Dick Meyer - Why We Hate Us: American Discontent in the New Millennium

Contents

To Jill

For Lily and Daniel

Preface

THERES SOMETHING ROTTEN in the state of America.

It is something phony, belligerent, and toxic in the culture. We are mad as hell about it, but we keep on taking it. We keep electing partisan phonies we cant stand. We keep watching loudmouthed pseudo-news shows on cable and keep yelling back at the television. We get furious at liberal bias and right-wing slant. We watch television for three hours a day and complain that theres nothing to watch. We whine about the ads and then buy the beer, the plasma-screen television, and the bottomless bowl at Olive Garden. We pay two dollars a bottle for water and feel like suckers. We commute ninety minutes a day in our SUVs and complain about gas prices. We read People magazine and then get irritated by the hypersexual ads and fawning coverage of celebrity skanks and himbos. We watch Paris Hilton on Larry King Live the day after she gets out of jail for drunk driving and feel like dopes for watching. We get furious at the loud cell-phone talker in the waiting room as we bang out e-mails on BlackBerries with our angry thumbs.

Americans are down on America. There are wide patches of the cultural landscape that we just plain hate.

Were often aware of this social self-loathing, but that doesnt relieve it. The trust and confidence Americans have in the countrys major institutions and leaders have been at historic lows since the early 1970s and are staying low in the first decade of the twenty-first century. We are disillusioned and repelled by the polluted social and cultural environment we live in. We perceive it as toxic, and we are wary. The values we have as families and individuals arent reflected in the collective culture. This threatens our individual happiness and our collective ability to get things done in politics and in communities. The recipes of self-discovery and do-it-yourself spirituality we have used to replace more traditional religions, social codes, and worldviews arent working. The planned communities we have built to replace real ones are hollow. Technology isnt making us happier. If America were put on the couch of popular psychology, the diagnosis would be obvious: low self-esteem. Our society is successful and admirable in so many ways, but we dont feel either pride or satisfaction in any sustained fashion. We would benefit from a better understanding of why we hate us.

This isnt a job for social science alone. Polls, focus groups, and brain scans cant prove that we hate us or explain why. So there wont be a lot of charts and graphs ahead. This book is not a political book. It isnt liberal or conservative. It avoids the hot-button issues of the chattering political elite because those repetitive arguments are sources of interminable heat but no light. Instead, I hope to swipe smart ideas from smart people who think about culture and history and mix them together in a useful way. I make no claims to originality and thank all the people I quote at the outset. This book came out of columns I wrote for CBSNews.com and the blunt, generously open responses I received from readers. They taught me much about what we hate, and they taught me that it is impossible to have a friendly, open-minded conversation about our complaints, flaws, and foibles without a sense of humor.

In chapter 1, I will describe what we hate most, what that says about us, and why its important to pay attention. Chapter 2 sorts our antipathies into some basic categories such as bullshit, belligerence, and boorishness. The next two chapters deal with why? I pin much of the blame for our crankiness on a disorienting one-two punch of rapid societal change; the combination of the moral, intellectual, and civic transformations that came after the sixties; and the disruptive social fallout from the revolution in technology at the turn of the millennium. After that Ill go into what I think is the emblematic malady of our times: phoniness. Then Ill dig into some specific areas of public life: politics, the gargantuan soul-sucking creature I call OmniMedia, its black sheep cousin OmniMarketing, and then character and manners.

At the end, Ill explore ideas we might use to hate us less and, importantly, to produce less that is hateful with our own lives and work. In life, you give and you get. The problems and discomforts I write about are not reparable by legislation, political platforms, or social programs. We are deluged by people and ideologies that claim to have the cures for what ails us. I belong to no intellectual team or ideological faction, and I am not making a political argument. I dont have answers. In times as cynical and skeptical as these, even making helpful suggestions is risky business. But Ill take that risk in the final chapter.

The sorts of complaints Ill be writing about come only to societies that have abundance, and ours has more than any nation has ever had. Our discontent in the face of such plenty is a puzzle. Obviously, too many people in America dont share in the countrys prosperity and relative peace. But people of all sorts, I learned from my readers and reporting, do hate what has happened to the countrys public cultureto usand they are the we I am talking about. We might hate different things, at different times, in different ways. Politics and media exaggerate our differences and disagreements. I do not think we hate one another. Still, everyone hates something about us, our collective work, our culture. We do have that much in common. And we do fight back. Thats the good news.

My ambition for this project was well expressed by Daniel Boorstin in 1961. He prefaced his wonderful book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America this way: I remain confident that what dominates American experience today is not reality. If I can only dispel some of the mists, the reader may then better discover his own real perplexity. He may better see the landscape to find whatever road he chooses.

Washington, D.C.
JANUARY 2008

Chapter One

LAND OF THE FAKE

THE CASKET WAS WRAPPED in an American flag, bright in the sun reflected off the marble Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery on a May morning in 1998. A military band played the old hymn Going Home as an honor guard lifted the casket and carried it to the waiting hearse. During the night, the coffin had been taken out from under the heavy stones of the tomb. It had rested there since Memorial Day 1984 when President Ronald Reagan led a ceremony to finally honor the soldiers of the Vietnam War by putting one of their own into the Tomb of the Unknowns. Who was he? What was his story? Where was his family? We will never know the answers to those questions about his life, Reagan said that day. For fourteen years that casket protected an unknown soldier from the Vietnam War, guarded around the clock by the Armys Old Guard at the countrys most solemn war memorial. On May 14, 1998, the disinterred casket was loaded into a black hearse and taken away.