The Unbearable Lightness (or Not) of Jedediah Purdy's Being America

As Professor Josh Stenger writes in his essay "'AMERICAN' IDLES: Spinning, Disappointment and Desire in Purdy's Paradise Lost," there is indeed something "slippery and insubstantial about [Jedediah Purdy's] style of writing" (Stenger 5). Stenger compares understanding Purdy's writing to struggling with the infamous childhood substance oobleck, the gluey green goo that has everyone in Dr. Seuss's Bartholomew and the Oobleck as helplessly mired in muck as those who attempt to traverse the waters of social, political and ecological modernity by way of Purdy's book, Being America.

Purdy's writing does impart upon a reader increased knowledge about the AIDS problem in South Africa, anti-American sentiment in India and Egypt, China's attempts to adapt American economics without the use of American politics, living and working conditions in Cambodia, the abundance of slave-cheap labor in the Philippines and Vietnam, and the inevitable decrease in this labor supply that will hopefully characterize a future in which there is a balance of power and prosperity. At the same time it leaves a reader scratching their head as to the message behind all of Purdy's fence-straddling objectivity. Purdy attempts to be objective in his writing almost to a fault, presenting both sides of every argument and creating a kind of monotonous back-and-forth that Stenger addresses in his essay as, "a Dickensian 'best of times, worst of times,' even-handedness" (6). Purdy's penchant for balanced arguments left me hanging on to paragraphs such as these, eagerly awaiting the strong opinion that never came:

We have been looking at the free market as a tectonic force that shifts populations and shakes governments. Markets can sow discontent, anger, and fear... But markets also weave people together in peaceful and equitable ways (Purdy 206).