We are all self-haters now

As an American coming of age at the fag end of the 1960s, I celebrated self-loathing. Everything about the United States was shameful: its shallow consumerism, its environmental rapacity, its worship of money, its racism, its political assassinations, its catastrophic involvement in Vietnam. Everything about the American past was shameful, too: slavery, the massacre of Native Americans, the arrogance of manifest destiny. No surprises. At the time, these views constituted a set menu.

Yet amid all this wallowing in ignominy, did I feel, myself, ashamed? Nah. Sure, I claimed to. But the sensation of genuine disgrace is soul-destroying. Drenched in actual shame, you don’t want to leave the house — and I was eager to hit the pavement with placards. In truth, the dominant emotion of my hippie period was exhilaration. I gloried in shaming my country, an aggressive, transitive construction that leaves the agent of the verb above reproach — like hosing down a crowd of muddy urchins in the backyard and not getting wet.