STUCK IN REVERSE

Jerry Harkins

It was Thomas Riley Marshall, one-time Governor of Indiana and two-term Vice President of the United States who said, "What this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar."  He was being sarcastic about politicians who like to bloviate about all the problems facing the nation.  Today he might add that the cigar should be non-toxic, non-polluting and non-addictive.  It should smell like lilacs in the early morning and help users lower bad cholesterol. 

Make no mistake about this:  the American people today are in a real funk.  A lot of them are getting ready to vote for the least qualified, most dangerous candidate that has ever been nominated for dog catcher never mind President of the United States by a major political party.  They will be voting for and expecting radical change in pretty much every department of their lives, hoping but not really expecting that things will get better.  Others have lost all hope.  The suicide rate has increased by 24% since 1999.  College students want "trigger warnings" about assigned readings that might disturb their delicate sensibilities.  Several states want teachers to carry guns in the classroom.  Twenty-three states have passed "Stand Your Ground" laws which seem to be a variation on the theme of shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later.  New York, California and Michigan now require college students to obtain "affirmative consent" from each other before sexual activity commences and again before it advances from one stage to the next.  This involves teaching them that "Yes Means Yes" and "No Means No" which apparently many of them did not learn at their parents' knees.  Mr. Trump wants to build a twenty-foot high wall along the border between the United States and Mexico which is 1,989 miles long.  The Great Wall of China is nearly seven times longer and five feet higher but it was instantly overrun by the Mongols and, later, by others.  Mr. Trump has never read Robert Frost's poem that begins with the line, "Something there is that doesn’t love a wall."  Then there's Bernie Sanders who would like to provide free college tuition to everyone.  He proposes to pay for this by adopting the platform of the children who brought you Occupy Wall Street.  The reasons for this mass psychosis are many and you already know the litany which includes but is not limited to four major social dislocations:  the information revolution, the global economy, the death of God and institutional religion, and the spoliation of the natural environment.

·         Through economic thick and thin, the middle class has been dwindling ever since the oil embargo of 1973.  Average family income has declined substantially in spite of the facts that productivity has been rising steadily and we are working longer hours.   For the first time in our history, the prospects of our children are not nearly as promising as were those of their parents and grandparents.  They won't be able to get a mortgage until they pay off their student loans which will be just in time to help their own kids through college and then their aging parents through retirement.   To a lot of people, it seems the American Dream is dead.

·        Our institutions have failed us.  The government is paralyzed at every level by ideological bankruptcy and blatant corruption.  We face major challenges but are beset by failure and/or procrastination.  The trillions of dollars we have invested in military assets cannot defeat a ragtag group of terrorists.  Airport security has become an exercise in impenetrable regulations, mismanagement and interminable delays.  Major segments of the business community have become anti-social cabals focused exclusively on generating private wealth by defrauding the public.  Our schools are unable to teach either basic skills or the kinds of knowledge we need in the post-industrial economy.  Our churches promote absurdist, medieval doctrines and preach hatred and exclusion.  Our news media revolve around celebrity gossip, lurid crimes, titillating sex and "virtual" reality instead of truth.  It is, of course, essential to note that we are our institutions.  We have, as Pogo said, "…met the enemy and he is us."

·        Everyday life is tough, tougher than it used to be.  Airline travel has become torturous.  The carriers compete to see who can provide the worst service at the highest cost and the greatest hassle.  You get medical bills you have no hope of understanding and notices from your insurer that are equally dense in explaining why they won't cover the costs and why they want to second guess your physician.  Your automobile comes with air bags designed to spray you with deadly shrapnel and software designed to produce deceptive mileage and pollution reports.  Meanwhile, we are choking on our own traffic.

·       The Information Revolution has backfired.  We have lost whole categories of decent, family-friendly jobs, replacing them with robots which assure us that our call is important to them but the waiting time is at least fifteen minutes and we might be better off "visiting" them on their web site.  Customer service has been outsourced to remote corners of the world where people speak languages we never heard of.  Social media have transformed us into isolated actors whose dreams and aspirations must be expressed in 140 characters or less.  Everybody is spying on us.  The government monitors our phone calls.  Businesses monitor our purchasing and web sites keep track of our internet searches.

Nor is our American discontent unique.  All over the world, people are fed up with things as they are.  They rant and rave and riot in the streets and fulminate on the so-called social media but the solutions they propose are simplistic.  Ignorance and mendacity are the order of the day everywhere;  greed has overwhelmed the social contract;  the world is pervaded by a sense of alienation and the fact of withdrawal into smaller and smaller tribal entities protected by walls of suspicion and indifference.  The British vote to withdraw from the European Union is a case in point.  At the very least, it was a backward decision, a yearning for a time long gone when Great Britain really was bestriding the world and ruling the waves.  That Brexit was brought about by the inanities of a comic opera bureaucracy in Brussels is true but irrelevant.  For all its many faults, the EU was a progressive movement which held out the hope of reversing two thousand years of constant and savage warfare.  Instead, Europe seems to be opting for separatism and political fragmentation.  The mood is reminiscent of the aftermath of World War I:  shock, disbelief and disillusionment.  The unthinkable has come to pass.  Tranquility and contentment have gone out of the world.  As William Butler Yeats wrote in 1919:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

At the present moment, it is hard to imagine what could happen that might bring about a turnaround in either realities or perceptions.  From an American perspective, the historical evidence is not promising.  The great empires of the past are all gone, having collapsed into long periods of decline and irrelevance­­.  Egypt, Greece, Rome, Mongolia, China and, more recently, the Ottoman and British empires and the Soviet Union all rose and fell dramatically.  Lesser entities including Spain and Portugal occupied major portions of the globe for brief periods before decaying.  The Thousand Year Reich lasted less than twelve years and reached its peak only twenty-five months before its ruination.

Te be sure, any enumeration of our discontents would be incomplete if we failed to pay homage to the historical truth that Americans have been here before and have prevailed.  We must constantly remind ourselves that even with the slavery, Indian removal, Know Nothingism, anti-unionism and jingoism that litter our history, we have made overall progress toward the ideals of our Declaration of Independence.  Until recently we have always been resilient in pursuing the American Dream.  If, for example, during the Great Depression our popular anthem was "Brother Can You Spare a Dime?" that is not the song we associate with it today.  Rather, as President Obama reminded us in his first inaugural address, it is the Jerome Kern, Dorothy Fields 1936 show tune:  "Nothing's impossible, I have found / For when my chin is on the ground / I pick myself up, / Dust myself off / And start all over again."  With the twenty-twenty hindsight of eighty years, we can see the Depression as an era of creativity and renewal.  Time after time in our history we have bounced back from the brink.  Lincoln preached "a new birth of freedom" and Franklin Roosevelt inaugurated a "New Deal."

As he took the oath of office on March 4, 1933, the United States was experiencing a calamitous economic disaster.  As he said:

Values have shrunken to fantastic levels; taxes have risen; our ability to pay has fallen; government of all kinds is faced by serious curtailment of income; the means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade; the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone.  More important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return.  Only a foolish optimist can deny the realities of the moment.

But he had already made his famous remark about fear being the only thing we have to fear and he had prefaced that with the bold assertion that, "This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper."  It did.  First the government stopped the bleeding with its plethora of alphabet soup job creation programs:  AAA, CCC, CWA, FHA, NIRA, SSA, TVA, WPA and all the rest.  War came and with it the jobs that created the wealth that fueled the post-war boom.

History, of course, is not destiny.  We cannot take comfort from our own past resilience any more than we should take dread from the collapse of the Roman Empire.  We are predestined to neither renewal nor decay.  We cannot see the future but there is one certainty:  we are our own worst enemy and our own best hope.