Present Laughter

The title of this post concerns, first of all, the Noel Coward play I saw last evening at the Saint James Theater in Manhattan. Kevin Kline was brilliant. I didn't realize that I wasn't the only person who loves him. The theater was packed. I wish I had enough money to go every night for the rest of the run and sit in the front row. The play was a piece of puff, but there was so much to see that I could not take it all in.

Afterward I went out with my new pals Rena and Andie. While I wasn't paying attention, I saw that the theater district has come to life in recent years: tons of restaurants and hotels. We ended up at a Brazilian place on 46th Street. A glass of white wine and calamari took off the edge after concentration on the theater piece. Rena, whose late husband was in real estate, said that "retail is dead." Malls will soon be rebuilt as office spaces and apartment complexes. All over the Upper West Side, it is true, the stores are closing. Storefronts stand empty, with FOR RENT signs in the windows.

I thought of this situation this morning as I was walking near where the old Coliseum Book Store used to be, just south of Columbus Circle. Checking the internet, I discovered that it closed in 2006, over a decade ago already. A way of life -- bookstores -- was on its way out. Who would have imagined that when I arrived in New York in 1980?

Can one use the term "present laughter" to refer to the ridiculous op-ed in the New York Times by Ulrich Baer, professor in NYU's German department? (The link here is to Jonathan Chait's response in New York magazine to such “illiberal” attacks on free speech. The piece includes a link to the NYT op-ed.)

On the one hand, it is amusing to consider what most readers of the New York Times might have made of the postmodernist jargon of the op-ed. It was as convoluted as the writings of Jean-Francois Lyotard, the French “literary theorist” who is Baer's authority on the issue of free speech. Baer identifies himself as “a college professor and university administrator with over two decades of direct experience of campus politics.” Clearly, he has spent too much time around twenty-year-olds. On the other hand, his defense of recent university protests against conservative speakers disguises the fact that students today are simply acting out the cynical ideals of Baer's academic cohort.

Most of the liberal free speech advocates, such as Chait, are tearing out their hair now, asserting that it is important to listen to all views, even “hateful” ones, “bigoted” ones, and so on. But why would anyone want to listen to hateful or bigoted views? I don’t want to. I don’t listen to the views of Holocaust deniers, for instance.

But are the views of Ann Coulter, Charles Murray, and Condoleezza Rice (another uninvited speaker) “hateful”? Or are they simply offensive to a portion of the population that has its own fixed views?

Besides illustrating what happens to an intelligent person when he spends too much time with young people, Ulrich Baer is exhibit no. 1 of why academics should stick with their area of expertise. (He writes books with titles like Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma.) If someone thinks that I am wading outside of mine, let me remind you that I have actually done work in this area and edited a book on the subject.

Photo credit: Marilyn K. Yee/The New York Times

Back-up Parents

"The Other Side" by Toby Morris

By the title of this post I don't mean "back-up parents" in the sense of, say, you are a child and your parents are drug users or other low lives and you have no models or no refuge when things go bad. In such cases, you may be fortunate to have some adult folks in your environment that serve as substitutes for parents. Indeed, for some of us, teachers once fulfilled that function, or at least they did back in the old, old days of the so-called terrible 1950s.

I come to the term "back-up parents" by my observations of parents in my milieu, the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Some of these are Sixties veterans, like myself, and others are younger, but we came of age at a good time, in the sense, that we transitioned from youth to adulthood with a good education, good jobs, and, for many of us now, great retirement plans. If the economy sucks for many Americans, not for us. To be fair, we often worked very hard.

The kids in this milieu, however, are of a different substance. Even if they went to privileged schools, they, like all other American kids, have experienced a certain dumbing down. Thus, their parents have done everything in their power to make sure that their own kids make the same transition to adulthood. When I have conversations with these parents -- usually the mothers in the locker room at the health club -- I learn that their children are now on the verge of adulthood and are contemplating careers. They have studied anthropology or women's studies or art history in college. They may have enjoyed a "gap year," during which they lived in Kenya and worked in "urban planning." Now it is time to make a career choice going forward, and it is generally of a feel-good sort, say, working for a non-profit. Whatever the merit of these jobs, they will not be exceedingly high paying, especially since the jobs -- with their outward show of trendiness -- are highly coveted. Lots of young, bright people with B.A.s in art history, for instance, gravitate to the glamour of museum jobs or art galleries. The salaries there, however, are not high paying. In other words, these children will probably not make as much in their own lifetimes as their parents or grandparents did.

That's where I come to the term back-up parents. The parents are there to back up their children financially as they enter adult life, for instance, to pay off their college loans or to lay down the money for their kids' first apartment. We are clearly entering a world of class distinctions, which have arisen since the Sixties generations assumed the reins of powers over the institutions of the U.S.

In contrast to such privileged kids, an ordinary American graduating from college with a degree in physical therapy -- a real profession, by the way -- will be paying $600 a month for the rest of her life (like my own physical therapist) and unable to buy her own personal computer (ditto). Her own parents are among those Americans who keep a roof over their head and expect their kids to work and do likewise.

The cartoon selection above is from the artist Toby Morris, who manages to put in a few pictures what I have less elegantly put into words.

Virginia Woolf channeling Jane Austen

Recently an essay by me appeared in The Yale Review on the career of the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner, in particular Warner's lesser status in comparison with her almost exact contemporary, Virginia Woolf. At the conclusion of my essay, I contrasted their differing treatments, in their own essays, of Jane Austen. It seemed to me that in writing of Austen's greatness, Woolf was speaking of herself. For instance, of Austen's unfinished early novel, The Watsons, Woolf writes (in Common Reader I): "Here, indeed, in this unfinished and in the main inferior story, are all the elements of Jane Austen's greatness. It has the permanent quality of literature."

Virginia was a scribbler from an early age, and her "juvenilia" have been published, as have her girlhood diaries and letters. One can't help thinking that she was concerned from early on with creating a literary legacy and of situating herself in the "canon" of English literature. Note the opening of her essay on the seventeenth-century poet John Donne, which appeared in 1932 in Common Reader II:

"When we think how many millions of words have been written and printed in England in the past three hundred years, and how the vast majority have died out without leaving any trace, it is tempting to wonder what quality the words of Donne possess that we should still hear them distinctly today."

The only thing holding her back, if you believe what you read in A Room of One's Own, was a lack of a university education. Anyone who has read her essays, however, can see that Virginia Woolf was quite learned, if not in an academic sense. Indeed, she enjoyed the best kind of education for a writer: she grew up in a literary household, had access to her father's library, and read all the time.

To return to Woolf's channeling of Jane Austen. In a scholarly study of Austen, I came across the following excerpt from a letter Jane wrote to James Stanier Clarke, who had written to her suggesting a clergyman for the hero of her next novel. Austen declined, saying that she knew nothing about the subjects of men's conversations, for instance, science and philosophy. And here is the pay quote (with my emphasis):

"A classical education, or at any rate a very extensive acquaintance with English literature, ancient and modern, appears to me quite indispensable for the person who would do any justice to your clergyman; and I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress."

Do I make my case? Did Woolf go on to spin this into A Room of One's Own?

Image source: Playbuzz

U.S. Communism in the 1950s

I am going out on a limb here, and I have certainly not seen it formulated as such, but being "American" in the 1950s stood in opposition to being "Communist." Indeed, in the milieu in which I grew up, one spoke of “communist Russia or “communist China,” both pronounced as if those were the official names. The threat of communism to the American way of life, to the self-understanding of people like my parents, should not be underestimated, not so much the native, homegrown variety as represented by the American labor movement, but the socialist product already well entrenched in Europe. After all, wasn't Britain, a nation with which the U.S. had been allied in World War II, which had so recently celebrated the coronation of young Elizabeth, in the process of establishing socialism? Something of this got through to me in connection with reports of labor strikes among English unionists, which led my father to explain to me the difference between the American and the English laboring classes: if an American union worker saw you driving a Cadillac, he worked to earn enough to buy one for himself; the English worker, on the other hand, sought to deprive you of yours. That was communism in a nutshell, and even I, an eight-year-old, got the point. Cold War threats, especially after the unleashing of the hydrogen bomb in 1952, strengthened our sense of this lurking evil.

At the same time, my father's relatively benign attitude toward the American labor union movement indicates that most Americans did not believe that a violent revolution of the communist variety was likely to take place in the U.S. The concern was for national security, and by 1950 there was plenty of evidence that Party members and fellow-travelers had indeed sought to undermine the security of the U.S.

Thus, it was with some interest that I came across an article yesterday by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., entitled "The Life of the Party," which appeared in The Saturday Review in July of 1949. It is a very clear-sighted analysis of the Communist Party of the U.S.A. (CPUSA) at that moment, when the extent of Soviet penetration and manipulation was becoming clear, but it also ends with a conclusion remarkably similar to that of my father. In Schlesinger's own words: can anyone seriously believe, he wrote in 1949, that the CPUSA is "absurd enough to contemplate a violent revolution in the U.S.?"

At the same time, Schlesinger also has this to say: namely, that the communist movement in the U.S. was, at the time of his writing, "an organized party of 70,000 members, extending its influence by means of an underground apparatus and through the collaboration of fellow-travelers; controlling a political party, several trade unions and a great many front organizations, and exerting a lingering power in cultural circles."

This was in July 1949, six months before senior government officials met in secret to discuss the "Rosenberg case," which would eventually lead to the trial and conviction of the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1951 and their execution in 1953.

Schlesinger's article begins by noting the strangeness of a communist movement in the U.S., a country that had enjoyed the longest period of liberal government in history. In his view, however, America had its "quota of lonely and frustrated people, craving social, intellectual, and even sexual fulfillment they cannot obtain in existing society." And even though, as Schlesinger writes, it was hard work to be a communist, party discipline was an attraction for such people. After all, each member acted "as if he embodied the impersonal force of history."

In the eyes of the Soviet masters, however, the American Communist Party was "one of the expendable parties. The Comintern has never exerted itself to give the CPUSA aid or to spare it embarrassment. No one in the CPUSA even knows in advance of impending change in party line." Schlesinger gives credit, however, to the domestic product, which he claims was responsible for "grass-root initiatives" that engaged in "courageous activity against local injustice and exploitation." I assume he is talking about the civil rights movement, which, like all such initiatives, the CPUSA infiltrated and sought to control.

So it was that in sleepy Louisville, where I grew up in the 1950s, the antagonisms of the Cold War came to our very back yard, and, for most of us, solidified the connection between communism and desegregation. It was 1954, when a white couple bought a house in a working-class white neighborhood in Louisville and then promptly turned around and sold it to a black couple. In short order, the house was bombed. No one was injured in the bombing, but, clearly, the new inhabitants were not welcome in the otherwise all-white neighborhood. The white purchasers of the house were arrested on charges of advocating sedition, and at the ensuing trial their membership in the Communist Party played a major role. Indeed, it was alleged that the white couple was behind the bombing, stirring up racial animosity for the purpose of advancing social revolution.

As in the celebrated case of Alger Hiss, the wife went to her grave in 2006 denying her CP membership. This refusal to admit being communist has always surprised me: it seemed to be a case of denying who you were. As Schlesinger notes concerning the refusal of Hollywood Leftists to own up to their political beliefs before a Congressional committee, imagine the indignation that would have followed if the Congressmen had been asking witnesses if they were members of the Klan.

Rosa Parks, 1955, with M.L. King, Jr.

I think Schlesinger was wrong, however, to give credit to what he considers "courageous activity against local injustice and exploitation." As Schlesinger himself points out, it was the method of the CPUSA to attach itself to "mass organizations -- that is, groups of liberals organized for some benevolent purpose" that were "designed for control by an alert minority," which they sought to do by the civil rights movement.

After all, by 1954 influential sectors of American society were already in favor of dismantling the barriers to full participation of black citizens. For instance, on July 26, 1948, President Harry S. Truman abolished racial discrimination in the United States Armed Forces, which eventually led to the end of segregation in the services. It would have been a struggle for American blacks, for instance, Rosa Parks, to fight against discrimination, but it would have been their struggle. Instead, civil rights became a "liberal" white cause that the communists turned into a violent confrontation.

I am also of the opinion that the market, i.e., capitalism, was already breaking down the barriers. In 1947, for instance, the Brooklyn Dodgers ended a sixty-year ban on black baseball players. The management didn't integrate the team primarily for the cause of "social justice": there were good business reasons for opening the game to more talent. An example from my own experience indicates how things were changing. By 1954 I was already traveling on my own by Greyhound Bus to visit my grandmother in central Ohio. These solo trips, which indicate the relative safety of those days for a child, were broken by several rest stops, including one in the large city of Cincinnati, where I moved among the offerings of colored jello and "fruit cocktail" in the bus station cafeteria. There were plenty of black passengers on these trips, mostly black women, among whom I circulated freely at the lunch counters and in the restrooms of the bus station. This intermingling was not something I had experienced in Louisville, but I like to think that living in Louisville had made me worldly enough to accept it as normal. It was these bus trips that first impressed on me the separate existence of blacks and whites in America, and of the different kind of segregation from that which excluded my own family from the Louisville Country Club.

The aggressive participation of whites, especially of the Leftist variety, has not resulted in a color-blind society. The "courageous activity" of Leftists, even today, has always had the aim of destroying liberal democracy. The result: more divisiveness than ever before. Instead of dignified personalities like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr., we have contentious blowhards like Al Sharpton. The Soviet Union is no more, but there remains the dissatisfied "quota" of whom Schlesinger wrote, and their legacy lives on. Is it any wonder that the first black president has been unable to heal the division?

Picture credit: Lib Com

Income inequality: conclusion

There is a category of people in our society that wants what it wants -- now. That category is called children. It is in adolescence that these critters begin to feel new powers growing in them and new urges that demand to be fulfilled. They are overwhelmed by desires for pleasure of a truly powerful kind, not just the desire for candy at the supermarket. Kept unchecked, kids will feel the urgency to realize their urges. In traditional societies the world over, these urges have been channeled by early marriage and by material limits that forced young males to go to work at an early age. For such unfortunates, there was not much of an opportunity to go wild, which throws some light on what adolescence itself is all about. By the 1960s, American technology had begun to reduce the need for the many skills and occupations on which a traditional order of life depended, especially the household tasks performed by women. With kids no longer going out to work at thirteen or fourteen, there was an in-between stage to be got through, a kind of holding place before adulthood. Thus, adolescence was not even a concept in most places in the world in the 1950s. It is instead a category that exists only in an advanced consumer society.

This preface allows me to finish off this series, and the presidential election offers me a perfect opportunity. Not the election itself, but the reactions to it. A friend phoned me last evening from Seattle, where it seems there were protests against the outcome. Indeed, there were protests in various cities throughout the U.S. Protest movements in the U.S. have principally been the domain of young people, as in the Sixties protests against the Vietnam War. These protests got a veneer of legitimacy from prominent adults who fronted the larger marches, e.g., those on Washington, D.C., written about so memorably by Norman Mailer. Mailer and the like were getting in on the fun. What it came down to, however, was not so much revulsion against a war as the unwillingness of young men to do what their fathers had done, without protest. This is not to say that there were not legitimate reasons for opposing the war, but the same could have been said for World War II: was it, in the end, worth the lives of so many young men and women worldwide? Historically, of course, men have always been induced or willingly become cannon fodder, but it was only in the Sixties that there was a generation of young men who saw better opportunities for themselves than those enjoyed by men of preceding generations. It was also a time when young women, for the first time in history, had choices unknown to their mothers. It was the first generation to experience adolescence, during the decade -- the 1950s -- in which their parents had rolled up their leaves, gone to work, and created the world's greatest economy which, in turn, provided unheard-of opportunities for this generation by the early 1970s.

Future leaders of the U.S.?

So began the protest era: young males against the war, young women against having to bear children. As adolescents, they had been the first generation in American history to enjoy good dental and dermatological care. Those who went to college by the mid-1960s, hardly 9 percent of their cohort, began to believe that the restrictions of their parents' lives was not for them. They were the first American generation to believe that they could have what they wanted -- and economically this has turned out to be the case. In the Sixties, when faced with unpleasant choices -- military service or restrictions on their sexual behavior -- they reacted like the young people they were. They wanted what they wanted, and they wanted it now.

They got what they wanted and went on to achieve many good things in life. They had, after all, gone to school in the 1950s, when they learned to read, write, and sit still at their desks for several hours at a time. They had the skills to participate in the new, explosive economy and to grow it. They gave up protesting and became well off. They now enjoy the fruits of their retirement accounts and worry about the inheritance taxes their children will have to pay.
 
All those kids out on the streets, protesting against Donald Trump, seemed to have learned only one thing: a belief in their right to have what they want and to have it now. Unfortunately for them, the economy is not in their favor, and many of them do not possess the skills to make a real contribution to society. They have grown up feeling entitled, with the attitude that society owes them what they want. A sign of their ignorance, however, a sign that they remain adolescent (even as many of them have segued into their late 20s and 30s), is their comparison of Trump to Hitler. For goodness sake, as Dilbert has pointed out, Reagan was compared to Hitler, as were both Bush presidents. It is, as Dilbert writes, their "first fake-Hitler scare."

Unfortunately, there is no sign yet that these kids will grow up to become really well-functioning, socially competent adults. They are, after all, the victims of the dumbing down of education instituted by my cohort (yes, I am, among this cohort), which began to take over the reigns of institutions by 1973. It was in that year, that we presided over a vast spending spree: the Great Society. Year by year, a many-tentacled octopus produced a national attitude and an accompanying bureaucracy of programs and entitlements designed to prevent people from … well, from feeling hurt, from having to face the consequences of bad choices, of failures. Once upon a time, it was our parents who protected us from bad choices. Now, if you make mistakes, you are supposed to turn to the government to bail your out, to allow someone else to pay for your shortcomings. If you become fat, it's not from overindulgence, but from a medical condition. If you can't read beyond third-grade level after eight years in school, you move on to high school anyway. Parents can no longer spank their own children, teachers can't fail them, and everyone agrees that competition is bad for the psyche.

No wonder we now have a nation of adolescents, whose claim on our attention derives solely from their belief that they should have what they want and have it now. If they are denied, they will behave like kids: they will scream and have tantrums.

Picture credit: Chicago Tribune

"Income Inequality: The Kids Are in Charge," part 4

In the previous posts I have spoken of “my generation,”  identifying this cohort as the kids who first went to school in 1950, give or take a year or two. To only a very small extent does this generation coincide with the Boomers (1946–1964). No one born in 1964 has enjoyed the opportunities — both for success and for failure — of those of us in the earlier demographic. Imagine a Bill Clinton, born not in 1946 but in 1964, raised by a single mother in a small town in Arkansas, proceeding to Georgetown University, Yale, a Rhodes scholarship, and finally to the presidency — no way. Bill Clinton went to school in 1952, not in 1966, and his success in life was a result of growing up in the 1950s.

We had been well trained in the virtues that President Carter asked the nation to draw upon in 1979: hard work, discipline, and patriotism in a common cause.  So, how did we react at the time of economic uncertainty? In the venerable and time-tested American method for achieving victory?

It might have been a renewed Sputnik moment for the U.S.  By 1979, after all, probably the most important positions that we occupied were not as lawyers or doctors or even the traditional wealth-producing sectors of the economy. By 1979 we were entrenched in fields that exercised enormous influence over public opinion: the universities, the media, including advertising, and entertainment. Expertise in these fields did not require exceptional competence in mathematics or science or even advanced business acumen. Their “product” was not the devices and goods produced in the economic sectors that made everyday American life increasingly convenient and pleasurable or that increased our longevity and our automobile performance, outcomes that “progressed” the economy. With our fine feeling for fashion and an ability to anticipate trends, my generation served as handmaidens to such industries, for instance, in advertising, entertainment, and public relations. A sign that we controlled the media was the amount of attention the media devoted to us: young urban professionals with a luxurious standard of living, the so-called Yuppies.

What we did not sell to the public in 1979 was confidence about America or about America’s future. Just the opposite.

President Carter had appealed in his speech to our common history, asserting that we were “heirs of great generations,” who had fought challenges greater than those we faced in 1979.

My generation was having none of that. If a decade earlier, the U.S. had put a man on the moon, the best and brightest were now bathing in a kind of after-the-fall-of-Rome skepticism. Carter’s ponderous presentation probably reminded us too much of our fathers, for instance, of Richard Nixon, who was definitely the face of fathers of the 1950s and whom we had dispatched with the Watergate hearings.

A sign of our contempt for our parents' values, for adult standards, could be seen in 1979 in the book review pages of publications like The New York Times. Skepticism, indeed even cynicism, pervaded the reviews. “Criticism” was a word in vogue, and it consisted of critiquing the writings of past authors, especially male ones, “deconstructing” them, which meant exposing the submerged ideology of power, racism, misogyny, repression, and so on that was hidden below the overt text of a novel. The unreadable philosophical skepticism underlying this criticism affirmed the superiority of the reviewer over the author and, indeed, over everyone else.

The Sixties generation had by 1979 transformed the rejection of our parents’ values into an ideology. The rejection had been professionalized and codified into a rejection of "patriarchy," of all fathers, including the Founding Fathers. Numerous books were churned out that, despite obscure language and nonsensical titles, supported what every adolescent feels to be the case about the world: that people with power can be unfair and mean. While adolescents invent things when presented with evidence of their failures, forty-five-year-olds with Ph.D.s were relativizing the evidence of reality itself. "Cost-benefit ratios"? Those were simply patriarchal constructs; ditto, traditional notions of hard work and success. At a moment of continuing economic crisis, when eighteen- to twenty-year-olds needed more than ever to equip themselves to succeed in an increasingly competitive work place, they were learning that everything that had made the U.S. successful was bogus.


To be continued.

"Income Inequality: The Kids Are in Charge," part 3

In my two previous posts I claimed that income inequality is the result of a collapse in American educational achievement and that this collapse began in 1973, the year that my cohort took over the reigns of the institutions from our fathers. On our watch we institutionalized the values of kids.

It is commonly thought that Boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) were the privileged generation, but it was my cohort, the kids who began school in 1950, give or take a year or two, who have literally had it all. Having it all started with our education, a very democratic one. Aside from a small minority representing the traditional American elite classes, we all went to the same kinds of schools and learned to read, write, compute, and sit still for several hours at a time, all without Ritalin. We developed lots of inner starch in the 1950s. That inner starch came in handy for us girls, most of whom got through high school able to put the desires of the organism on hold. In other words, we postponed our sexual desires. There were exceptions of course, on the fringes of the social order, and many of my own classmates got married within weeks of graduation.

We were rewarded for our competence. By the early 1960s, as we graduated from high school, the American economy had taken off, thanks to the labors of our parents in the 1950s. Not only were we the first generation in American history to take good dental and dermatological care for granted, we were also the first to reap the benefits of American prosperity. We went out to work; some of us went on to the universities and to even better jobs. We had lots of choices. The summer after I graduated, I decided to go to work in order to save money for college in the fall. I went to a bank in downtown Louisville, where I was hired on the spot, with no more evidence of my skills than my high school diploma.

The American economy required our skills. If the U.S. was to produce all the goods its citizens demanded –– and, increasingly, the rest of the world –– all hands were required on board. This economic explosion, however, also offered us unprecedented opportunities for fun. It was amazing how well you could live on in an American university town in 1968 and still have money left over for booze and drugs. And don’t forget the sexual revolution, another benefit of American industry: the Pill, followed quickly by other birth control devices. Overnight, we were able to let go of all those youthful inhibitions concerning sex. Some of my cohort went off the deep end, but for the most part we did not throw everything overboard. After all, we had been raised in the cautious 1950s. As we emerged from the Sixties, especially those of us  of us who had experienced the decade to the hilt –– the rock concerts, the peace marches, the chanting, the summer of love, the days of rage, all the grooving and hanging out, the sex (no AIDS back then!), the binges, the balling, the grunge, the dope and acid and psilocybin –– after getting that out of our system, we moved on to new pastures.

Most of us got down to work, some of us even married and, outwardly anyway, assumed the forms and conventions of middle-class life: had children, or at least one, bought a house, mowed our lawns, paid property taxes. “Will you still love me when I’m sixty-four,” indeed. Within a decade we would in many ways replicate the lives of our parents, if with a better standard of living. We would enter the professions –– become lawyers, doctors, professors, especially the women in our cohort —  have careers or, at the least, good jobs, and further diversify and empower the economy. We were not radicals, despite the peculiar vocabulary that developed in the Sixties. Why demolish a system that rewarded us so well and that promised, as far as we could see, even more rewards in the future?

And, yet, we lacked spine: we were unable to pass on the standards with which we had been raised and that had made us successful in the first place: hard work, discipline, patriotism in a common cause. This was on view in our response to the oil crisis that began in 1973.

In retrospect, the oil shock certainly marked the end of the good times. The opportunities my generation had taken for granted, including jobs that simply fell into your lap, were a thing of the past. The U.S. economy had not reached its vast economic potential without being the world’s largest importer of oil, and, after the first Arab oil embargo in the fall of 1973, the price of fuel went from $3 to $12 a barrel. In a replay of 1944, Americans in 1973 were forced to line up to fill their gas tanks, and there was talk of fuel-rationing. Indeed, by the early 1970s, the enormous financial burden of the Vietnam War might have been a sign that we were living beyond our means. Still, the biggest jolt came after the oil shock and lasted for several years. And just when the worse seemed to be over, the Iranian Revolution of 1979 exploded, disrupting the oil fields of Iran. The GDP dropped, and “stagflation” entered the vocabulary of ordinary Americans, along with the reality of recession and unemployment.

The energy crisis was more than an economic blow. Despite our own vast energy reserves, we had allowed ourselves to become dependent on oil imports. The result was that hostile dictators now held the U.S. hostage: “our neck is stretched over a fence, and OPEC holds the knife.” So said President Jimmy Carter in his “Crisis of Confidence” speech of July 1979, during which he spoke of sacrifice and encouraged the nation to unite in order to survive what he called a “fundamental threat” to our democracy. And, then, in November of that year came the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, after which fifty-two Americans were literally held hostage, for 444 days, by followers of the Iranian Revolution. For the U.S., the energy crisis was indeed an admonition: “You must change your life,” indeed.

How did my generation react? In the way encouraged by the president? Did we face up to the reconfiguration of the world order and respond in the venerable and time-tested American method for achieving victory: hard work, discipline, and patriotism in a common cause?

To be continued.

Image credit: Gavyn Davies; Kathy Lien