There are some who see America today breaking into myriad separate entities, into racial, sexual, generational, cultural, and linguistic ghettoes. I
don't believe it. I believe that there are those who would like to see the assertion of difference as an excuse to promote their political agendas. And there are, of course, those who wish to see such breakups in order to fulfill various doomsday scenarios. And those who feel overwhelmed by the rapidity of change are using this vision as an excuse for withdrawing from public life.
Many of the arguments now used to divide us are posited in the wrong terms, the “gap” terms. Some of these gaps are real, but others are not. Take, for example, the argument between the advocates of “English only” and those promoting ethnic-language education. It shouldn't be a question of either/or. Bilingual education combined with ethnic language education makes sense. The language of the land is Englishâor Americanâso it makes sense that foreign-born residents should learn English first of all. Not to do so would condemn them to a linguistic ghetto, which would prevent them from fully joining American life. On the other hand, we should promote a partially bilingual and ethnic-language curriculum in those places where immigrants live in sizeable numbers. The fabric of America is multiracial and multicultural today. That's a fact. This is what gives this country its vitality and its substance. America is not a one-race, one-ethnicity, one-church national state of the kind that has been the cause of war in Europe for centuries. Her fabric stretches and changes. Not to admit this is a disaster. To deny education to immigrants or to promote an alienating curriculum will force them into linguistic ghettoes and cut off their access.
You can see the benefits not just of tolerance, but of celebrating difference, in the work of artists. The Nuyorican poets use both Spanish and English simultaneously to create rich, plastic expressions of a new kind of identity, an identity that is wholly American, not hyphenated. Their work is not the work of Puerto-Rican Americans, or Mexican-Americans, but the work of Americans, simply, the newest Americans. The same can be heard and seen in the performances of Guillermo Gomez-Pena, the work of muralistas, and the reflections of other émigré artists on the ambiguities of cultural translation. They all use language and other materials provocatively. The point is that we live with contradictions and absurdities in our private and political life. To look at them with candor and humorâwhich is to say, creativelyâis to bridge them. Implicit in all viable art is the demand for everyone to be an artist. Good art makes art-communities because it speaks to the myriad gaps that are present in our lives.
Good art today is creole, mestizo, mixed, like American society. How is it still possible, after the civil-rights era, after the psychedelic age, to continue looking at things in black and white? We are no longer living in the era of the Cold War. How is it possible for some politicians to revive racism by using codes like “crime” and “IQ” to mean race? Racial purity is a myth. It is an artist's job to expose and subvert these insidious codes, as well as to thoroughly mix the palette.
The problem is not “race” or “immigration” or “free thinking” or “the media” or any of the numerous scapegoats that this country's paranoid right-wingers would like us to blame for our ills. Their solutionsâcensorship, repression, closing off borders, defending “patriotism” and “religion” with legislationâincrease rather than diminish our difficulties. We have a reality gap in this country as big as the very real economic disparity between the poor and the rich. The discussion of social class in America has been fatally compromised of late by the ideology of capitalism-uber-alles that dominates the media and the political discourse. This obscuring has created a perfectly viable climate for hate mongers, Nazis, and other radical enemies of democracy who, in the absence of a significant discussion of class inequities, have been left in charge of the moral welfare of the dispossesed. They make up the armies of Louis Farrakhan and of the patriotic white militias.
There are those who celebrate and look for imaginative, tolerant, even loving solutions, and those who hate. The American experience shows us that we can overcome hatred, xenophobia, and fear. The European experience has shown quite the opposite. The advocates of intolerance, division, racism, and xenophobia would like us to return to the implacable hostilities of Europe. I, for one, don't believe that this is possible. The essence of America, as expressed in those sorely tested principles of the Bill of Rights, will not allow it. Unfortunately, those rights are not universally accepted even here, in the country that gave birth to them. They need to be reiterated, reaffirmed, and defended over and over. It's not a job just for the American Civil Liberties Union. It's everybody's job.
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he pundits are already declaring the nineties the Age of Anxiety for the middle class. Give us a break. The middle class invented anxiety. The poor have despair and the rich have ennui. That leaves anxiety, the middling emotion. The middle class is anxious about savings, its children's future, and old age. It is this anxious middle class that Bob Dole addressed by holding before it the vision of an unanxious middle class from the fifties. Back then, the sugarplum Republican fiction goes, everybody liked Ike and women were housewives and men had lifetime jobs and big cars. That's true. Women were also on Dexedrine and Valium and highballs and got freaked out by their vacuum cleaners and frequented psychiatrists and mental hospitals. Anne Sexton, a fifties housewife, said, “Imagine it. A radio playing / and everyone here was crazy.” Men were breadwinners and alcoholics and sometimes drove their big cars all the way to the edge of the continent to escape what Henry Miller called “the air-conditioned nightmare.” Lest we forget, this is the generation that started the Cold War. Bob Dole's postwar middle class was wretchedly unhappy with its burden of seriousness and tedium and worry about its children, who turned into either hippies or casualties in Vietnam.
Today's middle class shouldn't be worried about its children: It should be worried about turning into the middle class of the fifties. That's a reason for anxiety! As people get older they get duller, more scared, more boring, and more frail. Despite its vaunted religiosity, American society is quite pragmatic. The past half century was ruled by four doctors: Dr. Spock, Dr. Seuss, Dr. Ruth, and now Dr. Kevorkian. The first three were Okay, but this last one makes me anxious, too. The middle-aged middle class to which I also belong fears its own evanescence: That's not anxiety, it's common sense. But there is a new ingredient to our generational anxiety that was unknown in Bob Dole's fifties: We contend with the insomniac floodlight of the news media. In the fifties the powerful made only powerful news and only the powerful made news. Now the powerful are under a microscope that reveals their every wart, which makes them just like us, which makes us anxious because we don't want them to be like us, we want them to be better. At the same time, people just like us stand mercilessly revealed on confessional television. There is nowhere to hide and this lack of privacy is anxiety-provoking indeed. You can add to that the rivers of information and the fact that the young and the hungry are better at navigating them, and we can appear quite useless to ourselves. But fear not: right below us are the poor and they are pissed. And above us are the rich and they are bored and greedy. Something's going to give.
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n Luis Buñuel's film
Miss Liberty
, everything we habitually share is turned upside down. People go to the bathroom together but eat privately. Schoolboys giggle over tourist postcards as if they were pornography. For Buñuel that was surrealism. For Americans at the end of the twentieth century, that's just life. Everything that was in the closet is now on TV, and everything that was publicly extolled not long ago is in the closet.
What's a closet? Freud called it the subconscious. It was the place where Victorians banished everything that got in the way of propriety. By the time the Victorians got around to it, it was already crammed with everything proscribed by the Church. Putting away all those matters that got in the way of work and obedience to society had the beneficial effect of building wealth and promoting work. By the time Freud got around to it, the closet was bursting with our banished desires, including sex and murder. By 1914, the closet exploded, giving birth to World War I, the Russian Revolution, the roaring twenties, World War II, Elvis Presley, the exploding sixties, women's liberation, and the gay movement. In between these closet-emptying events, well-meaning men in suits tried to cram the released darkness, prurience, lassitude, and decadent art back into the closet but that proved impossible because the monsters grew up when they got out while the closet stayed
the same size. Or, to put it another way, the repressive apparatus of morality didn't evolve, while the hungry monsters fed and got very fat. What's kept them fat and keeps feeding them is the huge market for them. Capitalism discovered the riches within just as the markets without began shrinking.
Advertising rifles our closets for whatever might be left in them. Legitimizing our desires for the forbidden has now begun to produce a numbing effect. It is thus that the president's penis or, in Freudian terms, the father's phallus, rose into public view. There were few things that were still unthinkable. Daddy's thing was among the last. Now it's on television, and a panicked feeling grows among the marketers.
Do not fear. I am here to announce the good news. The closet is not empty. While it's true that we've taken everything formerly repressed out of it, it's been quietly filling with other furnishings, namely “the angels of our better nature,” as Lincoln called them. Our desires for sublimity, excellence, genius, and moral improvement are now in the closet, furnishing the subconscious with the means to renew us.
The angels ripening in the dark will of course be very different, when they are finally released, from the virtues imagined by post-Victorians and Christian moralists. The literary canon, for instance, during its sojourn in the closet, will have no resemblance to William Bennett's canon. Nor will closet-seasoned family values resemble in the least Jerry Falwell's fondest hopes. Nor will the closet-refreshed ascetic urges have much in common with the sexual ethics promoted by various men's movements. The angels in the closet will burst upon us in the third millennium in forms unimaginable to puritans and unacceptable to zealots.
I don't know what they will look like, but I am certain that they will be paradoxical, like a young person tattooed from head to foot with the poetry of Lao Tzu or verses from the Song of Songs. The virtues of tomorrow, unlike the virtues of yore, will be inspiring shape-shifters whose purpose, in addition to saving us, will be to baffle the certainties and absolutisms of ideologues everywhere.
The reason for this optimism is that the experience of the closet will give rhetoric a rest. The public demons of today are not as mean to the closeted angels as the angels' spokespersons were to them. The prison of the subconscious is a more humane place. There is no longer such an absolute break between what's in the closet and what's on display. There is much traffic back and forth because there is now a new reality, called Virtuality, which is a
bridge that unites the inside of the closet and the outside of television, our private natures and our public images. Virtuality, or VR in techno shorthand, is a purgatory, the in-between place where everything is modeled before being actualized.
Virtuality also means the the end of the respite between historical cycles of war and revolution. For the last two centuries we have had thirty to forty years of rest between explosions: Between the end of the Napoleonic wars to the revolutions of 1848, approximately thirty years; between the American Revolution and the Civil War, a hundred years divided by Indian Wars and various conflicts with Britain, Spain, and France; between the Civil War and World War I, about fifty years; between World War I and World War II about thirty years. It's been thirty years since the end of the Vietnam War. (The Korean conflict was an extension of World War II.) We seem due for another bad decade, but it won't happen. We'll have a virtual explosion, followed by the emergence from the closet of our better natures.
Of course, I may be virtually wrong.
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mnesia has settled like meteorite dust over our ever-expanding republic. In good times, there is no need to remember. Things remembered are usually bad, wars and traumas, public and private. Our appetite now is for distant history, dramatized hopefully in a way that makes us feel good enough to forget the more recent past. There is a scale of forgetting, from the petty to the grand, and it is all in operation now. On the petty end of the scale, take former candidate Bob Dole, for instance, who warned us, like a good Republican, against the national debt. What does he do now? Credit card commercials that urge us to increase debt. It isn't that we demand principles from politicians, it's only that we'd like them to last for at least a month after seeking public office. In the middle of the scale is Whitewater and its equivalents, dragging listlessly through the newspapers and forgotten by all but the people paid to worry them. At the grand end is the case of Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, who claims to have only recently learned of her Jewish roots. Her parents had deliberately misled her and she cultivated amnesia.