>[Caution: extreme flight of fancy follows] I think one reason is
>that the national cult of individualism has decayed into easily
>manipulable mass narcissism (a la Christopher Lasch) and lost any of
>the positive qualities individualism can have
>That line of thought might sound screwy, but at least in part it has
>had some popular resonance in US history. I would cite the leading
>example of Ralph Waldo Emerson. RWE might have been Mr. Frosty
>Freeze in temperament (as Doug would surely agree)
Not only that - he was our ur-narcissist! In the dissertation I never wrote, I was planning to examine the transformations of narcissism in American culture from Emerson though Whitman and onto Stevens and Ashbery. RWE's was more "heroic" and "imperial" than Stevens and Ashberry's interiorized and aestheticized one, but they're all part of the same lineage. Ralph's notions of self-creation and self-reliance are largely bereft of any idea of the social, and his individual exists almost in opposition to the social. That kind of individuation is more a sign of weakness than strength - a stubborn refusal of interdependency, a childish "No!" that takes the place of real engagement.
Doug