizes the idea that people are formed
by the environment they live in. He illustrates this with numerous
examples of how the ghetto has shaped its inhabitants and how
America's chattel slavery has shaped the American black. By
contrasting American blacks with Africans and with other former black
slaves in non-capitalistic countries, he finds again and again that it
is the various stresses peculiar to a society or system of government
(and hence of slavery) that have led to the present attributes of
these peoples. Thus even within America he notices differences in the
attitudes and behavior of blacks in the North and South. His
vagabonding in both Northern city slums and rural Southern "slave
camps" enables him to directly experience the deep humanity of the
people relegated to the lowest realms of society. He is taken in by
black members of the underclass who have no running water,
electricity, food, or furniture but who, in spite of his white skin,
treat him like a human being. He describes the subhuman conditions in
which these people live and eventually comes to understand the
psychological defeat they have undergone with respect to finding a
meaningful place in American society. Some seem so broken in spirit
that they simply deteriorate, while others, in an effort to retain a
measure of self-respect, refuse to join as productive elements a
society that treats them like trash. As one black women says to her
West Indian neighbor -- "You West Indians will scrub floors and do
anything to make it in this country. It may be that you end up ... in
most top black positions, but I would never for anything in the world
break my ass for the white man in order to get there. You have no
pride ....." He witnesses how so many in the "underclass" turn to
drugs and physically deteriorate in response to the deterioration of
spirit which they could not bear while 'clean'. Those more resilient
to these effects of oppression often take their cues from the American
capitalist system and find ways to exploit each other, often becoming
pimps, prostitutes, or hustlers. Those who escape these alternatives
are more often forced into crime as the only realistic means of
survival. Thus from the time ghetto children are old enough to see,
hear, and feel they have already begun to absorb these destructive
patterns of behavior from their chaotic environment, and the ghetto
child who has not witnessed a shoot-out by the first grade is a rare
find indeed. If any members of the younger generation do manage to
survive the repression of the ghetto, they then have to contend with
the American system of education, which after having taught in
American public schools, Holdt describes quite simply as "designed to
make some into an elite and dispose of other's as trash."
He then shows how our society further condemns the poor with its
stingy welfare policies which in effect pronounce a death sentence on
families in which there is a man present, thus fostering the
destruction of the black family unit begun during the period of
slavery. Eventually these detrimental aspects of ghetto life become
ingrained in the culture and are reinforced as each successive
generation gets further indoctrinated into its patterns of violence
and self-destruction.
As a consequence of his many "psychic leaps" from the despondency of
the ghetto to the luxurious wealth of the bankers, corporate
executives and businessmen, Holdt soon begins to perceive the
emptiness inherent in the lives of the affluent, yet often finds them
to be sympathetic and concerned about the needs and lives of those
less fortunate than themselves, stemming perhaps from the lack of
human contact and isolation which results from their material
vulnerability and which ultimately confines them to their lonely
strata at the uppermost tiers of society. Because of constant fear of
kidnappers and burglars, many of the parents and children Holdt
encounters in these homes are permanently isolated from large segments
of the populations resulting in the development of a deep-seated fear
and distrust of the underclass. This effectively rules out the
possibility of positive interaction and thus allows for the
perpetuation of malignant myths about those they have only encountered
as the master in the master-slave relationship. As a result Holdt
witnesses the same alcohol and drug dependency in the isolated and
closed upperclass society that he found in the ghettos, emphasizing
the point that the stresses involved in acquiring vast fortunes and
holding on to them are just os detrimental to the spirit as are the
struggles of the poverty-stricken to survive. He is forced to conclude
that "wherever the master-slave relationship is found neither master
nor slave is really happy. Neither role permits either to became fully
human and therefore serves to cripple and paralyze their minds and
behavior." Holdt seeks in vain to bridge this vast chasm which exists
between the wealthy whose lives have little meaning outside of their
material abundance and the often intense humanity of the poor.
In contrast to the emptiness characterizing the lives of the rich, the
wealthy Southern "aristocrats" he finds in Georgia have bridged this
gap. By administering paternalistic concern for their former slaves
they satisfy their consciences in feeling that they are doing a
service to humanity, while at the same time deriving direct emotional,
social, and "comic" interaction from them. They thereby see themselves
as "philanthropists" and as such feel morally and spiritually
fulfilled. As such, however, they merely perpetuate the repressive
stratification of society.
When he first discovers the many injustices in America Holdt looks for
groups of people to blame, at times singling out white liberals who
"do great and exhausting work in the ghettos, but whether they
breastfeed or bottlefeed the underclass the result is the same: they
are actually blaming the victims themselves by trying to adjust them
to their unhappy casteless fate in an unjust caste society, instead of
changing that society." As he continues to vagabond across the country
he begins to realize that nearly everyone is a victim and thus begins
instead to ask "Where is the rainmaker who created the mud puddle?" If
by the end of his travels he has found the answer to this metaphorical
questions it is surely that the fault lies in the greed, selfishness
and mass consumption inherent in the U.S. capitalist system itself.
"When love is made a sales item, all our humanity is sold out. ...
"Disposable" society, backyard-dumping both things and human beings,
has in this way killed love in society by isolating and alienating
enormous population groups from each other."
Holdt further implicates the system in his characterization of the
large U.S. cities:
"The elevated highways symbolize the struggle against an inhuman
systems and are equally significant of the powerlessness of those who
ride them over increasingly misanthropic and deserted cities wherein
they as a result of such distorted priorities no longer dare move on
foot. Trapped by their own systems these lonesome whites must speed
down the superhighway to get safely from the protected suburbs to
their work downtown without being confronted by the rats, the misery,
and the violence in the poor neighborhoods. Once in a while, however,
up on their highways they do get shot at from the ghettos below such
as I heard it happened in East St. Louis. In these barren,
anxiety-ridden and seemingly 'neutron-bombed' landscapes it becomes a
deadly necessity to have a car. The reasonable answer therefore is to
create even more concrete spaghetti and human sterility while there is
not enough money for public transportation for the poor."
With all the emotion and bitterness characteristic of the oppressed,
Holdt extends the misguided rationalization inherent in the
capitalistic mentality to explain how media reinforces our empty
society, and he further links this mentality with the U.S.'s support
of bloody and repressive regimes in Central America and in the Third
World all of which is permitted by the mindlessness and indifference
of the majority of Americans. Thus the documentary photographs in
American Pictures serve to dig a grave for the American version of
capitalism and the essays drive the nails into the coffins leaving it
up to the reader to decide whether or not it should be buried.
American Pictures is an extremely difficult book for any American to
read, but it, is perhaps most distressing for the whites it was
intended to educate, as Holdt often does not hesitate to put much of
the blame for our society's injustices on the white middle and upper
class segments of the American population. This has surely had the
effect of souring many a potential reader toward Holdt, his book, and
the many harsh and distasteful realities inherent in American society
and government. But the genuinely human readers who recognize the
importance of this work will not be discouraged by the guilt,
responsibility and sadness which it instills in them, instead acting
to alleviate these by making an effort to correct society's ills. As
Holdt points out, "the failure to feel guilt is the basic flaw of the
psychopath, who is capable at committing crimes of the vilest sort
without remorse or contrition." Thus for many would-be philanthropists
this book often has the effect of causing our self-righteous
indignation over this outsider's critique of our society to melt away
in the heat of emotion as we struggle to find a finger-hold by which
to grab a brick from the prison of guilt he is building around us so
that we might eventually rationalize our way out. But every argument,
every brick, is quickly cemented over until we are trapped inside the
prisons alone with ourselves and the pain which comes from knowing and
finally having to face the cruel fact that we are guilty. The
admission of this oppressive guilt burns away the layers of
rationalization which we had previously used as excuses to protect
ourselves from the realization that our very life-styles and
unconcerned attitudes not only allow but are the direct cause of our
great injustices towards society's discarded people. In this way
American Pictures allows the reader to be 'reborn' as a thinking,
feeling human being in a position of renewed but humble strength,
allowing him to see the oppressed as equal human beings and thereby
bring about change for everyone's mutual benefit, as opposed to the
"infernalism or paternalism" that results when we consider ourselves
to be superior.