Out of America
Richburg, Keith B.
ened and the powerful" (who were frequently pro-Hiss) and "the plain men and women of the nation" (who believed Chambers)? God or Man, Soul or Mind: Chambers's formulation may seem facile. But as...
...Otherwise, they might carve off your ears, your nose, and toss your limbless torso atop the pile of dead bodies, where you could slowly bleed to death...
...The froth and frenzy of industrial civilization mask our deep loneliness...
...Here is that thought, perfectly captured in the book's last sentence: "By an accident of birth, I am a black man born in America, and everything I am today—my culture and attitudes, my sensibilities, loves, and desires—derives from that one simple and irrefutable truth...
...But Bork, Gore, and many other commentators can't see past the imperfections that remain...
...The militias, he writes, wouldn't shoot you in the head, Somali style...
...He also takes them to task for trooping to Africa to praise corrupt dictators, withholding criticism that they surely would offer were the dictators and their subjects SARKES TARZIAN INC Sarkes Tarzian Television Sarkes Tarzian Radio Broadcasters Making a Difference 74 May 1997 • The American Spectator not black...
...Rejecting the separationist tendenThe Idea of Decline in Western History Arthur Herman Free Press / 521 pages / $3o REVIEWED BY Stephen Chapman I n the acknowledgments to Slouching Towards Gomorrah, Robert Bork thanks his wife, who "provided moral support on bleak days...
...This, of course, is not what he is supposed to be, according to those in America who would make Africa central to Rich-burg's identity...
...Mental illness in its many forms is at epidemic levels...
...If you were lucky, they might finish you off with a machete blow to the back of the head...
...Judging from the rest of the book, there must be a lot of them...
...Whether they know it or not, they are part of a long tradition of bitter disenchantment with Western civilization...
...But in Africa, he says, "I am an alien...
...The vice president's 1992 book, Earth in the Balance, makes Bork sound like Norman Vincent Peale: [O]ur civilization is addicted to the consumption of the earth itself...
...Richburg spent time in depressing places and witnessed hellish things...
...Elsewhere, Richburg found that elections were stolen in Cameroon, annulled in Nigeria, and rigged in Kenya...
...Citing Asian countries that are former colonies, full of ethnic and linguistic diversity, and wanting in resources—yet that are now doing well—Richburg contends that Africa's problems stem from corruption and dependence on Western aid...
...Herman's book would be worth attention if it did nothing more than quote from an endless parade of doomsayers, which it does extensively...
...strove to fathom its meaning, Chambers intrigues and jars us even now...
...certainly it is worth consideration and debate...
...Then, if you didn't pass out, they would chop off one of your legs, or maybe just a foot...
...Out of America does include good political news—from Malawi, Mozambique, and Benin...
...Richburg has purposely chosen that self-identification...
...It was the "ultimate escape from being constantly defined and evaluated by the color of my skin...
...As he relates in riveting detail in Out of America, that is not the story he found...
...The "anonymity of death," as he calls it, was what he found "most difficult to accept and comprehend...
...And in Rwanda, Richburg found in the civil war between the Hutus and Tutsis "a senseless orgy of violence...
...When he was asked by his editors to go to Africa, Richburg worried what it would be like for the first time in his life to be "just another face in the crowd...
...In Rwanda he had similar thoughts as he watched butchered bodies float down the Kagera River toward Tanzania...
...So numbing is the assault on our sensibilities that many of us grow numb, finding resignation to be the rational, adaptive response to an environment that is increasingly polluted...
...What chewed up Richburg were the values that shaped the societies he encountered—values sharply in conflict with those that had shaped him...
...Out ofAmerica thus is also a confrontation, a brave one, of currently fashionable Afrocentrist teaching in the United States...
...Bork, in his book, suggests that modern feminists decrying their oppression by a patriarchal society are motivated mainly by boredom...
...The "rot is spreading...
...This apocalyptic impulse gathered considerable strength after the Enlightenment, which had the nerve to place confidence in the power of reason...
...It cannot work for me," he writes...
...The political and spiritual fault lines that he identified continue to shake, revealing issues of fundamental import that vex us still...
...But Richburg knows that he is condemning the refusal by U.S...
...Sorry, but I've been there...
...And it is in service of truths that badly needed saying...
...The Cold War was over, and with it the superpower rivalries that had troubled various parts of the continent...
...He delves into the writings of a variety of nineteenth-century thinkers, beginning with the French count Arthur de Gobineau, who claimed that all civilization was the product of the white Aryan race, which was doomed to decline as a result of centuries of thoughtless interbreeding with The S Even Is Always Falling en It's Blue The American Spectator • May 1997 75...
...Soon enough he decided tobecome a foreign correspondent...
...T]he testimony will stand...
...Each generation, it appears, feels obliged to find reasons to don sandwich boards and proclaim, "The end is nigh...
...W]e are on the road to cultural disaster...Life in such a culture can come close to seeming intolerable...
...cies among some black Americans —tendencies encouraged by Afrocentrism — Richburg contends that "we need instead to go back to the original idea of America as a melting pot and create a society that's truly color-blind, not carved up into racial and ethnic duchies...
...Close...
...Blacks were a minority at his public high school, but he says he was never made to feel unwelcome or the subject of hostility...
...Where that idea governs, progress toward a civilized society and democratic institutions is possible...
...4% us...
...Having seen Africa, Richburg will not allow himself to be an African-American, just an American...
...In Europe philosophers predicted rapid decay as a result of any number of causes —the dilution of the white race, man's growing separation from nature, the rise of capitalism, the power of technology, and so on...
...If the race is ever going to progress, we might start by admitting that the enemy is within...
...Even in death, the witness of Whittaker Chambers is not yet history...
...He rejects the notion that white America owes black Americans something on account of slavery...
...His 1996 book, Ending Affirmative Action (Basic Books), is now available in paperback...
...But the overall outlook for democracy and improved living conditions is decidedly bleak...
...Even America, whose creation as a country was a great act of faith in the possibilities of free people, soon had its prophets of decline...
...Richburg was born in Detroit thirty-five years ago, the son of a South Carolinian who had moved to Detroit during World War II in search of a better job...
...He scorns "our supposedly enlightened, so-called black leaders" who hold up Mother Africa as some kind of "black Valhalla, where descendants of slaves would be welcomed back and blacks can walk in true dignity...
...Nor can he recommend it to other black Americans...
...There, he says, he "chafed at the argument that I was supposed to be a black reporter, not simply a good reporter...
...Indeed, he is grateful that he is "out of America," not Africa...
...Well, look who's talking...
...Jeremiads like those from Bork and Gore have been heard issuing from both right and left across Europe and America for at least a century and a half—though similar laments can be found all the way back to the ancient Greeks...
...They would carve off your arm first and watch you bleed and scream in pain...
...In Asia, Richburg indeed escaped, as the Asians treated black and white Americans alike, simply as Americans...
...After attending the University of Michigan, Richburg worked for the Post covering the District of Columbia...
...Bork may not think he has much in common with Al Gore, but the two of them could have a good cry over dinner STEPHEN CHAPMAN is a syndicated columnist on the staff of the Chicago Tribune...
...Richburg says that his exploration of Africa wound up being an exploration of himself...
...black leaders to "talk straight" not just about Africa but also America...
...He can, however, recommend America...
...Not since The Divine Comedy has one book assembled so many sinners and documented so much wailing and gnashing of teeth...
...But over the course of the next three years, "Africa chewed me up and spit me back out again...
...military spokesman: "We fed them, they got strong, they killed TERRY EASTLAND is media editor of Forbes Digital Tool and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center...
...Arguing that Africa's failings have been "hidden behind a veil of excuses and apologies," Richburg rejects the usual explanations—the legacy of white colonialism, tribal diversity, and lack of natural resources...
...The witness is gone," Arthur Koestler wrote at Chambers's death...
...Had that not happened, he might have been one of the many unfortunate Africans who had met "an anonymous fate in one of the countless ongoing civil wars or tribal clashes on this brutal continent...
...When he was visited by Brooks Adams, brother of Henry, Theodore Roosevelt wrote, "He is having a delightful time here, and simply reveling in gloom over the appalling social and civic disasters which he sees impending...
...Because his own life was riven by this conflict, and because he so movingly Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa Keith B. Richburg Basic Books / 257 pages / $24 REVIEWED BY Terry Eastland I n1991, Keith B. Richburg had finished a tour of duty for the Washington Post in Southeast Asia when his editors asked him to go to Africa, where things were looking up...
...But the anger is often justified and in most cases controlled...
...T]he pursuit of happiness and comfort is paramount, and the consumption of an endless stream of shiny new products is encouraged as the best way to succeed in that pursuit...
...Yet he says hearrived "wanting to love the place, love the people," withal hoping that he "might find a little bit of that missing piece of myself" in his ancestral homeland...
...Some of the old dictators seemed on the ropes, and socialism was yielding to free markets...
...But as the "culture wars" of the nineties intensify, substantial numbers of Americans believe that at the root of our troubles is indeed a conflict of visions...
...An only child in a working class family, Richburg grew up in a racially mixed neighborhood, attending parochial school through the seventh grade...
...In Somalia, though the famine eased, the U.S.-led military intervention proved unable to save the country from itself...
...But Out ofAmeri- ca is not really a book about the condition of various African nations and how they might be bettered...
...This is a book about decline," Bork announces on page two...
...Richburg arrived in Nairobi thinking that the continent's best days since independence were immediately ahead...
...Half his readers have probably started eyeing the razor blades by the end of the first chapter...
...Where it does not, where the individual is submerged within the tribe or the clan, the Africa that Richburg rejects is certain...
...H ow did such a book, a kind of Roots in reverse, come to be written...
...More than once, as he contemplated the bodies in the Kagera, or some other such scene, Richburg thought: "There but for the grace of God go I." In perhaps the most remarkable passage in the book, he expresses gratitude that his African-born ancestor survived the voyage on the ship that brought him to the New World, a slave...
...Richburg names names: Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, Coretta Scott King, among others—people "completely ignorant about Africa...
...Richburg quotes the U.S...
...He claims to have written this book because he was tired of the lying, the ignorance, the hypocrisy, and double standards he reads and hears about Africa...
...4* chronicling the many ways in which the world is going to hell on a bullet train...
...What all of these Eeyores shared is what many on the modern left and right share: a powerful aversion to change, a distrust of unregulated commerce and individual liberty, and a dark certainty that the modern world has unleashed satanic forces that may be beyond our control...
...They are not entirely to blame for their warped perspective...
...Nonetheless, he Understanding the "African" in African-American The American Spectator • May 1997 73 was aware both of his color and of the fact others were aware of it even as he tried to avoid being defined by his color—by racialists white or black...
...A] new fear is now deepening our addiction: even as we revel in our success at controlling nature, we have become increasingly frightened of the consequences, and that fear only drives us to ride this destructive cycle harder and faster...
...Much of this analysis and prescription seems sound...
...Surveying Africa as a whole, he writes that, in the three decades since power was transferred from white colonial dictators, there has been more repression and brutality: "For the Africans, for the ordinary, decent, long-suffering Africans, precious little has changed...
...But it also clarified for him what it is about America that is worthy of praise —the absolute importance of each individual person, not the clan or the tribe...
...It is, as the subtitle indicates, a confrontation with Africa written by a "black man...
...Communism is dead, the world is at peace, enormous strides have been made toward racial equality, the environment is getting cleaner all the time, crime is falling, personal freedom has greatly expanded, rising living standards have made life easier and fuller for even the poorest Americans, socialism and much of the welfare state have been discredited —at one time, achievements like these would have seemed figments of utopian fantasy...
...Tracing that tradition, and explaining its influence on contemporary thinking, is the job undertaken by Arthur Herman in The Idea of Decline in Western History...
...His list of needed reforms includes limiting "imperial presidencies," empowering opposition parties, decentralizing government, creating regional economic groups, and ensuring press freedom...
...army major who served as the U.N...
...Published in late February and in its fourth printing by the end of March, Out ofAmerica has been called an "angry" book...
...Not that America is perfect, or that, being black, he does not at times feel an alien in his own country...
...But not just his testimony in a legal sense...
...They also seem to have in common a psychological need to savor the prospect of imminent catastrophe...
...In Somalia he was struck that no one seemed to care who in particular was starving to death...
...True enough...
Vol. 30 • May 1997 • No. 5
