Mrs. Trollope's America

Frances Trollope, mother of the celebrated novelist, left England for the United States in 1827. She found a country that boasted of loving freedom, while enslaving Africans and killing its native people. To the winner of the V.F. essay contest, her criticisms still hit home.

 For the third annual Vanity Fair essay contest, we asked young Americans to define our national reality. To be more specific: In a country defined by video games, reality TV, and virtual friendships, with a White House that has perfected the art of politics as public relations, what is reality to Americans today? And did we ever have a grasp of it?

Kipling Buis, photographed in Ventura, California. Photograph by Patrick Fraser.

Also on VF.com: the second-place and third-place essays.

In 1827, an Englishwoman named Frances Trollope—mother of the now more famous novelist Anthony Trollope—migrated to the United States, which was already billing itself as the land of opportunity. After various attempts to prosper in Cincinnati failed, she wrote a classic travelogue, Domestic Manners of the Americans. On the whole, she was not too impressed with us. Our social conduct, she reported, was a uniquely repellent mixture of vulgarity and prudery that involved copious handshaking, spitting, and expressions of self-righteousness. Furthermore, our buildings were makeshift and ugly. Our roads were untraversable. Our merchants were dishonest. Our scholars were ignorant. Our women were flat-chested. But what really galled Mrs. Trollope was our hypocrisy:

They inveigh against the governments of Europe, because, as they say, they favour the powerful and oppress the weak. You may hear this declaimed upon in Congress, roared out in taverns, discussed in every drawing-room, satirized upon the stage, nay, even anathematized from the pulpit: listen to it, and then look at them at home; you will see them with one hand hoisting the cap of liberty, and with the other flogging their slaves. You will see them one hour lecturing their mob on the indefeasible rights of man, and the next driving from their homes the children of the soil, whom they have bound themselves to protect by the most solemn treaties.

Ouch. Mrs. Trollope rather cruelly poked us in both of our sore spots by invoking the two thoroughly repugnant crimes of our early history—namely, the enslavement of Africans and the massacre of the native population. (She would not have been surprised to learn that the U.S. government eventually violated nearly all of the innumerable "most solemn treaties" signed with various tribes.) Yet her criticism was (and is) easily dismissed with a version of the handy old saw about not being able to fry an omelet without breaking a few eggs. So today, nearly 200 years later, America continues to boast about its "exceptionalism" while Europe continues to resent hearing lectures about freedom and justice from a country founded on slavery and genocide.

This sort of contrast between one's self-image and one's public image has always been the stuff of comedy, but it's getting harder and harder to laugh about the gap between appearance and reality in America. The gap has widened into a chasm of make-believe that approaches schizophrenia. Hypocrisy is only part of the story. Ignorance plays an important role, too, as does sheer brutality. Together with greed and complacency, they feed our truly astounding capacity for denial. In fact denial, more than Christianity, is probably the true American religion. You need nothing short of religious faith—untainted by godless fact and logic—to slap a no blood for oil sticker on the bumper of your S.U.V. and fail to see the irony.

Our aversion to book learning is often blamed for this notorious inability to put two and two together. Not that we are or were completely illiterate. Mrs. Trollope noted that whereas our appreciation of literature was very meager indeed (her Ohio neighbors considered Shakespeare obscene and Chaucer obsolete), Americans were great newspaper readers. Today we are great television watchers and Web surfers. Our knowledge of the outside world, therefore, has mainly come to us in sensationalized fragments that are never connected and thus quickly forgotten. Hence the famous American ignorance. Books, by imparting a sense of continuity and context, can enlarge the imagination and enable you to weigh evidence, compare, contrast, and make important connections—in short, to exercise skepticism. Without this skill, your grasp of reality is going to be at best superficial and your ability to challenge prevailing myths nonexistent.

Mrs. Trollope applied her skepticism to the primal American myth, the immigration experience, and found it wanting. Give me your tired, your poor, Emma Lazarus would later write, and if you work hard and keep your nose clean you will strike it rich. The reality, Mrs. Trollope soon discovered, was much more brutal. She herself sank into destitution while other immigrants, particularly the Irish (whom she found even more wretched than the African slaves), were ruthlessly exploited for cheap labor and did not even earn subsistence wages. After the so-called aliens did all the dirty work, they were indignantly told to go home and stop taking jobs away from real American citizens. This pattern has been repeated many times—as, for example, with the Chinese after they built our great railroads—and it's happening again today with Latinos, who are now being told to go home after picking our crops, nannying our children, and mowing our lawns.

Meanwhile, the terminology has changed in step with our increasing greed, which even Mrs. Trollope, who considered us money-grubbing, would find shocking. The American people, once deemed citizens, are now "consumers," consuming the lion's share of the world's resources. Old-fashioned imperialism operates under euphemisms such as "globalization," "outsourcing," and (my favorite) "spreading democracy," justifying situations in which Asian and Latin American slaves who are not called "slaves" sew our clothes and assemble the television sets that transmit the American Dream, a vision of universal prosperity that somehow always excludes images of the ubiquitous sweatshop.

Which brings us to the media, everyone's favorite scapegoat for our escapist, myth-promoting, reality-denying tendencies. Plugged into his entertainment console, the isolated, air-conditioned suburbanite wanders through a maze of alternative realities into a wilderness of nested electronic hallucinations until he loses his sense of identity as well as his sense of reality—like Walter Mitty trapped inside a Philip K. Dick novel. Or so the postmodernists tell us. Personally, I don't find junk television and video games as harmful as all that. Few Americans mistake them for reality.

Quite a few Americans mistake our "serious" news programs for reality, however, so this is where our denial of reality reaches outlandish heights. It is no longer possible for me to believe that any news programs show us what we need to know. There is no relationship between the importance of an event and the time CNN, say, devotes to its coverage, just as there is no longer much difference between tabloid news and mainstream news. (If you judged an event's importance strictly by the amount of media coverage it received, then the O. J. Simpson trial would be by far the most significant event in the history of the universe.) The press never challenges our president when he makes his bewildering statements, because journalists are committed to maintaining the fantasy that the man in charge is competent and intelligent. Can denial go any further?

Even so, the media couldn't help showing us a few glimpses of reality following Hurricane Katrina. We were able to see some of the gross Third World inequality that thrives in the last best hope on earth, as well as the shocking incompetence and indifference of our leaders. When Mr. Warmth himself, Dick Cheney, visited New Orleans, he proved himself to be a poor hypocrite. He could barely even pretend to act as if he cared about the destruction of the great city and its infra dig inhabitants.

If Mrs. Trollope had seen the vice president that day, she would have realized anew that there are worse things in the world than hypocrisy. As a Francophile, she was no doubt familiar with La Rochefoucauld's observation that hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue. When a miser pretends to be generous, he's at least acknowledging the fact that generosity is a good thing. The upper crust of Mrs. Trollope's day, in the spirit of noblesse oblige, would occasionally throw a few crumbs to the peasants. In today's climate of brazen greed and make-believe democracy, our leaders keep all the crumbs to themselves. They have dropped their masks. It is time for us to remove the scales from our eyes.