Word: kammen
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...gallon than gas. And ethanol does little, on balance, to reduce greenhouse gases. Nor does it help that corn ethanol's success depends on imponderables like subsidies, commodity prices, the weather, Congress, the geopolitics of oil and a limited distribution network. "Corn ethanol is clearly flawed," says Daniel Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, noting the billions of dollars in subsidies that Uncle Sam has been funneling to distillers for years. "Everything we're seeing is politically expedient; [ethanol is] a scientifically naive choice...
...Diversity, Kammen suggests, was one reason why Americans were indifferent to their history. A young, pluralistic nation is united by its future rather than its past. Americans had their eyes focused on the horizon, and history was an impediment to progress. Americans, Abraham Lincoln once said, have "a perfect rage...
Immigrants to America had a different relationship with the past. Most had come to escape it. The irony is that once they settled in America, they could not live without it. Kammen suggests a kind of ethnic American syllogism: the first generation zealously preserves; the second generation zealously forgets; the third generation zealously rediscovers. The idea of the melting pot, he points out, was a comforting myth to Americans of older stock and a frightening one to those just off the boat. The idea of assimilation is always more congenial when you are the one being imitated...
...nearly two decades after World War II, Kammen suggests, patriotism served as the American civil religion. The 1960s turned into a decade of questioning, while the 1970s ushered in an era of nostalgia. And what is nostalgia, he says, but "history without guilt"? During the past 25 years, history has become a growth industry. Memory has been commercialized. Ask Ralph Lauren. In the Reagan years, public history was privatized, so that it was Coca-Cola, not the U.S. government, that "brought you" the centennial of the Statue of Liberty. The 1980s, Kammen says, inculcated "a selective memory and a soothing...
Mystic Chords of Memory trails off with a sense that America is not moving forward but pensively looking back. Kammen asserts that we have shown an increased interest in the past but a decreased knowledge of it. In the 1930s Lewis Mumford wrote, "Our past still lies ahead of us." The feeling one is left with after reading Kammen's dense and masterly work is that our future lies behind...