Morning in America

It's morning in America. Our long national daydream is over. The worm, so to speak, has turned. The Reagan era is history. The evidence is as plain as the nose on your face and the faces on your television.

The last year has seen a 180-degree shift in public iconography. The strong, silent Rambo is supplanted by Oliver North, the Mute Marine. The romance of the entrepeneur, symbolized by Lovable Lee Iacocca, is replaced by revulsion at the greedy thievery of Ivan Boesky. The warm glow of "family values" and "spiritual renewal," the velvet glove on the New Right fist, dissipates as the corruption of PTL--and the meanness of PTL nemesis Jimmy Swaggart--comes to the fore. Our boys in uniform, last seen storming the med schools and mental wards of Grenada to public adulation, now turn up in Moscow handing over the government's most closely guarded secrets in exchange for what boys' room graffiti would call "a good time."

Obviously these various examples of decadence and disillusion are not all related. But in the calculus of popular consciousness, they all add up. Even Time magazine, the ultimate arbiter of conventional wisdom, can now discern what its March 30 cover line called "A Change in the Weather." In the cover story, "America's Agenda After Reagan," Time's resident thinker of deep thoughts, Lance Morrow, tells us that in the post-Reagan backwash, "compassion" is again becoming fashionable. As evidence he cited polling data showing that more than 70 percent of the American people favor increased government spending on health care for the elderly and poor, aid to the homeless, and environmental protection.

Time cited the growing ranks of the homeless as the thermometer for taking the nation's moral temperature. Quoth Morrow: "In a nation that prides itself on its economic comeback from recession, the spectacle of people huddling around trash-can fires is ethically embarrassing. One makes five or ten serious moral choices (give money, pass them by, what?) on the way to work, and as many coming home, and the conscience at last is frayed."

But the piece also noted discontents of a more systemic nature, including the growing "cognitive dissonance" between the "nominal economy" of 11 million new jobs created and a record-high stock market, and the "real economy" of continual layoffs and small-business failures. Time even cited a Harris poll showing public approval of U.S. corporations down from 69 percent in 1979 to a mere 35 percent last year. It seems that Big Business is supplanting Big Government as the public's villain of choice. Being a Big Business itself, Time can be trusted on such estimations.

All this of course should have been obvious by the end of last November. That month, you'll recall, saw the one-two punch of a Democratic Senate victory, spearheaded by anti-corporate populists, and the first revelations of the arms deal sleaze-a-rama. Washington Post reporter Paul Taylor, who's been covering the 1988 presidential campaign almost since the '84 one ended, wrote a Sunday-edition editorial piece almost a year ago predicting that 1988 would see a new public mood of compassion and idealism not unlike that of the early 1960s.

No less a pop-cult guru than Norman Lear, producer of "All in the Family," "One Day at a Time," and legion of other successful sit-coms, recently diagnosed the national condition well in a speech at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, later adapted for publication in the Washington Post. Using the language of the medium he (and America) knows best, Lear said, "America has become a game show. Winning is all that matters. Cash prizes. Get rich quick....We are turning the commonweal into the Commonwheel of Fortune." No wonder even Time magazine's conscience is a bit "frayed."

THE BOTTOM LINE HERE is that an opening exists for bold new definitions of old political standbys like patriotism, national security, and even self-interest. The Hobbesian "war of all against all" could be replaced by a political agenda built on notions of interdependence and community. As the pundits are already noting, the 1988 election could serve to give form to such a new mood and new agenda.

"But, noooooo!" as the late John Belushi used to say. Instead the crop of 1988 politicians, in both parties, seems likely to be dominated by a half-dozen or so Bob Foreheads. Bob Forehead is the hero of the syndicated comic strip "Washingtoon," created by Village Voice cartoonist Mark Alan Stamaty. Having failed in his life's great ambition of becoming a TV game-show host, Forehead was elected to Congress where he immediately joined the "JFK-Look-Alike Caucus" and hired a "charismatician," who will help find the appropriate political "fuzz words" to create the trance-like state in which the voters will make him president.

The aspiring Democratic Bob Foreheads have obviously seen the same polling data that Time magazine did. But they mostly seem unable to conceive of things like "community" and "compassion" as anything other than a new set of fuzz words most effective when used in combination with their other favorites, "toughness" and "efficiency." The exception of course is the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, who doesn't look anything like JFK but seems poised to run a 1988 campaign stronger, and wiser, than his '84 effort.

Danny Duncan Collum is a Sojourners contributing editor.