Books: These Strange Americans

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Poker & Politics. The essence of the "noble and somewhat sacrilegious" American Dream, writes Barzini, is that all man's problems can be solved by intelligence and industry. When things go wrong, at home or abroad, Americans are like "the man who has dropped a penny in the slot machine and did not get either his chewing gum or his money back . . . He fumes, shakes, punches and curses . . . Americans [think that] if you put the right amount of money in the right place ... if you sign carefully worded contracts . . . you must always get satisfactory results. When history does not deliver the gum . . . when injustice prevails . . . Americans are eternally surprised . . . Nothing ever surprised the British and the Romans, who considered the most desperate and illogical behavior on the part of foreigners only natural ... At the bottom of these excessive [U.S.] hopes there may be apathy. Men who get out of bed only for the greatest crusades—to change the face of the world, and to right all wrongs forever—are apparently reluctant to accept everyday, nonrevolutionary tasks ..."

Reporter Barzini wants the U.S. to buckle down harder to the everyday tasks of a great nation. He wants Americans to stop feeling contempt for "blocs," "spheres of influence," and "balances of power," because these are the "technical means by which any policy, aggressive and imperialistic, or noble and disinterested, can be promoted." He wants them to apply "to political transactions . . . the same knowledge of human nature which Americans use daily in their national card game, poker." Above all, he wants the U.S. to stop taking the initiative only in emergencies, and adjust itself to the permanent crisis, "the psychology of the long pull." The U.S. must build a "smooth-running system" for all the free world—"the American Empire."

Barzini winds up in a significant self-contradiction: he tells the U.S. to be tough, fearless, self-assured and Europe's leader; at the same time, he wants the U.S. to follow Europe's advice and do things Europe's way. His ideal America would be a kind of super-Europe, the successful, functioning substance of centuries ago, but equipped with all modern conveniences, its diplomats so many Metternichs riding to peace conferences in helicopters, taking its philosophy and manners (as Rome took Greece's) from older and wiser heads, via teletypewriter. That is the sentimental dream behind the oft-heard European advice that the U.S. ought to learn how to be "realistic" from Europe.

Actually, Reporter Barzini knows that the U.S. does not fit that dream because its nature and its tasks are different from anything that ever went before. He writes: "We, in Europe, know little and decide nothing . . . They, the Americans, are alone in the world and carry war and peace on their lap, and . . . nobody can really advise, help or guide them."