Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2000. [Vol. 6.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)

Studies - Jason M. Dew: Cold War Reflections in Travels with Charley: Steinbeck's New Americanist Evaluation of Intra-Imperialist America

reason than for the paradigm's ability to organize and, hence, make sense out of a complex set of phenomena: "You think then we might be using the Russians as an outlet for something else, for other things." "I didn't think that at all, sir, but I bet I'm going to. [...] Yes, sir." he said with growing enthusiasm, "those Russians got quite a load to carry. Man has a fight with his wife, he belts the Russians." "Maybe everybody needs Russians. I'll bet even in Russia they need Russians. Maybe they call it Americans." He cut a sliver of cheese from a wheel and held it out to me on the knife blade. "You've give me something to think about in a sneaking kind of way." (TWC 143-144) The juxtaposition between this unsubstantiated view of the Russians with that still vague "something else" presents a conveniently distilled illustration of what Steinbeck later calls his country's "sickness" {TWC 168). By suggesting the existence of a socially-pertinent relationship between the two, Steinbeck attempts to open the door to further insight in regards to the pall descended upon American society. To this extent, the Russians emerged as a scapegoat to an ideologically inculcated American public, and, therefore, became a vent through which to channel the frustrations cultivated within America's borders. They were simply the issue externalized; indeed, the intra-imperialistic idea of what it was to be a Russian helped Americans give a semblance of order and, perhaps more importantly, direction to their world. Given the fact that Steinbeck had "always had a keen awareness of the importance of the social cement of common purpose" (Champney, "Californian" 353), the character of his initial supposition is not surprising nor is the notion that what the Russians really were even this late into the Cold War were an overstated threat made so by a lost and dissatisfied people very much laden with the riddle of their own legitimation. The problems that arise out of this type of binary thinking are evident, especially when the identified tyranny is poorly understood if understood at all. Russia and Russians essentially were likened to things that go bump in the night: a hyper-imagined threat that sufficed as a means to articulate what Americans were definitively not. It was a structural negative; the more Americans distinguished themselves from the "enemy," the more aware of themselves they were. This was 35