The ongoing American zeitgeist grows more worrisome by the day. We were once described with the phrase American exceptionalism but those days are long gone.
Political culture is now characterized by catchy sound bites, divisiveness and what I like to call the politics of stupidity. Red states versus blue states, Fake News, the Age of Trumpism, the politics of rage, Brett Kavanaugh.
It’s enough to give one pause. So let’s do just that. Let’s pause as the mid-term elections approach and consider what is actually happening in American culture.
Things were not always this way. One of the few benefits of aging is that one recalls the way things were. Let us go back to the early 1960s when for one brief hope was in the air. But on Nov. 22, 1963 John Kennedy was assassinated. And three weeks after that Jackie Kennedy gave an interview to Life Magazine and she said “There’ll be great presidents again but there’ll never be another Camelot again. It will never be that way again.”
The lyrics to the musical were written by Alan Lerner who was a classmate of Kennedy at Choate and Harvard. Recall when Richard Harris sung “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot. For one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.”
It seems to me that it’s all been downhill for America since that fateful day.
Since then history has given us Richard Nixon, the Vietnam War, an oil embargo, the drug and sexual revolution, trickle-down economics, the Iraq War, the bombing of the World Trade Center, flattened wages, the collapse of the middle class, the end of the American Dream, the rise of corporate power, the rise of the 1 percenters, social media as the new social life, school shootings and mail bombs and finally shootings in a synagogue.
We are a long, long way from Camelot. For more than 50 years we have seen the rise of paranoia, anomie, social isolation and anxiety. Our times have been called the age of anxiety and the age of narcissism.
All this prompts the simple question “how did we get into this mess?” America is like a raging tiger lit on fire and roaring into the future. And the ride grows scarier by the week.
Desperate to find answers, I called up my friend Judge Scott Fairgrieve and asked him to lunch.
Scott Fairgrieve is one of the most reasonable, fair-minded and learned men I know and I felt he may be able to shed light on our current zeitgeist. Judge Fairgrieve has been a judge at the Nassau County District Court for 18 years, teaches at LIU Post and has published over 250 legal decisions.
I met Scott through sports since I’m a sports psychologist and he is a serious long-distance runner.
On this day he was nursing a swollen knee following a marathon run in the cold. It is always a mystery to me how long-distance runners are able to withstand all the pain but somehow they can.
During our lunch what I learned from the judge is that his job is to listen carefully to both sides of an argument and come to a fair and equitable decision somewhere in between. And referring back to Camelot King Arthur came up with the idea of the round table where all matters would henceforth be settled in a ‘court of law’ and not on the battlefield with violence.
Those were medieval times and obviously, we’ve grown since then. Thank God we still have courts of law and settle our disputes with logic and fair-minded judges.
But these basic foundations of our government do seem to be threatened at this time. I am especially interested in the current attack on the Fourth Estate. Back in 1791 freedom of the press was established as a First Amendment right to prevent the government from interfering with the distribution of information and opinion.
In this age we now live in it’s as if the entire nation were caught up in some kind of street fight and there is no place of safety or peace or truth.
If you travel overseas you clearly realize that our nation has enormous abundance and success and money. We are great exporters of entertainment and sports and art and science and intellectual property. It is quite ironic that we are the true exporters of the American Dream but somehow we simultaneously destroyed the American Dream for ourselves.
It seems that we have lost faith in our leaders.
Parents, politicians, priests and CEO’s are uniformly distrusted.. And now we are even losing faith in the integrity of the press.
I think one cause of all this relates to social structure. In the past people would congregate in social spaces called cafes to share ideas, engage in civil debate and find humanity and mores.
Café life has been replaced with chat rooms where people spew things out and rant without the benefit of real social contact which serves to temper things.
Marshall McLuhan said television is a ‘cool medium’ and by this he meant it tended to feel dead so that the media who have to enflame things to make the tube more interesting.
All we can do is to hope that someday soon people will remember what it was like to speak and to listen and to be human and social. Madness abounds right now but humans do have a way to makes things better when they set their minds to it.
I hope that day comes soon.
