The Cooling of America

A beat. A pause. The bomb that arced over the wall lies there unexploded, past its fuse-time, possibly dead. Something has happened in American life --or has failed to happen. In dead winter, 1971, after months of recession, a decade of war abroad and domestic violence, a mood approaching quiet has fallen like a deep snow.

How permanent or transitory is the change remains mysterious. It could be merely temporary calm induced by fatigue or a bit of boredom or even by winter weather. But the change seems more complex than that and therefore more profound. To the extent that an American psychology exists, it has, in nearly all its troubled compartments, undergone numerous and sometimes subtle transformations, as is shown by reports from TIME correspondents on the following pages.

The calm carries little serenity with it, which may be just as well. Instead, it suggests a complex of rather sober fears; of joblessness, of radical violence, of counterviolence from the government. There is a chastened air. A decade of almost amphetamine economic growth culminates in a recession that, although relatively mild in historical terms, has thrown the fear of wolves into the most resolutely buoyant consumer. Simultaneously, even the most heedless slob in a throwaway society begins to understand that his cans and bottles and poisoned gases are piling up in a fatal glut.

As the '60s tested the upper reaches of production and consumption, they opened up new territories of violence. The war would not end. For all the professed incredulity about it, the My Lai massacre has dripped acids onto the nation's conviction of its own innocence. At home, the Sharon Tate murders were so incomprehensible as to excite a stunned awe at what orgies of violence are possible. In the presence of such insanities, many Americans have grown introspective. It is a reaction built on residues of abhorrence going back through sad, internal video tapes to Nov. 22, 1963. Americans seem to be convincingly sick of violence.

Such a weariness--and much more--accounts for the profound hibernation of the radical movement in the U.S. The students who closed down scores of campuses after Kent State and the Cambodian invasion last spring scarcely stirred at the current South Vietnamese expedition into Laos. Only last summer dynamite seemed the shock wave of the future.

Inglorious War. Some argue that "the revolution" in the U.S. is dead. As a cultural influence, however, the movement is still alive and pervasive. The music, language, mores and styles of what used to be known as radical culture have changed and enlivened the country.

The present pause should not, however, obscure the fact that some fundamental assumptions have been altered: the national opinion of a war, the nation's draft policies, attitudes toward pollution and ecology. Today elders as well as the young know that many things are profoundly wrong. Warfare is widely seen as inglorious. There is a growing public, if not yet legal tolerance for marijuana. Still, like England's 19th century Chartists, the radicals are seeing the larger society adopt and subsume much of their revolution. "Cooptation" is an infuriating and unsatisfactory denouement for the revolutionary. The Chief of Naval Operations grows sideburns: the war goes on. Yet drastically changed public attitudes prove that not all of the co-optation has been merely decorative.

Healing Glimpse. Undoubtedly the Nixon Administration has contributed to the new, calmer mood, both by commission and omission. The cautious withdrawal from Viet Nam has largely disarmed the antiwar movement. "Repression," real or imagined, has also stilled a lot of dissent. For all their unfairness, Spiro Agnew's attacks on the press have made many practitioners in journalism and TV a little more cautious about playing up news of dissent. The election results of last fall had a healing effect, for they gave the nation a glimpse of itself, in the kinds of candidates it accepted and rejected, and a notion of its intelligent continuation.

On both sides, there has been a drawing back from anarchy and violence. As much as anything, Americans seem now to be seeking public limits and a private equilibrium, to be answering David Riesman's complaint: "Why are we so evangelical? Why do we not have a happier sense of the ordinary, of dailiness?" Americans have the vanity of thinking that the U.S. must be either the best country or the worst country. There is something reassuring and necessary in the acknowledgment that it is neither.

Many Americans have simply grown more realistic about their own problems. Thus crime is as bad as ever, but the outcry for law and order is not so hysterical as before. The cities, the courts, the welfare systems are still crippling along; yet there now seems to be a broad and pragmatic demand for reform.

The overwhelming response to the new atmosphere must be relief. Yet something will have been lost with yesterday's turbulence if all the urgent pressures for change are allowed to be dissipated. Most of the trouble that breeds violence is still there; the absence of more spectacular political violence can only be considered a period of grace. The great loss will be if nothing is done with that grace, such as it is. The present pause is certainly no reason for thinking that some tranquillity from the middle years of Eisenhower's Administration has magically descended. Rather, it is an opportunity for America to get on with the much-delayed business of rebuilding itself.

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