By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, February 05, 2017
“How old are you,
usually, when it all hits you?”
— Tom Wolfe, “The Frisbee Ion”
One of the great pageants in American life, the Super
Bowl, is happening in my new hometown of Houston today. House Williamson has
decided to treat this occurrence as a natural disaster, and our strategy for
dealing with natural disasters is always the same: Be elsewhere. When
Superstorm Sandy hit New York City, I watched it on the news in Palm Springs.
Whatever transpires in the city today, I’ll be keeping a wary eye on it from a
good bit farther on down the Gulf Coast.
Houston can be horrifying much of the year. Summers here
are unbearable, and I write that as a man who lived for a time in India —
without air conditioning. Sometimes it rains for days, the traffic is
positively Third World, and the city’s great landmarks are an empty sports
arena and a shopping mall. But this time of year, Houston is glorious, warm and
mellow winter sunshine on palm trees, cloudless skies. This is neither
America’s prettiest city nor its most exciting nor its most refined — “refined”
here mainly refers to petroleum products. But it certainly seems to be a place
that works. It has stupid municipal government, like practically every major
American city, and it counts Sheila Jackson Lee as among its great political
assets. But damn it all if it doesn’t seem to work, from the guys out in Baytown refining oil and churning out
petrochemicals to the manufacturing businesses that build the tools they use to
the downtown financiers and lawyers who keep everything moving. Lots of new
pickups, lots of full restaurants, lots of guys making a good living installing
swimming pools for the guys who are making an even better one. You’ve never
seen a median household income of $61,485 look so rich.
We Texans like to sneer at Californians, but they aren’t
doing too badly out there, either. I am a big fan of the unwritten sumptuary
laws of Silicon Valley: Nobody wears a suit, but everybody wears an
oh-so-casual cashmere sweater that costs about three grand, and nobody drives a
Lamborghini but nobody’s Tesla is more than about 18 months old, either.
California has its problems, to be sure, though we Texans shouldn’t laugh at
them too hard: The green-eyeshades guys tell me that there’s a good chance we’ll
see the public pensions in Houston and Dallas go toes-up before the ones in Los
Angeles and San Francisco do. (Weirdly, New York has been relatively
responsible on this front — who could have seen that coming?) Everybody who
reads knows the idiots in Sacramento are screwing things up like it’s their
job, but there isn’t much in California that feels like a crisis. The Bay Area
is rich and slick and happy, and sprawling Los Angeles seems to be doing quite
well, too, and even the drought-stricken farm country still for the most part
is looking pretty prosperous.
And so it goes: Washington, D.C., is not only thriving
but maybe even doing a little better than your thinking small-r republican would like to see in
principle. For all the talk of “carnage” and the very real problem of violent
crime plaguing a handful of its neighborhoods, most of Chicago is doing just
fine and some of it is spectacular. South Florida’s low-rent good-fun vibe has
figured out a way to coexist with serious business, thanks in no small part to
excellent state-level political leadership and a very forward-looking business
community. New York is still New York, and Boston is still Boston, which is
great if you like that sort of thing. And outside of the big cities, American
farmers are prospering beyond the imagining of their forebears only a
generation ago, with high-tech 21st-century agriculture having grown into
something that’s influenced a lot more by what they’re doing in Palo Alto than
by what they used to do in Muleshoe. If you haven’t visited an American cotton,
wheat, corn, or soybean operation, you really should — the sheer vastness of
the enterprise is eye-opening.
Part of my job is writing about social problems such as
poverty, crime, and drug addiction, which means I drive around the country
looking for the worst parts of everywhere, which are pretty easy to find if you
know how to do it. I’ve spent the last couple of years interviewing hookers in
Charleston and heroin addicts in Birmingham and welfare cheats in Tennessee. I’ve
been in jails and Alcoholics Anonymous meeting rooms and halfway houses, talked
to dealers on drug corners in New Orleans, and heard the story of a family
living in a gas station in Kentucky. Generally speaking, when I show up in your
town, it isn’t good news. And we need to talk about those things, but those
situations — in this land of unbelievable peace and plenty — are the man who
bites the dog, not the other way around. The news is the news because it is not
the norm.
Perhaps it is because there is not much in the way of
genuinely bad American expletive-deleted with which I am not at least passingly
familiar that the hysteria and negativity of our political discourse strikes me
as so very expletive deleted insane.
You’d think the United States is poor, desperate,
backward, and on the verge of either civil war or building concentration camps
or both.
It isn’t.
The idiot children in Berkeley who risibly style
themselves “antifascists” say that they are going to “war,” that the United
States is descending into some sort of Nazi-style nightmare state, and that
allowing a daffy Anglo-Greek homosexual writer to speak about current affairs
on a University of California campus is only one step away from — their words —
“genocide.” Surely, if there were to be some sort of neo-Nazi regime in the
United States, its poet laureate would not be Milo Yiannopoulos, who is: gay,
Jewish by birth, Catholic by profession, and something of an enthusiastic
race-mixer to boot. He’s the guy who’d be put into a camp, if there were camps.
There aren’t.
Senator Bernie Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren want
you to believe that the economy and the political system are “rigged” against
you, that you have no real hope of prospering, rising, and thriving in what
Senator Sanders insists is an “oligarchy.” (He pronounces it “Allah-garchy,”
and, sharia hysteria notwithstanding, we aren’t getting one of those, either.)
The guys on talk radio want to sell you gold coins and freeze-dried ice cream,
and so they need you to believe that we are on the verge of total anarchy, that
somebody — the Islamic State, Black Lives Matter, Chicago gangsters, somebody — is coming to get you.
Politicos and angst-peddlers left and right want you terrified and anxious, and
they want you to believe that these United States comprise a vast impoverished
anarchic Eliotic wasteland, a kind of gigantic continental Haiti with lots of
shopping malls and a surprisingly large number of Range Rovers.
But if you drive around the country, it doesn’t look like
that at all. It looks, for all its very real problems, amazing.
Tom Wolfe, the peerless chronicler of American life,
tells a wonderful story of the 1960s, about a group of philosophers and social
critics flying in through O’Hare to descend on an American college campus. The
assembled scolds and beard-strokers and Chicken Littles describe the myriad of
problems facing the United States — horrifying, existential, insoluble. And
then one young man stood up:
I’m a senior, and for four years
we’ve been told by people like yourself and the other gentlemen that
everything’s in terrible shape, and it’s all going to hell, and I’m willing to
take your word for it, because you’re all experts in your fields. But around
here, at this school, for the past four years, the biggest problem, as far as I
can see, has been finding a parking place near the campus.
Dead silence. The panelists looked
at this poor turkey to try to size him up. Was he trying to be funny? Or was
this the native bray of the heartland? The ecologist struck a note of
forbearance as he said:
“I’m sure that’s true, and that
illustrates one of the biggest difficulties we have in making realistic
assessments. A university like this, after all, is a middle-class institution,
and middle-class life is calculated precisely to create a screen—”
“I understand all that,” said the
boy. “What I want to know is — how old are you, usually, when it all hits you?”
And suddenly the situation became
clear. This kid was no wiseacre! He was genuinely perplexed! . . . For four
years he had been squinting at the horizon . . . looking for the grim horrors
he knew — on faith — to be all around him. . . . War! Fascism! Repression!
Corruption! . . .
The Jocks & Buds & Freaks
of the heartland have their all-knowing savants of O’Hare, who keep warning
them that this is “the worst of all possible worlds,” and they know it must be
true — and yet life keeps getting easier, sunnier, happier . . . Frisbee!
Yes, bread and circuses and all that, but the least
expensive ticket to this weekend’s big game is going for about $4,500, which
suggests to me a society with a great deal of disposable income and leisure
time on its hands. And if that’s too rich for your means, there’s always
Frisbee, or Starbucks, or starting a business, or MIT OpenCourseware, or the
Appalachian Trail, or reading Mark Twain at the New York Public Library.
How old are you, usually, when it hits you? I’m 44, and
it hasn’t hit me yet.
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