A new generation of historians finds new meanings in the past The American . . . seems to bear lightly the sorrowful burden of
human knowledge. In a word, he is young . . .The American has
never yet had to face the trials of Job. —George Santayana, 1920 The Fourth of July speech today is seldom the shapely purple cloud of
bombast that it once was. That style is nearly extinct. The old
eagle-screaming rhapsody, the Everlasting Yea, survives mostly in
wistful, or merely empty, references to Jefferson, in Smithsonian
pageants or in the elegiac drone of a speaker recalling something that
happened a long, long time ago, almost in another country. This year a note of truculence may thrum now and then in the holiday;
prayers for the hostages will sound and some rhetorical menace will be
aimed at ayatullahs and other Iranians. The nation will brighten itself
with parades and fireworks and concerts in the park, and cute local
events like the porcupine race in Council, Idaho. Patriotism and
nostalgia will gust among the picnickers. But on the whole, American
morale may not be up to a convincingly exuberant Fourth. In the years
since Viet Nam, the U.S. has accumulated a few sorrows that, if not
worthy of Job, are at least chastening. A deepening recession is closing automobile plants; unemployment has
gone to 7.8%. Inflation has subverted the traditional apparatus of
American hope and self-improvement: hard work and saving. The nation's
allies have developed the habit of treating it with public
condescension and private contempt. Voters face a choice for President
in November that leaves many of them shaking their heads. An uneasy
suspicion has formed that the U.S. is about to leave the sweeping
interstate highway it has cruised along for more than a generation, and
return to a two-lane blacktop. Or worse. That is a heretical direction
of thought for Americans. For most of the nation's 204 years, pessimism
has been considered un-American —in an official way, at least. Americans have an almost physiological need to think well of themselves,
to be likable and to be liked. More than most people, they seem to have
a passion for self-analysis. If the nation was constructed upon
abstractions, Americans somehow need to be reassured constantly about
who they are, about what they are up to and what they mean in the
scheme of things. They are less certain now about their moral place in
the world; that is a possibly promising readjustment of the national
psychology.
