"And yet, Mr. Ashcroft's efforts notwithstanding, people continue to make their way here from across the globe. Not all of these migrants are fleeing death squads and deep poverty; some are attracted to the mobility, the essential rootlessness of this place. A friend of mine is from Georgia (the former Soviet republic and again independent state)."
Speaking as an immigrant (arrived here at 9), you cannot, absolutely cannot imagine the anguish of leaving your own country, family, friends, language, music, parks, lakes, tales, jokes....and arriving in LA.
"He complains constantly about the loneliness, the emptiness of American life. At home, he knew where he stood and his place in the world without question. Here he is adrift.
And yet he stays when return is possible. Why? He tells me that he feels he can be a different person here, that in the void there is a strange freedom to remake himself - as an MDMA selling club kid, as a database administrator, as a mountain biking enthusiast, as a devout religionist, as a wry commentator on the American scence as an insider who's an outsider. He is ecstatic, he is depressed. He is inifinitely weak and supremely strong at once."
Ironically, the immigrant may have more inner resources to withstand the pressures of life in the U.S. than the native born. For one thing, his ego was formed within a functioning civil-society/family/culture therefore he can make something more of the "freedom" -- while he suffers more from the loneliness.
"This is the modern state to me. Not simply the capitalist opressive state, but the full condition of a species that realizes, for the first time, that its entire history and future clings to the surface of a small world circling a star destined to die a spectacular death - taking the little world with it"
Nah, the fact that life is ephemeral could paradoxically make it seem more precious, more beatiful. I remember, I think it was in Beowulf (ca 800 AD), that life is compared to a swallow that flies into a dining hall where everyone is eating and making merry...before flying out again, into the darkness. This was definitely pre-modernity...and life looked like a party between darkness and darkness.
So, I'll insist that the real burden of modernity is not that we have discovered that we can make stuff up as we go along, but that we have cut off all meaningful connection to one another and to the earth.
Joanna