Gilded Apartheid for the Old?"

[rodeodance]

Published on Tuesday, December 19, 2006 by the Daytona Beach News-Journal (Florida)
French Author on de Tocqueville's Trail Finds Land of Gates
by Pierre Tristam


Bernard-Henri Levy is one of those superstar French intellectuals you don't hear much about anymore. He has big ideas to go along with his big hair and big mouth, and an addiction to glamour that only begins with his toothpick-model of a wife. In 2003, The Atlantic magazine asked him to retrace the footsteps of Alexis de Tocqueville in the United States and write a "Democracy in America"-like book for the 21st century. The magazine serialized the results, and earlier this year the American edition of "American Vertigo," a 300-odd page book, collected Levy's reflections about megachurches, lap-dancers, presidential debates, weight-loss clinics, Sharon Stone, a half dozen prisons, kitsch, gun shows, over-the-hill gay sex clubs and up-and-comers like Hillary and Barack. Levy is alternately infuriating, clueless, dead-on and brilliant -- and never dull, which is more than you can say for most intellectuals working today, French or American.

One particularly acute observation in "American Vertigo" relates to Sun City in Arizona, where, Levy writes, "the rule is simple. Implacable. No home without at least one resident above fifty-five. Children and teenagers admitted only to visit. A city of the old. A private city, reserved for retired people, cut off from the rest of the world. In this falsely urban space with perfectly straight, almost deserted streets, where once in a while a few granddads in golf carts pass by, an optimist will see an oasis of prosperity in a society plagued by crisis, a bourgeois utopia dreamed up by some grand developer. ... The problem, obviously, is the rest. Everything else. The problem is all the black people you can't see here, and the Hispanics who, I am told, are here, but whose presence I am not aware of either. Poor people in general, a huge population left out of this suburban dream. ... The problem, in short, is that all this implies a profound break with the very tradition of civic-mindedness and civility -- I won't even say of compassion -- that was responsible, and continues to be responsible, for this country's greatness."

That last note of optimism doesn't keep Levy from titling the section, "A Gilded Apartheid for the Old?" The question mark is superfluous, and the word "apartheid" hardly an overstatement. Resegregation is alive and well in the United States, by all sorts of means and for all sorts of reasons (age, health care, race, education, class), usually with at least these threads in common: The segregation is voluntary. It's driven by money. And its end result is a separate and unequal arrangement that benefits those included at the expense of those not. It's country-club rules applied to broader but equally exclusionary and civically destructive ends.

To argue, for instance, that gated-community residents are only freely living according to their means is a delusion. Such communities are separate civic and quasi-governmental structures (down to separate "security" patrols, garbage pickups, elections and homeowner regulations). Yet they cannot exist without the support structure beyond the gates. Still, by not having a vested involvement in the community beyond its walls, the gated ghetto impoverishes the whole structure by weakening its social and political bonds. Medieval burgs were run that way. Rich at the top, presumed rabb............

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1219-27.htm