The Time of Our Lives

by Peggy Noonan

  St. Thomas More functions too as a town hall for every secular group in the area. It is a meetinghouse for all of them. It is a citizen.

  Our cardinal, my friend Timothy Dolan, being from Milwaukee, would not know, and the members of his many clusters and advisory boards would not know, that St. Thomas More is a mother root of the spiritual life of the Catholics on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

  They’re not talking about the closing of a church but the destroying of a world.

  And for what? The archdiocese’s arguments have been varied and lacking. They say there are other churches close by, that St. Thomas More can be relieved of its duties, blended and “merged” with the church of St. Ignatius. But St. Ignatius is near overwhelmed with its own schools and parish life, and could not absorb St. Thomas More’s functions and programs.

  The archdiocese then argues there is a shortage of priests. But St. Thomas More raises priests, three vocations born there the past 20 years. The cardinal’s top media man, Joe Zwilling, last weekend pointed at St. Thomas More and asked, “What will you do in 20 years when there’s no priest” to lead it? Well, over 20 years, in a church founded on miracles, we’ll pray for vocations. More to the point, as one active friend of the archdiocese said to me, “In what way does closing a vital parish create more priests? Please share the logic.”

  Yes. Please.

  The archdiocese appears to be scrambling for a respectable rationale. In the meantime parishioners wonder about the reasons for what they’ve come to call the second beheading of Thomas More.

  Is it possible, they ask, the archdiocese is driven by what drove Henry VIII, politics and real estate?

  That is an uncharitable thought. Let’s explore it.

  The archdiocese is defensive about closing churches in poor areas. What better way to comfort themselves, and avoid bad press, than closing one in an affluent area? Mr. Zwilling told this newspaper “it would be wrong and unjust” if only less affluent parishes were closed. To me, more sharply, Mr. Zwilling said just because St. Thomas More is in the black doesn’t mean it is “protected.”

  The cardinal himself told one parishioner he sees it as a matter of fairness. “I can’t just close poor parishes,” the parishioner quoted him as saying. The parishioner responded, “Poor people are not helped because rich people are hurt.”

  All this seems in line with the de Blasio-ization of the times: Pick a target, move against it. Especially move on excellence, which can be painted as “elitist.” If you can’t help the poor you can at least afflict those you imagine to be rich.

  Real estate? If St. Thomas More is closed, it can be sold. New York is experiencing a real-estate boom, Carnegie Hill is desirable. The church and its land could bring in $50 million, maybe $100 million. Any number of developers would jump at the chance. It’s rumored—rumored—any number have.

  * * *

  In a true spirit of helpfulness, some members of St. Thomas More have searched for ways to keep their church alive, give even more money to the archdiocese and help it show greater, deeper affiliation with the needy. The cardinal could sell his grand private mansion in Midtown, just down the street from what has been assessed the most valuable piece of real estate in the city, Saks Fifth Avenue, judged to be worth almost $4 billion. Think of what the cardinal’s mansion would sell or rent for! That would take care of everything. This is what Boston’s Cardinal Sean O’Malley did: sell the cardinal’s estate. He lives now in a small apartment in a modest part of town.

  But that and other ideas can be explored in future columns. For now, Merry Christmas. May peace and love descend on all.

  CHAPTER 8

  Uneasy Pieces

  These two pieces meant a lot to me at the time (1992 and 1998, respectively) and still do.

  In the first I was trying to capture some of the current mood of members of my generation. In the second I tried to capture some things I was seeing in the country that, taken together, suggested to me: trouble ahead.

  I poured my heart into each piece, working every day for months, wanting each to say something important. In both cases I received editorial reactions that I never forgot and that taught me something.

  After I sent the editor of Forbes “You’d Cry Too If It Happened to You,” we met for lunch to discuss it. He was the great Jim Michaels, and he warmly told me he liked the piece a lot. I was glad. I told him how hard I’d worked on it, meaning to communicate that I took the assignment seriously and had given it the best I had. He surprised me by saying “No you didn’t.” I think I said nothing. “Anything that reads this easy was easy,” he said, and I realized that he meant it as a compliment. But I said no, you have to work hard to make it look easy. Jim was one great reporter and editor, a great person, too, but he stuck to his guns: It was easy.

  I came after that conversation to think there was an odd thing with editors. If the draft you give them is lumpy, jagged or uneven but contains interesting thought, they’ll see how hard you’re trying and appreciate it. If you give it to them as realized and polished as you can make it, they’re more likely not to see the effort. In time I came to wonder if when you give an editor an easy edit they experience it as ungenerous: They’re part of the process, too. I never solved this quandary, to the extent it’s a quandary. But I do wonder why I felt I had to tell him how hard I’d worked. You never really have to say that, and what does it matter, anyway, the finished work is the finished work. I think if I’d been a man, or an older woman, I would have teased him that actually I’d knocked it off on the subway the day before.

  In the case of the second piece, the reaction I received was more startling, and more fundamental. Normally in those days you’d fax a piece into a magazine and a few days later you’d get a response. But days or a week passed and I hadn’t heard anything, so I called the editor to make sure he’d received it, and see if he had any suggestions or problems. The editor was polite but his tone was somewhat distanced. Yes, yes, he said, we have it, it’s fine. There was a pause. I couldn’t get a handle on what was being said or not said, and I asked if anyone else there had seen it and perhaps had any thoughts. We all saw it, he said. He added, “It was upsetting.” I didn’t understand: The whole piece was upsetting?

  The ending, he said.

  Now I understood, and realized for the first time how surprising the last few pages might seem, how apart from the current thought curve, even how confounding.

  Sometimes thoughts in your head seem to you so obvious that you assume that to one degree or another they’re in everyone’s head. But you know, they’re not. At that moment in 1998 I came to see not everyone was seeing what I was seeing.

  * * *

  You’d Cry Too If It Happened to You

  Forbes Magazine: September 14, 1992

  In his lifetime he had seen America rise and rise and rise, some sort of golden legend to her own people, some sort of impossible fantasy to others… rise and rise and rise—and then… the golden legend crumbled, overnight the fall began, the heart went out of it, a too complacent and uncaring people awoke to find themselves naked with the winds of the world howling around their ears… A universal quilt enshrouded… all who participated in those times… Now there was a time of uneasiness… when all thinking men fretted and worried desperately about “how to catch up” and “how to get ahead”; and also, in the small hours of the night’s cold terror, about what it would be like if America couldn’t catch up, if history should have decided once and for all that America should never again be permitted to get ahead…

  Well, so much for Camelot.

  When Allen Drury wrote those words—they set the scene for his classic political novel, “Advise and Consent”—he was trying to capture the mood of America in 1959, as the peaceful and composed Eisenhower era receded, John Kennedy geared up for the presidency and the go-go ’60s waited to be born. We remember those days as innocent and hopeful; Drury recorded them as anxious and depressed. Which demonstrates a small but not insignificant
point: It is writers—journalists, screenwriters, novelists, newswriters—we turn to more than anyone to tell us exactly how our country is doing, and they are precisely the last people who would accurately point out that in the long tape of history this is a pretty good few inches.

  There are many reasons for this—catching and tagging whatever angst is floating around is their job—but the biggest is simple. Writers always see their time as marked by pain because it always is. Children die. People lose their homes. Life is sad. To declare the relative happiness of your era is to sound stupid and uncaring, as if you don’t know people are suffering, when people always are.

  I am inclined toward the long view. The life of people on earth is obviously better now than it has ever been—certainly much better than it was 500 years ago when people beat each other with cats. This may sound silly but now and then when I read old fairy tales and see an illustration of a hunchbacked hag with no teeth and bumps on her nose who lives by herself in the forest, I think: People looked like that once. They lived like that. There were no doctors, no phones, and people lived in the dark in a hole in a tree. It was terrible. It’s much better now.

  But we are not happier. I believe we are just cleaner, more attractive sad people than we used to be.

  * * *

  There are serious reasons members of my generation in particular are feeling a high level of anxiety and unhappiness these days, but first a word about how we “know” this: the polls.

  I used to like polls because I like vox pop, and polls seemed a good way to get a broad sampling. But now I think the vox has popped—the voice has cracked from too many command performances. Polls are contributing to a strange new volatility in public opinion.

  A year ago, at the conclusion of the Gulf war, George Bush’s approval ratings were at nearly 90%. As I write, they are 30%. This is a huge drop, and in a way a meaningless one. President Bush didn’t deserve 90% support for having successfully executed a 100-hour ground war; Abe Lincoln deserved a 90% for preserving the nation. Bush didn’t deserve 30% support because the economy is in recession; John Adams deserved a 30% for the Alien and Sedition laws. It is all so exaggerated.

  The dramatic rises and drops are fueled in part by mass media and their famous steady drumbeat of what’s not working, from an increase in reported child abuse to a fall in savings. When this tendency is not prompted by ideology it is legitimate: Good news isn’t news. But the volatility is also driven by the polls themselves. People think they have to have an answer when they are questioned by pollsters, and they think it has to be “intelligent” and “not naive.” This has the effect of hardening opinions that haven’t even been formed yet. Poll questions do not invite subtlety of response. This dispels ambiguity, when a lot of thoughts and opinions are ambiguous.

  And we are polled too often. We are constantly having our temperature taken, like a hypochondriac who is looking for the reassurance that no man can have, i.e., that he will not die.

  I once knew a man who was so neurotically fearful about his physical well-being that in the middle of conversations he would quietly put his hand to his wrist. He was taking his pulse. When I was 7 or 8 years old, I became anxious that I would stop breathing unless I remembered every few seconds to inhale. This mania was exhausting. At night, on the verge of sleep, I would come awake in a panic, gulping for air.

  People who take their pulse too often are likely to make it race; people obsessed with breathing are likely to stop. Nations that use polls as daily temperature readings inevitably give inauthentic readings and wind up not reassured but demoralized.

  * * *

  There are reasons for our discontent. Each era has its distinguishing characteristics; each time a big barrel of malaise rolls down the hill there are specific and discrete facts rolling around inside. Here are some of ours:

  Once in America if you lost your job—if you were laid off from the assembly line at Ford, for instance—you had reason to believe you’d be rehired. Business cycles, boom and bust—sooner or later they’d call you back. There was a certain security in the insecurity. Now it’s different. Now if you’re laid off from your job as the number two guy in public affairs at the main Jersey office of a phone company, you have reason to fear you’ll never be hired back into that or any white-collar job, because employment now is connected less to boom and bust than to changing realities, often changing technologies, in the marketplace. The telephone company doesn’t need you anymore.

  You are a boomer, and obscurely oppressed.

  But there is nothing obscure about your predicament. So many people are relying on you! You and your wife waited to have children, and now they’re 8 and 10 and you’re 48—too late to start over, to jeopardize the $75,000 a year you earn. And if you tried, you would lose your medical coverage.

  Your mother and father are going to live longer than parents have ever lived and will depend on you to take care of them as they (as you, at night, imagine it) slide from mild senility to full dementia. Your children will have a longer adolescence, and expect you to put them through college just as mom and dad are entering a home.

  Your biggest personal asset is your house, which has lost value. You have a hefty mortgage, your pension fund is underfunded, you don’t think your Social Security benefits are secure and you do not trust the banks.

  The last may be the most serious in terms of how people feel. In the years since the Depression we have been able to trust that the institutions we put our savings into would be there tomorrow and pay us interest. We don’t know that anymore; most of us are afraid that all of a sudden a major bank, strained from its own feckless investments to middle-aged mall builders who make political contributions, will fold, taking the other banks with it.

  We wonder, “in the small hours of the night’s cold terror,” if there is another depression and the banks fail, how will I and my family live? How will we buy food and gas and pay for electricity? We don’t know how to grow things! What will we eat if it all collapses?

  * * *

  I think the essential daily predicament of modern, intelligent, early-middle-age Americans—the boomers, the basketball in the python—is this: There is no margin for error anymore. Everything has to continue as it is for us to continue with the comfort we have. And we do not believe that everything will continue as it is.

  It is embarrassing to live in the most comfortable time in the history of man and not be happy. We all have so much!

  Think of the set of “The Honeymooners.”

  What did Ralph and Alice have in 1955? A small rented apartment with a table, two chairs, a bureau, a picture on a faded wall. The set designer was spoofing the average.

  Think of the set of “Family Ties”: the couches, the lamps, the VCRs, the color TVs. There is art on the walls. The children had expensive orthodontia.

  You will say, one show was about the working class, the other the middle class. But that’s the point: The average couple was working class then and is middle class now.

  We have so much more than mom and dad that we can’t help but feel defensive about feeling so bad, and paying off our charge cards so late, and being found in the den surfing from channel to channel at 3 a.m., staring back at Brian Lamb’s eyes.

  And there’s this: We know that we suffer—and we get no credit for it! Sometimes we feel the bitterness of the generation that fought World War I, but we cannot write our memoirs and say “goodbye to all that,” cannot tell stories of how our boots rotted in the mud, cannot deflect the neighborhood praise and be modest as we lean against the bar. They don’t know we’re brave. They don’t know we fight in trenches, too.

  I find myself thinking of Auden’s words about the average man in 1939, as darkness gathered over Europe—the “sensual man-in-the-street,” barely aware of his emptiness, who promised that he will be “true to the wife,” that some day he will be happy and good.

  Auden called his era the “age of anxiety.” I think what was at the heart of the dread in
those days, just a few years into modern times, was that we could tell we were beginning to lose God—banishing him from the scene, from our consciousness, losing the assumption that he was part of the daily drama, or its maker. And it is a terrible thing when people lose God. Life is difficult and people are afraid, and to be without God is to lose man’s great source of consolation and coherence. There is a phrase I once heard or made up that I think of when I think about what people with deep faith must get from God: the love that assuages all.

  I don’t think it is unconnected to the boomers’ predicament that as a country we were losing God just as they were being born.

  At the same time, a huge revolution in human expectation was beginning to shape our lives, the salient feature of which is the expectation of happiness.

  * * *

  It is 1956 in the suburbs in the summer. A man comes home from work, parks the car, slouches up the driveway. His white shirt clings softly to his back. He bends for the paper, surveys the lawn, waves to a neighbor. From the house comes his son, freckled, 10. He jumps on his father; they twirl on the lawn. Another day done. Now water the lawn, eat fish cakes, watch some TV, go to bed, do it all again tomorrow.

  * * *

  Is he happy? No. Why should he be? We weren’t put here to be happy. But the knowledge of his unhappiness does not gnaw. Everyone is unhappy, or rather everyone has a boring job, a marriage that’s turned to disinterest, a life that’s turned to sameness. And because he does not expect to be happy, the knowledge of his unhappiness does not weigh on him. He looks perhaps to other, more eternal forms of comfort.