170. To the American Who Thinks Times Are Bad.

 

You there, you who are doing what I have done for 70 years, read the newspapers and worry, don't let these politicians make you think times are bad.  They don't know bad.  They can't imagine bad.

You want to know bad?  Bad is looking for the funnies in your newspaper on the floor, seeing the big, black headlines, and being told by your dad that this very bad man Adolf Hitler had invaded Austria, that England and France had done nothing, and that there was no telling what would stop him now.

Up to that time you had thought bad was the unemployment numbers your town's Republican paper kept putting on the front page all through 1937, climbing month by month from 14 to 19%.   The Depression was coming back!  Where would it stop?  How many more of your friends' dads would go broke, as mine did in 1938?

Bad is not having any more layers of fat left.  Mothers of my time wanted to fatten their children so that, if they got sick, they'd have "something in reserve to draw on."  Find nothing soft when you felt your arm and you figured that with the next whooping cough you were going to lose some bone.  That would be very bad.  (My grandmother applied "layers of fat" to luxuries of the twenties she hadn't approved of, and which were being stripped away after The Crash.)

You want to know worry?  Worry is being a child in the forties like Meg Greenfield, a Jew, and John Updike, a Christian, watching the lines of defense collapse toward you, and not knowing how much your country had ready to protect you, or whether God cared.  (You might even try putting yourself in the place of an adult in 1942; you know we were going to be winners in the war, he didn't.)

Worry is what you do as an adult when Stewart Alsop writes that the Soviet Union has just MIRVed its long-range missiles, making some hydrogen-bomb hits a certainty.  It's what grows when you learn that your country contains people sympathetic to the MIRV-firing side, and willing to help them improve their firing — or, if not that, work to make your country more like that country, to the point of revolution.

Worry is what you do when you hear a worker for Gene McCarthy tell his crew of fellow students when Nixon looks like the winner:  "Well, what we've got to hope for now is a quick revolution."

Look at what we have now with those things in mind and what do you see?  Enemies with no H-bombs, no delivery vehicles that can reach our shores, no tanks that can break through our lines, no more divisions than the Vatican had.  And, even better, no enemies with significant sympathy, much less a constituency, in the United States.  Has there ever been a group more generally scorned than the Taliban?

Look at our candidates.  Each meets the Stewart Alsop test: Will he be acceptable to the other party?  He meant without driving them to talk of revolution.

Look at unemployment, 7.8%.  Bad, but far from 19%, and we know which direction it's going in.  Furthermore, we're not all teetering over a canyon with no safety net under us.  And, I might add for those willing to make a leap in space as well as time, we're not living in a country where that 7.8 figure, being of advantage to the incumbent power, is generally distrusted.  Indeed, we're living in a country in which those who express such distrust are hooted off the stage.

As for loss of fat, you who assess the nation's health, try looking at it my grandmother's way. The nation added layer after layer, beginning in the fifties, until we were bulging with it.  That's OK, I suppose, until you begin to think the bulge is normal, and necessary, and your right, and the loss of it a disaster. 

Here's where the imagination comes in.  Try a thought experiment.  Imagine what it would be like as layer after layer of the fat added since the forties came off.  Would it be as terrible as you think, and are told?  Maybe you'd get a lesson in material disasters, and how they're different from moral and spiritual disasters.  Maybe you'd find yourself, and the nation, reading Emerson and Thoreau more seriously.  Maybe, as Republicans lament America's loss of its position as the number one superpower, you'd look more closely at the Swiss and the Swedes, and ask more seriously how they could be happy.

Want to picture what a moral and spiritual disaster would be?  Picture us, fat with weapons, dropping an atom bomb on North Vietnam, as Curtis LeMay wanted to do.  "America would lose her soul," said Walter Lippmann, and I think he was right.

Finally, look more closely at all the politicians who have been haranguing you from stage and screen for these many months, calling each other names, raking up the other guy's muck, displaying their own clean families, making you sick one moment with their sentimentality and outraged the next with their divisiveness.  Look at them, maybe with the help of your college history teacher, against the full background of the past, with John Adams (or his birther flacks) calling Thomas Jefferson the "son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto" and Adams calling Jefferson "hideous," "bald," "toothless" and "hermaphroditical." Look at our politicians with our model democracy in the background, ancient Athens, with clean families on the stage winning one case after another and politicians groomed by the best flacks (named "rhetoricians" then) winning the best offices.