The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice - Hardcover

Marcus, Greil

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0571221564 ISBN 13: 9780571221561

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2006

Synopsis

From the author of Mystery Train and Lipstick Traces, an exhilarating and provocative investigation of the tangle of American identity “America is a place and a story, made up of exuberance and suspicion, crime and liberation, lynch mobs and escapes; its greatest testaments are made of portents and warnings, biblical allusions that lose all certainty in the American air.” It is this story of self-invention and nationhood that Greil Marcus rediscovers, beginning with John Winthrop’s invocation of America as a “city on the hill,” Lincoln’s second inaugural address, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech about his American dream. Listening to these prophetic founding statements, Marcus explores America’s promise as a New Jerusalem and the nature of its covenant: first with God, and then with its own citizens. In the nineteenth century, this vision of the nation’s story was told in public as part of common discourse, to be fought over in plain speech and flights of gorgeous rhetoric. Since then, Marcus argues, it has become cryptic, a story told more in art than in politics. He traces it across the continent and through time, hearing the tale in the disparate voices of writers, filmmakers, performers, and actors: Philip Roth, David Lynch, David Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, Sheryl Lee, and Bill Pullman. In The Shape of Things to Come, the future and the past merge in extraordinary and uncanny ways, and Marcus proves once again that he is our most imaginative and original cultural critic.

About this title

About the Author

Greil Marcus is the author of nine previous books, including The Old, Weird America and Like a Rolling Stone. He lives in Berkeley, California.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Prologue NEW YORK, WASHINGTON, D.C., PENNSYLVANIA
 
These are the voices I found when, a few days after terrorists attacked American cities, I was asked to write about what happened. It seemed presumptuous to say anything, and in any case I had nothing to say. I listened instead.
 
“Where is the building? Did it fall down? Where is it?”
 
—Joe Disordo, on the collapse of Two World Trade Center, describing his escape from One World Trade Center, New York Times, 16 September 2001
 
***
 
Looking down they could see the last convulsions: the lights of the cars were darting through the streets, like animals trapped in a maze, frantically seeking an exit, the bridges were jammed with cars, the approaches to the bridges were veins of massed headlights, glittering bottlenecks stopping all motion, and the desperate screaming of sirens reached faintly to the height of the plane . . .
 
            The plane was above the peaks of the skyscrapers when suddenly, with the abruptness of a shudder, as if the ground had parted to engulf it, the city disappeared from the face of the earth. It took them a moment to realize that the panic had reached the power stations—and that the lights of New York had gone out.
 
—Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1957
 
Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon. The sky was blue. The birds were singing. And the bastards were finally going to get what was coming to them.
 
            I say “I” even though I didn’t actually bomb the Pentagon—we bombed it, in the sense that Weathermen organized and claimed it . . .
 
            Some details cannot be told. Some friends and comrades have been in prison for decades; others, including Bernadine, spent months and months locked up for refusing to talk or give handwriting samples to federal grand juries. Consequences are real for people, and that’s part of this story, too. But the government was dead wrong, and we were right. In our conflict we don’t talk; we don’t tell. We never confess.
 
            When activists were paraded before grand juries, asked to name names, to humiliate themselves and to participate in destroying the movement, most refused and went to jail rather than say a word. Outside they told the press, I didn’t do it, but I dug it. I recall John Brown’s strategy over a century ago—he shot all the members of the grand jury investigating his activities in Kansas.
 
—Bill Ayers, Fugitive Days, September 2001
 
“You don’t know where she is?” I asked again. He shrugged again, and I said, “OK.” I let the automatic dangle from my hand as I waited for the sound of a jet making its final approach over the motel. “Last chance,” I said before the noise got too loud for him to hear. He shrugged again. “You know I’m not going to kill you, don’t you?” I said. He shook his head, but his eyes smiled. He might be a piece of shit but Jackson had some balls on him. Either that or he was more frightened of his business associates than he was of me. That was a real mistake on his part. When the landing jet swept over the motel, I leaned down and pumped two rounds into his right foot.
 
            “You didn’t have to shoot him twice,” Trahearne said.
 
            “Once to get his attention,” I said, “and once to let him know I was serious.”
 
—James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss, 1978
 
***
 
The terrorist attacks were major atrocities. In scale, they may not reach the level of many others—for example, Clinton’s 1998 bombing of the Sudan with no credible pretext, destroying half its pharmaceutical supplies and killing unknown numbers of people.
 
—Noam Chomsky, 11 September 2001
 
Over the years since the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran in 1979, the [American] public has become tolerably familiar with the idea that there are Middle Easterners of various shades and stripes who do not like them . . .
 
            With cell phones still bleeping piteously from under the rubble, it probably seems indecent to most people to ask if the United States has ever done anything to attract such awful hatred.
 
—Christopher Hitchens, Guardian (London), 13 September 2001
 
What we saw on Tuesday, terrible as it is, could be minuscule if, in fact, God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve . . . The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy forty million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, the abortionists, the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the A.C.L.U., People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say, “You helped this happen.”
 
—The Reverend Jerry Falwell, The 700 Club, 13 September 2001
 
The responsibility for violence lies with those who perpetrate it.
 
—Salman Rushdie, In Good Faith, 1990
 
***
 
The water was rising, got up in my bed
 
Lord, the water was rolling, got up to my bed
 
I thought I would take a trip, Lord, out on the days I slept.
 
—Charley Patton, “High Water Everywhere Part II,” 1929
 
I was stranded in Chicago until late last night. On the runway in Newark on Monday at 8 a.m.—that was OK by one day; on the runway at O’Hare on Tuesday at 8.30—that wasn’t so great. The airport shut down, and we were left to make our way into a chaotic Chicago of semi-evacuation. After three days and five plane reservations cancelled, I finally found a car and drove home. Eight hundred miles of flags, licenses from everywhere and bumper stickers like MY PRESIDENT IS CHARLTON HESTON and HOW’S MY DRIVING / DIAL 1-800-EAT-SHIT. With my finger on the pulse of the nation, I pulled in about 10 p.m.
 
—Hal Foster, Princeton, New Jersey, e-mail, 15 September 2001
 
For the first time in America, except during the Civil War and the World War, people were afraid to say whatever came to their tongues. On the streets, on trains, at theaters, men looked about to see who might be listening before they dared so much as say there was a drought in the West, for someone might suppose they were blaming the drought on the Chief! . . .
 
            Every moment everyone felt fear, nameless and omnipresent. They were as jumpy as men in a plague district. Any sudden sound, any unexplained footstep, any unfamiliar script on an envelope, made them startle; and for months they never felt secure enough to let themselves go, in complete sleep.
 
—Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here, 1935
 
Gloom and sadness and bereavement just hang in the air. My local firemen were killed, and the whole area is plastered with missing-people flyers: someone&

Edition details

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0571221564
• ISBN 13: 9780571221561
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English