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"This is awful. You watch this in the movies. Not in real life.''
That was the comment of a woman on the second astounding shooting in two days in the US. On February 29, a 6 year old boy went to school and shot a girl to death. On March 1, a man shot and killed 3 people, wounded more, and took hostages in a daycare center along one of America’s thousands of ugly strip malls, this one near Pittsburgh.
The President deplores the problem, the presidential candidates step back for a moment from their game of ripping each other’s reputations to shreds to acknowledge that a problem exists, and millions of Americans go right on thinking that all these gun deaths are “not in real life”, or fall back on the witless explanation after Columbine: “things like this aren’t supposed to happen here”.
Columbine was almost a year ago, and while homicides in general are falling, as is crime all over the country, Americans still shoot to kill one another at a rate between 5 to 10 times higher than people in Western European countries.
Of course the main problem is that guns are so incredibly easy to get, and very little is being done to change that, and with a vocal and powerful minority led by the National Rifle Association, very little will change. For one thing THEY are armed and should be considered dangerous. Confiscating their guns would not go by without an armed uprising, after all they go rabid at the idea of gun registration.
The reason the situation has gotten this bad though--that there are so many guns, so much violence, and it’s impossible to change things, is because American culture is suffering a chronic illness. This is the reality that many Americans can’t accept. They feel fine, and then something terrible like this happens--regularly. They’re so sure that everything they do is right and that everything is taken care of: America is the last hope for the world. They cannot accept that in “real life” most other people in other countries reject the American model even though they munch at McDonalds and wear blue jeans. Accepting the output of American pop culture is not the same thing as acceptance or approval of the system that produced it. If it were, England would re-impose the death penalty, Germany would put close to a million of its citizens behind bars, and Holland would embrace sodomy laws. The advanced countries of the world (and those are primarily in Western Europe) have evolved to a “kinder, gentler” level of civilization, and they see America absolutely as a role-model they do not want to copy. As I've often been asked: "What is wrong with your country?"
But so many Americans are so wrapped up in day-trading or thinking up new ways to make money on or off the internet, that they are at a loss to see that their country has degenerated into a sick society, at the same time its national economy is generating an enormous amount of goods and services. As is so often the case, economic good times send Americans on a wave of binge-buying, and close to half the cars on the road now seem to be enormous menacing tank-like vehicles that cost a lot of money to buy, fuel and maintain. Cars as fortresses and weapons, it seems.
If you run a country as if the only thing that matters is “the economy, stupid”, then in terms any moneygrubber can understand: you will pay a high price for your short-sightedness, and you will have a society full of people doing stupid (and harmful) things.
About 8 or 9 years ago,I read an article in that mouthpiece of mammon: The Wall Street Journal which pondered about “when America went wrong”. They decided the date was sometime in the late sixties, and blamed (you guessed it): “the liberals”. Of course they had to have some sort of scapegoat to dump the ills which even the WSJ acknowledged to exisit: the dysfunctional families, the everyday violence, the rampant me-me-me selfishness. If only the “liberals” hadn’t led us down the wrong road, the Journal concluded.
Nope, the point of no return came a little later, I think. It was in November, 1980 when the American electorate chose Ronald Reagan as their leader. After all, in Ronald Reagan much of America could see itself: here was a gregarious, goodlooking man who’d made a career in the Hollywood dream factory, quite often playing a cowboy, followed by a lucrative career being a tv huckster selling soap powder and representing one of the country’s biggest arms contractors. He was divorced, didn’t play much role in raising his children, and didn’t bother very much about skimming beyond the surface on any one topic, keeping to simplistic opinions on most of them. He was called “The Great Communicator”, apparently for his ability to reduce everything he said to the level of a commercial jingle. His morals were fluid: he turned in former colleagues as commies in the 40s and lied about trading arms for hostages with Iran, but he stood up for what he truly believed in: he hated those welfare mothers riding around in limousines, those Russians who were the “focus of evil” in the world, and made sure his son was “all man” before allowing him to become a ballet-dancer. As president, he neglected the education system, punished the poor for their plight, filled the jails as crime continued to increase, and tripled the national deficit, all with a smile and a wink. And most Americans still think he was a good president, one of the best.
He could be considered the prototypical late-20th century American: superficial and glib, mean-spirited and smiling about it, duplicitous when necessary, and with an ability to pretend that what existed, didn’t, and what didn’t exist, did.
If a majority of Americans felt he was a good leader for them, and millions of children grew up during the years when he set the tone for the society, how can it be a surprise that America has social problems which seem to be unsolvable? It's become like a patient whose prognosis is survival for a time, but with a continuing debilitating condition, eventually resulting in dementia. This also resembles Ronald Reagan’s own personal plight: he suffers from Alzheimers. The essential difference is that in no way did Reagan cause himself to contract this illness, while the society he lives in, did.
(March 2, 2000)
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