Word: revelations
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...France as a columnist for the weekly L'Express, Revel cast his beady eye upon a more solid target, sacred, large, fixed as a monument: Charles de Gaulle himself. Then Revel had a splendid idea. As a Frenchman in search of the ultimate heresy, why not-sacre bleu! -write a book in praise of the United States...
Without Marx or Jesus is the result. Already a bestseller in France, it promises to be one of those literary causes celebres that Americans like to discuss without necessarily reading. Revel operates from two unprovable premises with a passion for abstract generalization that seems extreme even for a Frenchman. Premise 1: "If mankind is to survive," Revel thunders, the world must have a revolution. Premise 2: Such a revolution can start only...
...just what is the "absolutely necessary" and rather total transformation Revel calls for? Little short of Utopia. All Revel seems to expect is an end to "the notion of national sovereignty," some sort of "worldwide economic and educational equality," the "abolition of war," an "elimination of the possibility of internal dictatorship," and worldwide birth control...
...prescribed change, Revel asserts, is already taking place in these United States. As he goes through the motions of proving it, Revel spends a good deal of time trying to destroy myths that cynical Europeans and guilt-ridden natives share about the New World...
Myth No. 1: "Conformity" and "uniformity" are now the chief characteristics of American society. "The truth," Revel writes, "is that American society is torn by too many tensions not to become more and more diversified." He sees the U.S. as a healthy bundle of contradictions, "a diversity of mutually complementary, of alternative subcultures...