I can’t recall who said it but somebody once said that since the beginning of time old ladies have always thought that the strawberries were sweeter when they were girls. Undoubtedly, there’s something of this in Peggy Noonan’s column this morning:
The country I was born into was a country that had existed steadily, for almost two centuries, as a nation in which everyone thought—wherever they were from, whatever their circumstances—that their children would have better lives than they did. That was what kept people pulling their boots on in the morning after the first weary pause: My kids will have it better. They’ll be richer or more educated, they’ll have a better job or a better house, they’ll take a step up in terms of rank, class or status. America always claimed to be, and meant to be, a nation that made little of class. But America is human. “The richest family in town,” they said, admiringly. Read Booth Tarkington on turn-of-the-last-century Indiana. It’s all about trying to rise.
Parents now fear something has stopped. They think they lived through the great abundance, a time of historic growth in wealth and material enjoyment. They got it, and they enjoyed it, and their kids did, too: a lot of toys in that age, a lot of Xboxes and iPhones. (Who is the most self-punishing person in America right now? The person who didn’t do well during the abundance.) But they look around, follow the political stories and debates, and deep down they think their children will live in a more limited country, that jobs won’t be made at a great enough pace, that taxes—too many people in the cart, not enough pulling it—will dishearten them, that the effects of 30 years of a low, sad culture will leave the whole country messed up. And then there is the world: nuts with nukes, etc.
but I think there’s a kernel of truth to it, too. That’s at the heart of the series of posts I’ve been writing this week. It certainly looks to me as though we’re entering what will be a prolonged period in which rather obviously the strawberries are not nearly as sweet as they used to be.
And I can’t help the nagging suspicion that we were the wealth and that what we failed to leave to our children was our children.
I’ve never been nostalgic for the good old days. I remember crouching down in the car so my white friends wouldn’t see that we had black people in the car. And I remember being threatened because I had long hair. And of course: Vietnam, race riots, assassinations, and 10,000 Soviet ICBM’s.
I have an iPhone 4 and on that phone I have an app which was free. A couple days ago I needed to know the nearest Chevron station. So I opened the app and I said, “Nearest Chevron station.” And in about ten seconds I had a map, and directions to every Chevron in the area. My son used the same app to find “a restaurant with good salads.”
That was a science fiction moment. My phone knew where I was and where the nearest Chevron was, and how I should get there. It knew where I could get a salad.
We need to knock off this declinist bullshit. Are we seriously crying because people can’t buy houses that are twice as big as they need? Is it a tragedy if people have to work a bit longer rather than retiring to a life of aimless puttering? Really? We have access to a flow of data that even sci fi writers underestimated. We survive diseases that have killed millions. We need never be too hot or too cold, we never go hungry, we drive around in airbag-filled crash cages, we have everything we ever dreamed of short of flying cars.
So what if we have 8 or 9% unemployment? The French have had those kinds of rates since WW2 and, as I’ve pointed out before, France is not exactly a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
The other 90% can support the 10%. That’s not a tragedy. That’s not the end of the world. It’s just France.
To do that we’re going to need to create a national identity somewhat different from the one we’ve had. So, for example, France has a national language and a history of suppressing competitors, e.g. Breton, Proven¸al. It does not have birthright citizenship.
There’s also a propensity for celebrating Frenchness without, to my knowledge, a parallel celebration of, for example, Sarkozy’s Hungarian ancestry. Their e pluribus unum has a much tighter focus on the unum than on the pluribus.
There’s another problem that occurs to me. What if it’s the 80% supporting the 20% (which is actually closer to the mark considering where U6 is)? 70%—30%? Additionally, I don’t think it’s factually the 90% supporting the 10%. I think it’s 10% supporting an overlapping 10% on behalf of a third 30 or 40%.
I don’t know whether I’m actually nostalgic. The “good old days” had a lot wrong with them. I am saddened that I don’t see that what’s good about today makes what’s bad about today necessary. Does greater racial tolerance and more equality for women really mean we need to accept a coarser society? Yesterday’s society may have been sullen but I don’t recall it being quite so angry.
Although (I think) I’m slightly older than you, this was never an issue for us. It’s an advantage I had in growing up in the peculiar sort of family I did—an odd mixture of the 19th century and the 21st century. Racial prejudice was the worst sin you could commit. One of my dad’s best friends was Joe Tanaka, a college chum (Nissei?). My mother’s uncle married Connie who was from Mexico and my second cousins, my closest blood relatives, are Irish-Mexican.
We’ve shifted our national identity a few times already. Pre and post Civil War is the most lurid example. But we’ve also absorbed the end of the frontier, great waves of immigration, the end of isolation and the emergence of the US as a superpower. When those things happened it changed our narrative about ourselves. I think we’re at the tail end of an already-ragged narrative that grew out of WW2 and the Cold War.
Our narrative has also been undercut by competing story lines. Are we the great melting pot? Well, yes, but there are other smaller melting pots now. Canada seems to do a good job absorbing immigrants. Are we the world’s entrepreneur? Then what are the Chinese, the Japanese and the Germans, who’ve each had huge transformative waves of economic innovation?
We are no longer the only free nation, or even necessarily the freest. We are still the richest major nation, but the differences between us and the EU or Japan are around the margins, not a fundamental difference.
And I think we’ve begun to get a clearer picture of the down side of being the lone superpower. It’s damned expensive for one thing.
We can either decide to double down and engineer some sort of return to a fictionalized past, or we can allow ourselves to evolve naturally, or I suppose we could (in theory only) achieve some great consensus on a future narrative and set out to write it. The middle option seems the most likely.
Racial prejudice was the worst sin you could commit.
Same with us. My dad was a soldier and of course worked with black soldiers. But we were residing in the Florida panhandle, (Eglin AFB) which is basically Alabama. In 1965 we still had segregated theaters and drinking fountain. My mom tutored kids at the segregated black high school. (The woman is nuts but she had her head on straight when it came to race.) For my part I was 11 and already the new kid, the weird kid, the loner and a few other labels, I guess I didn’t feel the need to also be the freedom rider. Still makes me ashamed, though.
I honestly don’t know whether we are or not or whether that’s a realistic way of thinking about us. I can’t help but wonder if we’re not the richest nation but actually just a country with heckuva lot of rich people in it, a somewhat different proposition.
One of the reasons for the great aggregate wealth is that we’re the largest very rich nation by a substantial margin, orders of magnitude.
I recall visiting Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida in the time period you describe. Actually a few years earlier—late fifties, very early 60s. I was still a kid at that point and found the segregation horrifying and frightening.