Y2K America

LIKE most people, I typically discount jeremiads like David Bosworth's "The Spirit of Capitalism, 2000," which describe a deep and possibly fatal corruption in American society. After all, the people I know all seem to lead sensible, quiet lives. In business, the people I encounter seem to know what they are doing and are about as helpful as one can reasonably expect. But it is when I encounter some bureaucratic or technological snarl, like a telephone answering system that offers endless choices but never the one I need, that I feel that the world no longer makes sense. And so, something about Bosworth's indictment of Americans for a lack of "moral adulthood," for never having grown up, rings true, as does his description of a society in which "toleration gives way to decadent license, civil solicitude to venal solicitation, as everything becomes 'good' and anything 'right.'"

But the disease appears to me to be more in what we might call our "public world" than in the private realms of family and the individual psyche. Most of our information about the world, at least most of mine, comes from the media, newspapers, TV, films, magazines, books, and omnipresent advertising. These, with the exception of some of the books, do indeed present a horrific scene. The maniacal violence of movies, TV, and rap music; the false promises of politicians running for office; the destructive myths of advertising that promise happiness with a new car or a six-pack of beer; the courts that so pervert "justice" that the "rule of law" becomes an absurdity; the flagrant way in which Wealth bribes Politics and calls it "freedom of expression"; the special interests that lobby for the "right to bear arms," even as schoolchildren assassinate their classmates; the boobs who rush to the talk shows to tell the sordid details of their strange, typically sad lives. Everyone can add to amazing spectacle of a wo rld gone mad with sex, violence, power, and money. No wonder, seeing only this, that the European and Asian governments try to protect their societies from becoming Americanized. But this is not the whole of America, or even the heart of it; this is that strange public world on which, as on some gigantic stage, some of the most bizarre people the world has ever seen will do literally anything to raise their "name recognition" for the sake of fame and fortune.

Bosworth is right in his perception that there is some kind of sentimental rot, some age-long childishness, that is at work on our people, though perhaps it has not penetrated as deeply into the core as he fears. Have you ever winced when abroad at the silliness of our teenagers compared to their European peers? Have you ever wondered how many occasions of phony concern there are when you see aisles and aisles of specialized greeting cards for sale? Can anyone really care that much and that often?

Bosworth sees this "rash and rational immaturity" as the product of excessive, corrosive capitalism. We have become, he says, a nation of efficient producers and mindlessly excessive consumers who have lost our spiritual bearings. But in my opinion, the disease is not so much modern capitalism as it is excessive democracy. Not the old meat-and-potatoes kind of democracy that rid us of kings and priests, and for the first time made political and legal equality at least a possibility for every person, but a particularly virulent kind of super-democracy, Y2K democracy.

DEMOCRACY in America has always been an exuberant, overreaching idea that has extracted the last full measure of hypocrisy from its citizens, and in times of prosperity, like our own, it promises more than it can (or should) deliver. Everybody has a right to go to college, or to receive every possible medical treatment without regard to expense, or not to be disliked because of race, sex, or creed. Relativism is, as Bosworth points out, our reigning philosophy, and in a radical democracy, Everyman is as good a thinker as Otherman. All men must be equal in fact, even though the evidence is clear--nothing could be clearer--that they can't be.

This leveling hyper-democracy has grotesquely distorted and perverted some of our most basic, time-tested values and institutions: Law, government, education, the family, art, the army, and the media are bloated with excessive democracy to the point where they are close to ceasing to function. Lawyers grow rich ensuring that every client gets his "rights" protected in personal injury cases and endless appeals; pornography is sold publicly under the name of "freedom of expression"; students are admitted to college not on the basis of their intellectual abilities but by affirmative action; the armed services are measured not by their ability to make war but by their enlistment and treatment of women and homosexuals.

Let it not be thought that I am an antidemocratic royalist or fascist autocrat. Quite to the contrary. I believe that democracy has already worked miracles in America, and will do more if its principles are not carried to such an extreme that it destroys itself.

An old philosopher once said that "when virtue leaves the heart, it takes refuge on the lips," and so it is with democracy as well Underneath the endless chatter about democratic values an enormous swindle is taking place. The very excess of American democracy, its goldrush enthusiasm to democratic equality, allows the wrong kind of elitism, and the wrong kind of elites, to manipulate populism and grab power and money in the process. Anyone can claim to be a victim and sue the company with the deepest pockets for any disaster, from lung cancer to cutting your hand on a light bulb, but the lawyers end up with the money. Whenever the common people are praised for being rugged individualists--like the Marlboro Man who smokes he-man cigarettes or the flinty outdoorsman who takes his four-wheel-drive sports utility vehicle into the unknown wilderness--you can bet that some combination of advertisers, media moguls, and manufacturers is leading the sheep to the slaughter once again. Whenever a politician puts his h and over his heart and speaks of the will of the people, put your hand on your wallet.

IN plain words, Y2K democracy is a glitzy scam that needs to be washed off with acid from time to time to show how it really works. This stripping process has traditionally been the work of satire, though this literary genre has never been, for obvious reasons, a popular art form in America, where the motto is always, "BOOST DON'T KNOCK." Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis, Nathanael West, Tom Lehrer, Lenny Bruce, Joseph Heller, and Herblock have made something of a go of it, but the Englishman Evelyn Waugh is, in my opinion, the greatest satirist in the twentieth century. Understatement is the key to his satiric art. His pages are alive with people saying and doing the most abominable things while those around them take little or no notice. Brenda Last in Handful of Dust, my favorite Waugh novel, hears that her son John has been killed by a kick from a horse, and exclaims, "oh thank God," when she learns that it was not her lover, the wretched John Beaver. No one at all seems to notice, or they are too polite to ma ke any fuss if they do. Dr. Messenger, a kooky explorer in the same book, tumbles over quite a small fall in a South American river: "They were unspectacular as falls go in that country--a drop of ten feet or less--but they were enough for Doctor Messenger." The movie altogether missed the point and turned the drop into a roaring Victoria Falls.

Waugh's understatement is a very English skill, and however much we may admire it, it will not do for America. Understatement is not going to catch very much, if anything, of what goes on in our country. Indeed, overstatement has to run for all it is worth to keep up with our countrymen, and even then it often falls far behind. An American satirist who spent the day writing shocking satiric exaggerations would turn on the evening television news to learn that two schoolboys had killed a number of their teachers and their fellows, and that the Congress had responded instantly by requiring that a copy of the Ten Commandments be posted in every schoolroom. Hit the remote control and there would be the president of the country telling us that "sex" does not include the kind of oral pleasure he had been enjoying with a young volunteer in the White House. This would be followed by an advertisement, in which the former head of the senate, a distinguished war hero, hypes Viagra and tells us how it has conquered ED ( erectile dysfunction) and made his wife, who is running for president, happy. This will be followed by another little playlet--ads never come in single spies but in battalions--in which a member of a jury sits in agony, in dire need of an ointment to relieve his "tormenting rectal itch."

OURS is a land of extremes. The temperature rises to well over 100 and drops below minus 40. Hurricanes and earthquakes, drought and flood, tornadoes and other ill winds race across it. It is a wild country, Cowboy and Indian land still, and its inhabitants gallop across the landscape with unnatural lights in their eyes. These questers will never hear the rifle shots of understatement; the canons of exaggeration will only distract them for a moment. On they ride, hell for leather, toward the horizon, going to Camelot, looking for the Fountain of Youth and Eldorado, "California or Bust," ending poverty and discrimination with New Deals and Great Societies, making the Serbs and the Muslims lie down together in Peaceable Kingdom, getting in the "command seat" of a four-ton sports utility vehicle for a trip to Disney Land.

ALVIN KERNAN is author of In Plato's Cave and at work on "The Fruited Plain, Satires of Y2K America."

COPYRIGHT 2000 The National Affairs, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group