PS.: There's Some Good News, Too

By Stefan Kanfer

One has two duties--to be worried and not to be worried.

--E.M. Forster It is the first of these two duties that seems these days to consume America's waking--and sleeping --hours. The nightmare fantasies have become tangible. An undertow of hopelessness and helplessness tugs at every conversation. The dolors of recession, the possibility of a Middle East holocaust, the random violence erupting in crimes against people, and indeed against civilization--the awful litany grows longer by the hour until the West seems to be sinking under its own weight, as if programmed by Oswald Spengler.

In such a season of despair, it seems idle to poke through the rubble looking for flowers, or even weeds. Pollyanna is dead, her grave long since vandalized and sprayed with graffiti. Dr. Pangloss's euphoria has given way to the Club of Rome's tocsins. Good news is an irretrievable ghost, like convertibles and safe streets. And peace.

Or is it? Americans have a peculiar appetite for superlatives, even negative superlatives. It is not enough for traffic to be bad; it must be the worst. Weather cannot be wet; it must be the rainiest fall on record. Times cannot be merely depressing; they must be devastating. But this attitude is at odds with the evidence. Certainly the items of cheer are sparse.

But to ignore them is to lose all sense of proportion, just as a penny held too close to the eye can blot out the sky.

>> It is no surprise that Americans eat well, but just how well is an astonishment (some would call it a disgrace). It took the worst weather in a generation to keep the country from enjoying a record food output this year. As it was, the U.S. produced the fourth largest grain harvest in history. In addition, farmers this year will bring nearly 23 billion Ibs. of beef to market, an average of some 100 Ibs. per citizen. Pork production is up over last year; turkey production has set a record--135 million birds, causing a refreshing drop in prices.

The fish supply will total about 12.5 Ibs. per person, nearly equal to last year's record consumer purchase. Hunger has not been eliminated in America, but 15 million people supplement their diet with food stamps, and 9 million children receive free or reduced-price school lunches. And with all this, the nation has sent abroad more than 80% of the world's total food aid--some 70 million Ibs. a day.

>> If the economy is unhealthy, the American consumer has never been healthier--medically speaking. Americans are free of many diseases that not long ago ravaged the country.

Vaccines are available that can send polio and measles the way of diphtheria and whooping cough.

Synthetics are used to replace many worn-out body parts, and even organ transplants have become relatively commonplace. Machines routinely supplement the function of failing kidneys. There are new methods of detecting and treating genetic defects. Hypertension is becoming more manageable; the coronary-bypass operation has made productive citizens of invalids. Even certain cancers, notably Hodgkin's disease and leukemia, have shown remarkable remissions under treatment. Infant mortality is less than 19 per thousand, and the contemporary child can expect to live four years longer than his parents. This may be a mixed blessing, considering our bafflement about how to use those bonus years, but it is still impressive that adults today may be expected to enjoy the greatest longevity of any Americans in history.

>> Politics is not celebrated for the manufacture of good news--except in campaign promises. Yet the nation has successfully weathered its severest constitutional crisis without producing oligarchy or chaos. The three-way division of powers, which has provoked more funeral orations than Julius Caesar, still functions. If the recent election showed evidence of apathy, it also provided examples of vigor. Harvard Sociologist Thomas Pettigrew sees "serious good news" in the massive gains that blacks made in Congress and state legislatures. Connecticut's Ella Grasso, the first woman to become Governor without benefit of her husband's coattails, is a symbol of the growing numbers of women who seek and win elective office. Optimists may be an endangered species, but news like this keeps them from becoming extinct. Political Analyst Ben Wattenberg (The Real America), among the hardiest of the species, argues that Americans are "a tough-minded, wise, shrewd people. They've coped with assassination, an awful Viet Nam War, city riots, political scandal and all the while made an enormous amount of material and attitudinal progress, i.e., in the women's field and civil rights. Remember that this is still the most emulated country in the world. There are very few nations who are saying they would really like to model themselves after the Soviet Union."

>> Technology likes to perform its tricks onstage and its real miracles in the dressing room. Christmas shoppers are happily aware that pocket calculators are now about one-third of last year's price and that before long, transistors and printed circuitry will provide TV sets so thin and flat that we will be able to hang them on the wall like engravings. Of far greater and subtler potential are discoveries that do not immediately reach the consumer. The maligned space program, for instance, has produced satellites and observatories that can survey a nation's military potential. Such hardware is the unspoken guarantor of the SALT talks between Russia and the U.S., and perhaps of detente itself. Geologists have begun to tap the geothermal energy of volcanoes in Mexico and the Azores. New offshore oil deposits have been discovered in such economically eroded countries as Italy and Britain. Researchers have just discovered a new subatomic particle. True, the explorers are not certain about what they have found; pure science seldom knows until years later. But then, who would have dreamed that blackboard physics of 70 years ago would ultimately lead to nuclear power?

Of course, technology is justly blamed for creating many of our problems--from overloading us with unneeded gadgets to fouling our seas and skies. But it is technology that we count on to solve the very problems it has created. Despite a growing reluctance to meet the heavy cost of environmental regulations, vigorous enforcement of these laws and technological innovations have begun to cleanse the nation's air and water. The atmosphere in New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles is cleaner than last year, and fish are flourishing once again in Lake Erie and the Hudson River.

Good news does not always arrive in capital letters or accompanied by trumpets. Tormented by economic distress, Americans may be disregarding some extremely significant and heartening items.

Within the past week, President Ford granted full pardons to eight convicted war resisters, evidence that the passions of Viet Nam are finally burning out. There are no longer any American troops fighting and dying in that country, and the draft has been successfully abolished; the volunteer Army is in fact oversubscribed. Congress has begun to reform its creaky, outmoded machinery. Nelson Rockefeller is likely to be confirmed as Vice President, perhaps providing the Executive Branch with the domestic authority it has so far failed to exercise. Overseas, where shadows deepen, there are still a few glimpses of good. The limitation on offensive weapons agreed upon by the U.S. and the Soviets is too high; but the point is that a ceiling has been set, and at least the agreement is an expression of each side's continuing desire for detente. Syria has allowed the U.N. peace-keeping force to stay on for another six months, granting some hope for further negotiations. Greece is slowly returning to a democratic form of government. U.S. relations with India, so long strained, have begun to show some improvement.

On a less global note, there are a few indicators of economic optimism. Nature may not have been land to farm crops, but she has smiled upon vintners; this year's grape harvest in France and California will be more bountiful and cheaper than its predecessors. A number of food chains have vowed not to raise prices through the end of the year. The out-of-sight costs of materials and labor have had some hidden benefits. Millions have become craftsmen; the arcana of carpentry, plumbing and auto repair have been revealed to those who once thought they possessed ten thumbs. In a variety of flea markets, church bazaars and garage sales, secondhand furniture and utensils trade hands and are given a new life.

The old colonial virtues of "use it up, wear it out; make it do, or do without" are back in style. Metalworking, canning, weaving and bread baking are becoming the sober and necessary pursuits of the common citizen.

In the other Hard Times, back in 1929, there was what Columnist Russell Baker called a "boom in love." Now, millions of families are finding that they have to stay home and save rather than go out and spend. It may not herald a new epoch of romance, but the New Hard Times--together with newly conservative sexual mores--may solidify more families than they dissolve.

One of the happiest trends of the present crisis is an anti-nostalgia backlash. In The Good Old Days--They Were Terrible!, Otto Bettmann provides a horrific picture gallery of the American past imperfect. "What we have forgotten," he demonstrates, "is the hunger of the unemployed, crime, corruption, the despair of the aged, the insane, the crippled. The world now gone was in no way spared the problems we consider horrendously our own, such as pollution, addiction, urban plight or educational turmoil."

Naturally, the fact that the past was miserable does little to alleviate the miseries of the present. No medical discovery, no scientific breakthrough, no political initiative or fresh economic approach can immediately reduce the feeling that a way of life is ebbing, that neither America nor the world will be the same. But in itself that is far from melancholy news.

For the first time, Americans seem willing to acknowledge that no continent is an island unto itself, that resources can no longer be the exclusive property of the privileged and that our bounty, however generous, is nonetheless finite. There are even some who hear, in the babel of violence and despair, a few melodies. Quiescent periods of the past have always proved deceptive; the gaiety of the '20s, the silence of the '50s, were both preludes to disaster. In the somber, sober '70s, the problems are there for all to see--and try to solve.

It is possible that Americans will provide some solutions.

Only an amnesiac could be unaware that the nation's durability has been grievously underestimated many times--during the Civil War and the Depression, global war and Viet Nam, assassination and resignation--and that somehow, its incredible resilience prevailed. Yet there are many who, forgetting America's great strength and ability to adapt, see today as the very worst of times. Columnist Joseph Alsop, noting "the strange break that has overtaken the spirit of America," wrote recently: "Somehow, self-confidence and energy have been replaced by fear and impotence--and this in a nation grown far more numerous, far richer, and far, far more powerful than the long ago America of my youth. The more I think about it, the more puzzling and inexplicable the subsequent change in America has always seemed to be."

But is it so inexplicable? Much has been written about the reasons for this loss of confidence--Viet Nam, which taught us about the limits of our power; the energy crisis, which taught us about the limits of our resources; Watergate, which taught us about the limitations of our leaders. Could it be that this emphasis on fear and impotence is, in truth, seriously misplaced--that it would be wiser to heed what Poet Archibald MacLeish said in a TV interview a couple of years ago: "When the Great Depression of the '30s brought Marxism and the American Proposition face to face . . . there was every theoretical reason to suppose that Marxism would triumph. It did not . . . because the American Proposition, unimpressed with the mystique of economic determinism, fought its way out of economic disaster and adapted itself to the new century . . . The truth is that, far from being dead, the belief in man, which is the ground of the American Proposition, is now stronger in the U.S. than it has ever been, and potentially stronger in the world, for it is now the one great positive affirmation left."

Perhaps the problem is, at bottom, a failure of perspective, an inability to see things as they were, as they are and as they might be. Bemoaning his fate, the American is obedient to W.H. Auden's dictum: "Sing of human unsuccess/ In a rapture of distress." He is like those ancient fresco painters who, lacking the techniques of proportion, illustrated everything in profile and of equal size. No matter how sophisticated its martial or plastic arts, a society that judges all phenomena without the gift of perspective must in the end be judged primitive. In these bountiful, beleaguered times, the recognition that America needs to acquire that perspective could be the best news Of all.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.