n514  2353  12 Jun 80
 
BC-ENERGY-06-13
     Context: a commentary on current affairs
     By Peter A. Jay
     (c) 1980, The Baltimore Sun (Field News Service)
    BALTIMORE-The first Friday the 13th of the new decade is as good a
time as any to consider some of the things that have gone wrong
lately, and to wonder why. Something more must be going on than plain
bad luck.
    The feeling grows, all the polls show, that the United States as
most of us used to know it is falling apart. Shoddiness is now
pervasive-in education, in the arts, in government, in our economic
life, even in our technology. (Low technology as well as high; not
only do our helicopters malfunction, but we can't even make decent
baseball gloves any more. The best ones today come from Japan, where
they are made from American leather.)
    From aircraft carriers to dishwashers, our machines no longer work
very well, and when they break there's no one to fix them. Our
children can't read or do arithmetic, but who cares? They get their
culture from television and carry pocket calculators. We graduate
them anyway and send them off to work, often as not as teachers.
    It seems as though the great historic energy that once characterized
our country has vanished. But that can't be; human energy, like other
kinds, is a constant. It can change form or direction, but it can't
be destroyed. So where has the American energy gone, in the 1980s
when we need it so badly?
    Tom Bethell, in an essay in the current Harper's, suggests that over
the last decade it has been diverted increasingly to politics, at
great cost to the nation's economic and intellectual vigor. He dates
this development from the beginning of our reconciliation, whether
actual or only perceived, with the Soviet Union.
    The argument is persuasive. Certainly the presence of a common
foreign threat forces a nation to use its energies in ways that are
likely to seem boring and superfluous once the threat is removed. But
why politics? Why, once we determined that Uncle Leonid and the rest
were only eccentric teddy bears, didn't a thousand flowers bloom in
every field of endeavor from music to medical research? Why didn't we
cure cancer, master nuclear fusion, colonize the moon, restore the
environment and produce one or two great writers?
    Bethell, an Englishman, says this is because American government has
been growing progressively weaker, thus encouraging a furious kind of
politics in which everything always seems up for grabs and the
participants swirl like feeding piranhas, drawing all of society with
them.
    (In England, he notes, where government is stronger and politics
much duller, human energies tend to flow into such things as
literature and horticulture. People keep formal gardens and write
witty letters to the Times in Latin instead of going to party
caucuses or becoming passionate about lettuce boycotts or the Panama
Canal.)
    Whatever the cause, it does seem clear that the decline of so many
American institutions coincides exactly with the great politicization
of American society. Politics, meaning not just government but the
whole spectrum of public affairs, has become our greatest growth
industry. It siphons talent and energy from everywhere.
    Bright young people who don't go into politics directly head for the
peripheral fields, including the media and the law. Some of them
become newspaper reporters or assistant United States attorneys, and
are thereby enabled to chase corporate criminals and put their
idealism into practice, pulling down good salaries and
benefit-packages at the same time.
    Others may work at less glamorous jobs and moonlight at
politics-leading rent-control strikes, picketing power plants,
writing tracts urging various forms of liberation for various
oppressed minorities.
    This is the sort of energy that used to (and in other societies
perhaps still does) produce inventions, works of art, scientific
breakthroughs, and huge personal fortunes. Currently we are wasting
it yelping at one another. (Oddly, even politics suffers when
everything is politicized, for then it no longer stands for anything
but itself, and becomes tedious and shrill.)
    The most logical solutions for this state of affairs are rather
grim. They include the rise of a new authoritarianism at home or a
genuine and unmistakeably serious threat from abroad. One would
curtail the energies now going into political expression and force
them to go elsewhere; the other would mobilize them for the national
defense.
    It's also possible, of course, that this current phase of
ineffectual narcissism will pass by itself, and that the country will
find more useful outlets for its energies through democratic and
rationally determined means. But on this Friday the 13th, at least,
the prospects don't look bright.
    ENDIT JAY
    
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