by Peggy Noonan
Somewhere in the ’70s, or the ’60s, we started expecting to be happy and changed our lives (left town, left families, switched jobs) if we were not. And society strained and cracked in the storm.
I think we have lost the old knowledge that happiness is overrated—that, in a way, life is overrated. We have lost, somehow, a sense of mystery—about us, our purpose, our meaning, our role. Our ancestors believed in two worlds, and understood this to be the solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short one. We are the first generations of man that actually expected to find happiness here on earth, and our search for it has caused such unhappiness. The reason: If you do not believe in another, higher world, if you believe only in the flat material world around you, if you believe that this is your only chance at happiness—if that is what you believe, then you are not disappointed when the world does not give you a good measure of its riches, you are despairing.
In a Catholic childhood in America, you were once given, as the answer to the big questions: It is a mystery. As I grew older I was impatient with this answer. Now I am probably as old, intellectually, as I am going to get, and more and more I think: It is a mystery. I am more comfortable with this now; it seems the only rational and scientific answer.
My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief or existential despair, chose… marijuana. Now we are in our cabernet stage. (Jung wrote in a letter that he saw a connection between spirits and The Spirit; sometimes when I go into a church and see how modern Catholics sometimes close their eyes and put their hands out, palms up, as if to get more of God on them, it reminds me of how kids in college used to cup their hands delicately around the smoke of the pipe and help it waft toward them.) Is it possible that our next step is a deep turning to faith, and worship? Is it starting now with tentative, New Age steps?
It is a commonplace to note that we have little faith in our institutions, no faith in Congress, in the White House, little faith in what used to be called the establishment—big business, big media, the church. But there’s a sort of schizoid quality in this. We have contempt for the media, but we have respect for newscasters and columnists. When we meet them we’re impressed and admiring. We respect priests and rabbis and doctors. But we are cynical about what they’re part of.
It’s also famously true that we hate Congress and keep reelecting our congressmen. I don’t know how to reconcile this. Sometimes I think there is a tinny, braying quality to our cynicism. We are like a city man in a Dreiser novel, quick with a wink that shows we know the real lowdown, the real dope. This kind of cynicism seems to me… a dodge. When you don’t believe, you don’t have to take part, invest, become part of. Skepticism is healthy, and an appropriate attitude toward those who wield power. But cynicism is corrosive and self-corrupting. Everyone at the top is a moral zero, I’ll be a moral zero, too.
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But our cynicism is also earned. Our establishments have failed us. I imagine an unspoken dialogue with a congressman in Washington:
Voter: “Do what is right!” Politician: “But you’ll kill me!”
Voter: “Maybe, but do it anyway! I hired you to go to Congress to make hard decisions to help our country. Take your term, do it and go home. Kill yourself!”
Politician: “But I have seniority and expertise and I’m up to speed on the issues. Replace me and it’ll be six years before he knows what I know.”
Voter: “Well, maybe we don’t want him to know what you know. Maybe we want someone dumb enough not to know what’s impossible and brave enough to want to do what’s right.”
Politician: “But I love this job.”
Voter: “But we never intended Congress to be a career. We meant it to be a pain in the neck, like jury duty. And maybe I won’t kill you. Maybe I’ll respect you. Take a chance!”
* * *
The biggest scandal of the modern era, and the one that will prove to have most changed our politics, is the S&L scandal, in which certain members of both parties colluded to give their campaign contributors what they wanted at the expense of innocent taxpayers who will pay the bill, in billions, for generations.
Watergate pales, Teapot Dome pales. It is what was behind the rise of Perot. The voters think Washington is a whorehouse and every four years they get a chance to elect a new piano player. They would rather burn the whorehouse down. They figured Perot for an affable man with a torch. They looked at him and saw a hand grenade with a bad haircut.
Finally, another thing has changed in our lifetimes: People don’t have faith in America’s future anymore.
I don’t know many people aged 35 to 50 who don’t have a sense that they were born into a healthier country and that they have seen the culture deteriorate before their eyes.
We tell pollsters we are concerned about “leadership” and “America’s prospects in a changing world,” but a lot of this is a reflection of a boomer secret: We all know the imperfect America we were born into was a better country than the one we live in now, i.e., the one we are increasingly responsible for.
You don’t have to look far for the fraying of the social fabric. Crime, the schools, the courts. Watch Channel 35 in New York and see your culture. See men and women, homo-and hetero-, dressed in black leather, masturbating each other and simulating sadomasochistic ritual. Realize this is pumped into everyone’s living room, including your own, where your 8-year-old is flipping channels. Then talk to a pollster. You too will declare you are pessimistic about your country’s future; you too will say we are on the wrong track.
Remember your boomer childhood in the towns and suburbs. You had physical security. You were safe. It is a cliché to say it, but it can’t be said enough: We didn’t lock the doors at night in the old America. We slept with the windows open! The cities were better. A man and woman falling in love could stroll the parks of a city at 2 a.m. Douglas Edwards, the venerable newscaster, once told me about what he called the best time. He sat back in the newsroom one afternoon in the late ’70s, in the middle of the creation of the current world, and said, “New York in the ’50s—there was nothing like it, it was clean and it was peaceful. You could walk the streets!” He stopped, and laughed at celebrating with such emotion what should be commonplace.
You know what else I bet he thought, though he didn’t say it. It was a more human world in that it was a sexier world, because sex was still a story. Each high school senior class had exactly one girl who got pregnant and one guy who was the father, and it was the town’s annual scandal. Either she went somewhere and had the baby and put it up for adoption, or she brought it home as a new baby sister, or the couple got married and the town topic changed. It was a stricter, tougher society, but its bruising sanctions came from ancient wisdom.
We have all had a moment when all of a sudden we looked around and thought: The world is changing, I am seeing it change. This is for me the moment when the new America began: I was at a graduation ceremony at a public high school in New Jersey. It was 1971 or 1972. One by one a stream of black-robed students walked across the stage and received their diplomas. And a pretty young girl with red hair, big under her graduation gown, walked up to receive hers. The auditorium stood up and applauded. I looked at my sister: “She’s going to have a baby,” she said.
The girl was eight months’ pregnant and had had the courage to go through with her pregnancy and take her finals and finish school despite society’s disapproval.
But: Society wasn’t disapproving. It was applauding. Applause is a right and generous response for a young girl with grit and heart. And yet, in the sound of that applause I heard a wall falling, a 1,000-year wall, a wall of sanctions that said: We as a society do not approve of teenaged unwed motherhood because it is not good for the child, not good for the mother and not good for us.
The old America had a delicate sense of the difference between the general (“We disapprove”) and the particular (“Let’s go help her”). We had the moral self-confidence to sustain the paradox, to sustain th
e distance between “official” disapproval and “unofficial” succor. The old America would not have applauded the girl in the big graduation gown, but some of its individuals would have helped her not only materially but with some measure of emotional support. We don’t so much anymore. For all our tolerance and talk, we don’t show much love to what used to be called girls in trouble. As we’ve gotten more open-minded, we’ve gotten more closed-hearted.
Message to society: What you applaud, you encourage. And: Watch out what you celebrate.
(This section was written before Dan Quayle and “Murphy Brown,” about which one might say he said a right thing in the wrong way and was the wrong man to say it. Quayle is not a stupid man, but his expressions reveal a certain tropism toward the banal. This is a problem with some Republican men. There is a kind of heavy-handed dorkishness in their approach that leaves them unable to persuasively address questions requiring delicacy; they always sound judgmental when they mean to show concern.)
Two final thoughts:
1. We might all feel better if we took personally the constitutional injunction to “preserve and protect.”
Every parent in America knows that we’re not doing a very good job of communicating to our children what America is and has been. When we talk about immigration, pro or con, there is, I think, an unspoken anxiety: We are not inculcating in America’s new immigrants—as someone inculcated in our grandparents and great-grandparents—the facts of American history and why America deserves to be loved. And imperfect as it is, and as we are, we boomers love our country.
In our cities we teach not the principles that made our country great—the worth of the Founding Fathers, the moral force that led us to endure five years of horror to free the slaves, a space program that expanded the frontiers of human knowledge, the free market of ideas and commerce and expression that yielded miracles like a car in every garage and mass-produced housing. We are lucky in that the central fact of our country is both inspiring and true: America is the place formed of the institutionalization of miracles. Which made it something new in the history of man, something—better.
We do not teach this as a society and we teach it insufficiently in our schools. We are more inclined to teach that Columbus’s encounter with the Americas produced, most significantly, the spreading of venereal disease to their innocent indigenous peoples.
We teach the culture of resentment, of grievance, of victimization. Our children are told by our media and our leaders that we are a racist nation in which minorities are and will be actively discriminated against.
If we are demoralized we have, at least in this, demoralized ourselves. We are certainly demoralizing our children, and giving them a darker sense of their future than is warranted.
* * *
2. It’s odd to accuse boomers of reticence, but I think we have been reticent, at least in this:
When we talk about the difficulties of our lives and how our country has changed we become embarrassed and feel… dotty. Like someone’s old aunt rocking on the porch and talking about the good old days. And so most of us keep quiet, raise our children as best we can, go to the cocktail party, eat our cake, go to work and take the vacation.
We have removed ourselves from leadership, we professional white-collar boomers. We have recused ourselves from a world we never made. We turn our attention to the arts, and entertainment, to watching and supporting them or contributing to them, because they are the only places we can imagine progress. And to money, hoping that it will keep us safe.
There Is No Time, There Will Be Time
Forbes ASAP: November 30, 1998
I suppose it is commonplace to say it, but it’s true: There is no such thing as time. The past is gone and no longer exists, the future is an assumption that has not yet come, all you have is the moment—this one—but it too has passed… just now.
The moment we are having is an awfully good one, though. History has handed us one of the easiest rides in all the story of man. It has handed us a wave of wealth so broad and deep that it would be almost disorienting if we thought about it a lot, which we don’t.
But: We know such comfort! We sleep on beds that are soft and supporting, eat food that is both good and plentiful. We touch small levers and heat our homes to exactly the degree we desire; the pores of our bare arms are open and relaxed as we read the Times in our T-shirts, while two feet away, on the other side of the plate glass window, a blizzard rages. We turn levers and get clean water, take short car trips to places where planes wait before whisking us across continents as we nap. It is all so fantastically fine.
Lately this leaves me uneasy. Does it you? Do you wonder how and why exactly we have it so different, so nice compared to thousands of years of peasants eating rocks? Is it possible that we, the people of the world, are being given a last great gift before everything changes? To me it feels like a gift. Only two generations ago, my family had to sweat in the sun to pull food from the ground.
Another thing. The marvels that are part of our everyday lives—computers, machines that can look into your body and see everything but your soul—are so astounding that most of us who use them don’t really understand exactly what they’re doing or how they do it. This too is strange. The day the wheel was invented, the crowd watching understood immediately what it was and how it worked. But I cannot explain with any true command how the MRI that finds a tumor works. Or how, for that matter, the fax works.
We could feel amazement, or even, again, a mild disorientation, if we were busy feeling and thinking long thoughts instead of doing—planning the next meeting, appointment, consultation, presentation, vacation. We are too busy doing these things to take time to see, feel, parse, and explain amazement.
Which gets me to time.
We have no time! Is it that way for you? Everyone seems so busy. Once, a few years ago, I sat on the Spanish Steps in Rome. Suddenly I realized that everyone, all the people going up and down the steps, was hurrying along on his or her way somewhere. I thought, Everyone is doing something. On the streets of Manhattan, they hurry along and I think, Everyone is busy. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone amble, except at a summer place, in a long time. I am thinking here of a man I saw four years ago at a little pier in Martha’s Vineyard. He had plaid shorts and white legs, and he was walking sort of stiffly, jerkily. Maybe he had mild Parkinson’s, but I think: Maybe he’s just arrived and trying to get out of his sprint and into a stroll.
All our splendor, our comfort, takes time to pay for. And affluence wants to increase; it carries within it an unspoken command: More! Affluence is like nature, which always moves toward new life. Nature does its job; affluence enlists us to do it. We hear the command for “More!” with immigrant ears that also hear “Do better!” or old American ears that hear “Sutter is rich, there’s gold in them hills, onward to California!” We carry California within us; that is what it is to be human, and American.
So we work. The more you have, the more you need, the more you work and plan. This is odd in part because of all the spare time we should have. We don’t, after all, have to haul water from the crick. We don’t have to kill an antelope for dinner. I can microwave a Lean Cuisine in four minutes and eat it in five. I should have a lot of extra time—more, say, than a cavewoman. And yet I do not. And I think: That cavewoman watching the antelope turn on the spit, she was probably happily daydreaming about how shadows played on the walls of her cave. She had time.
It’s not just work. We all know the applications of Parkinson’s Law, that work expands to fill the time allotted to complete it. This isn’t new. But this is: So many of us feel we have no time to cook and serve a lovely three-course dinner, to write the long, thoughtful letter, to ever so patiently tutor the child. But other generations, not so long ago, did. And we have more time-saving devices than they did.
We invented new technologies so that work could be done efficiently, more quickly. We wished it done more quickly so we could have more leisure time. (Wa
sn’t that the plan? Or was it to increase our productivity?)
But we have less leisure time, it seems, because these technologies encroach on our leisure time.
You can be beeped on safari! Be faxed while riding an elephant and receive email while being menaced by a tiger. And if you can be beeped on safari, you will be beeped on safari. This gives you less time to enjoy being away from the demands of time.
Twenty years ago when I was starting out at CBS on the radio desk, we would try each day to track down our roving foreign correspondents and get them to file on the phone for our morning news broadcasts. I would go to the daily log to see who was where. And not infrequently it would say that Smith, in Beirut, is “out of pocket,” i.e., unreachable, unfindable for a few days. The official implication was that Smith was out in the field traveling with the guerrillas. But I thought it was code for “Smith is drunk,” or “Smith is on deep background with a really cute source.” I’d think, Oh, to be an out-of-pocket correspondent on the loose in Cairo, Jerusalem, Paris—what a thing.
But now there is no “out of pocket.” Now everyone can be reached and found, anywhere, anytime. Now there is no hiding place. We are “in the pocket.”
What are we in the pocket of? An illusion, perhaps, or rather many illusions: that we must know the latest, that we must have a say, that we are players, are needed, that the next score will change things, that through work we can quench our thirst, that, as they said in the sign over the entrance of Auschwitz, “Work Brings Freedom,” that we must bow to “More!” and pay homage to California. I live a life of only average intensity, and yet by 9 p.m. I am quite stupid, struck dumb with stimuli fatigue. I am tired from 10 hours of the unconscious strain of planning, meeting, talking, thinking. If you clench your fist for 10 hours and then let go, your hand will jerk and tremble. My brain trembles.