An End to Alibis

AN END TO ALIBIS?
Douglas Dowd

1. America Fouls Its Dream
Bologna
America! It was not too long ago that the mere mention of our land – whether to others or ourselves-was the cause of at least a slight shiver of delight, or hope or desire; mixed, to be sure, with some degree of amusement, or contempt or fear. Still, America! land of promises, of social, political and economic achievements barely dreamed of elsewhere; land of abundance, mobility, social experiment, democracy, classlessness, freedom, marvelous humor—land, in short, of opportunities for tile realization of man.
Justly so?
Justly so; up to a point. The thrust of our development enabled us to overcome the weight of mediocrities, of corruption, greed, know-nothingness-of the violence to body and spirit meted out (especially but not only) to red and black men. Up to a point, and so it seemed, for those whose voices were heard. Today it seems less so, and not because we hear new voices. Shivers of apprehension noticeably replace shivers of delight.
Fear, disenchantment and bitterness grow daily in and about America, at home and abroad. It is a growth becoming lush. Are there deep roots to this development, or is what we see the result merely of seeds scattered by querulous youngsters on the one hand, beady-eyed fanatics on the other seeds that can find no congenial soil in the American garden?
But first, what is it about America today that even prompts such questions? A lengthening list forms in the mind. It is popular to place the war in Vietnam at its head, to give it the dubious honor of causa causans. But is not Vietnam, though unquestionably a powerful wrecker, more consequence than cause of our condition? Could America! be involved in such filthy deeds?
Especially among liberal critics, our involvement in the war is looked upon as something of an accident, the result of a series of largely well-intentioned miscalculations that have with the push of a handful of misguided men of power caught us up in a process from which there is no easy extrication. Worse, for these same critics, there exists an inverse relationship between rising war expenditures and our ability to cope with serious domestic and international problems in the connected areas of race, poverty, housing, education, dying cities, the needs of the desperate two-thirds of the world.
Other things being equal, who could quarrel with such notions? They cannot be quarreled with, except by looking at other things. In doing so, one finds that the Vietnamese War has become a convenient and comforting, if also an awkward, explanation that locates the source of our troubles closer to our stars than to ourselves.
In what encouraging sense may it be said that the Johnson Administration does not represent the American people? What substantial bloc of American voters, of Congressmen or Senators, opposes the Johnson Administration, except in details, or except to depart even further from the dream? Does a majority of the American people wish an end to the war in Vietnam, brought about by means less dreadful, more constructive, than those currently in use? If the credibility gap were to be closed, for example, would that mean bringing public relations closer to reality, or reality closer to public relations? How many would dare entrust a full and secret vote of the American people to choose between the positions of, say, U Thant, LBJ, or the Hon. Mendel Rivers?
Or, on domestic issues, does the majority honestly will the day when Negroes, Puerto Ricans and Mexican-Americans will exist as equals in America? When the poor will have power and dignity and realistic access to the advantages of, and a voice in shaping, America? Do the American people wish to make that effort of imagination and will required to build our cities into places of creative enjoyment -places even of decency, cleanliness, comfort, safety? As between an educational system designed to enhance the marvelous possibilities of the young (and of society), and the dreary foolishness of the present system at all levels, how do the American people choose?
A credibility gap there is, between the Administration's words and the facts. The more important credibility gap, however, is between the image that Americans like to have of their society, and what Americans work for and do, what their society is. This is not to say that, in terms of what is done, America is worse than other societies, Americans worse than other peoples; our evil consists of believing that we are better than others—and it consists as well of our being able to be so much better than we are, of being able in fact to make our image a reality.
The gap between what Americans are in practice, and what with our ideals and our resources we should be, is as a President Johnson indeed represents us; like us, lie cannot face—perhaps cannot comprehend—the truth. But Johnson's gap is a line scratched in the sand; we the people have allowed the earth to open. It is this gap, this chasm between reality and ideal, that defines the American crisis. It is this gap into which America slides.
Steadily and surely, America has stumbled into unprecedented abundance for the majority, and has created in the process a majority whose heart's desire is for still more abundance, whose shimmering brightness is enough to blind us to any intrusions—seemingly, but not in fact- competitive with growing heaps of things. This year, we shall have a gross national product in excess of $750 billion; on modest assumptions about our future growth rate, we shall pass a $1 trillion gross national product several years before 1984. In 1964, when President Johnson announced the war on poverty, he also announced that there were 30 million poor people in the United States. (Michael Harrington and Leon Keyserling, using a less politic definition of poverty, put the figure at between 40 and 50 million—more people than there are in toto in Mexico, or Italy, or Great Britain or France.) In his Economic Report to Congress in 1966, the President stated that there were 32 million poor people in the United States. The number of poor people had increased by 2 million in a period when our growth rate was between 5 and 6 per cent. Could that have been because of our economic inability to cope with both the war abroad and the war at ]ionic? It does not seem so.
Suppose GNP to rise at 4 per cent per annum. Suppose that, beginning with this year's GNP of between $750 and 5800 billion one were to propose that half of the increase—i.e., about 81.5 billion—be employed to allow the poor to earn incomes through helping to plan and carry out the reconstruction of their housing and educational facilities, and the reconstruction as well of the sprawl and tangle that defeats and strangles us in our daily coming and going. The remainder of the annual increase could, of course, go toward raising the real levels of life for the already well-off Americans, levels already high and rising in any event (the level rises without an increase in income, as the well-off fill out gaps in their possessions). Suppose too, that current estimates for the termination (late of the Vietnamese War are valid; that is, suppose that at some tithe in the next five to ten years another $20 billion-plus will be “released.” Suppose, finally, that it is made clear that a cutback in the war would both make possible and require additional expenditures for social enhancement, if GNP were to continue to grow.
Suppose, in short, that there is no simple-minded economic reason for us to assume that the obstacles to social improvement are to be found in shortages of resources. Who, after all these suppositions have been made, believes that the American people are prepared to support, let alone insist upon, even the bare bones of a modest but meaningful program of social reconstruction? If we would tomorrow, why have we not yesterday, when all this was equally possible?
Was it the personal inadequacies of Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson that held us back, their string of miscalculations on Southeast Asia (that look almost systematic in retrospect) that fouled our dream?
No. Vietnam is not our incubus. It is our fix. We need it not, as some have said, as an outlet for our GNP, or to give vent to imperialistic high spirits. There may indeed be some emerging validity to such notions; but whatever validity there is pales beside the social catharsis provided by the war remembering that a catharsis provides some pain as well as some relief. We are a society in crisis, faced with the need for new and large resolutions. The crisis is not confined within our borders. It is world-wide, and the share of it that we see at home is an almost exact, miniature replica of the larger scene—where poor contend against rich, colored against white, powerless against powerful. Our power to move toward an easing of those crises is immense; Vietnam is our boyish way of both obscuring and deepening the crises at ]ionic and abroad. That we should behave so is not a product of eminent personalities or historical accidents; it is a product of our development as a people.
The process began no later than the American Revolution. Like most revolutions, ours was brought into being by diverse people, some with diverse dims, soiree with a single motivation (whether glory, or profit or land, or power or freedom). Our revolution, as distinct from our war with Britain, neither failed nor succeeded; it opened ways for social change. just which way we would travel, who would decide and how, who would pay and who would gain, were the issues that produced the numerous conflicts of o in- first century as a nation.
Some of these issues are still unresolved; but which way we would travel, and who would decide, using what criteria, were questions that began to receive lard answers before Jackson left office. We were to be a businesslike, and businessman's, society. Our economy was to be ruggedly capitalistic, but flexible enough, for a while, to work well with part of its people enslaved. When it became clear that rugged capitalism meant also industrial capitalism, the power of slaveholders—not over their slaves, but over the destiny of the nation—had to be dissolved. Whether that would be accomplished by Southerners giving up their power or having it taken froth them by force was up to Southerners to decide. The Civil War demonstrated well the ferocity that Americans lave in them and how, like others elsewhere, them will use it ferociously for ignoble purposes. (Unless one assumes, as is only rarely believed today, that the war was fought by the North to end slavery, or by the South to maintain political freedom.)
In the half century or so following the Civil War we developed and hardened the traits and institutions by which we have lived and died ever since. More than merely symbolic among these was our ability to ignore the continuing de facto enslavement of Negroes in America. That period was our prep school we learned then to accustom ourselves to a reality that defied our ideals.
Hypocrisy was not invented in America, nor was industrial capitalism. But both have been carried further by us than by others; we have interwoven their strands to form our character as a people. David M. Potter has ably dubbed us and explained us as the “people of plenty.” The term may be carried further: We are a people who have learned to live with any quality of existence as long as the quantitative balance is high and rising; a people who decry organized power-whether it be political, or economic or social—but who live under concentrated power of all sorts, and look the other way as long as the price is right; a people who profess to love equality, freedom, dignity for themselves and others, but who only curtsy when these are betrayed by or for themselves and others. (Is it not probable that the outcry against “black power” arises not merely from hatred or fear of black people but from a fear, doubtless unconscious, that any serious confrontation with questions of power, freedom and dignity would cause not just the poor but the rest of us to face our own powerlessness, our own constraints, our own indignity in our own work, our own politics, our own daily social relationships?) Like all others, we profess to love peace not the sword; but, like all others, our response to threats—or to the easy promise of territorial gain—has customarily been to rattle or unsheath the sword.
As a people, Americans have of course placed first things first. We have produced a definition of first things that quite conveniently in a business society—ineluctably made the first thing the search for gain, and it's each for himself and God for all. Material self-interest as the highest of the priorities has become so fully absorbed in the American style that it is also unconscious, imperialistic in its reach, redefining all else to suit, or placing all else in a penumbra of qualification: except as second thoughts, except upon ritualistic occasion, except in the once-weekly church of the spirit. Except, perhaps, for the young.
The young are the place to look first in America today, to see what we have become, are becoming; to see, also, what hope there is for realization of the lingering dream. If by the young we mean to include those between (say) 16 and 25, they fall naturally into three groups, defined not by age but by outlook and behavior. There is that very largest of the three groups, a large lump of young men and women who go about cheerfully doing their duty—in school, in office, and farm, and factory, at home and in the armed services. At these tasks they do passably, or very well. There is a smaller, still substantial, group that performs its tasks well, but with misgiving, questions, puzzlement; wondering if something has gone wrong, at times even knowing that it has. They will be found in all the same functions, but also in the Peace Corps, in VISTA, even, some of them, in civil rights and protest groups. In not too many years their tasks will push them into the oblivion of the largest group, or their consciousness and conscience into the last and smallest of the groups.
This last group grows most rapidly, and its growth is most rapid among the very youngest, the teenagers; but its most vocal representatives are also its oldest members. They may do well at school, or may have done so at one time; but they do best at withdrawing, at turning thumbs down—thumbs down on the rhetoric as well as the goods of the affluent society; on the family, on business, on, not least, the government. (Who can dislike one of their buttons: “I am an enemy of the State”?) Since they cannot believe in America, how can they believe in dying, let alone killing, for it?
This is not to say that they lack ideals. It is this frequently raucous (sometimes very silent), often dirty, usually ineffectual, always impious group of “kids” that has taken most seriously the ideals of America—ideals of freedom, brotherhood, honesty, dignity, peace -and found them badly wanting. Growing up in an opulent world, they can find no great urge to make money nor, on reflection, would it make much sense if they did. On the other hand, what they could believe in and work for, they cannot find in reality. These are disappointed lovers, wide-eyed still with the romance of America, angry rather than cynical; not yet smooth. The heartbeat of America for them is a cacophony, a horror of lies.
When one comes to know the members of this last group (not easy, if one is over 25) , and many of the middle bunch, one finds them to be attractive. One cannot but worry about their future. In doing so, however, one is worrying about the future of America. The young face reality as their elders do not. The reality they see is one in which the technology, resources and ideals of America have rendered possible (Now! as they would say) the realization of a dream; there are no more excuses. The basis of their opposition boils down to one word: hypocrisy. They see the reality of war and racism and poverty, and ugliness and conformity and mindless education, acquiesced in and extended by their parents (their parents: who, many of them disapproving of the war, raise no public voice against it, seek at most the ignominious ways of having other youngsters do the dirty work), their teachers and preachers, their intellectual, business and political leaders. They see killing justified in the name of freedom by those who shut their eyes to oppression in their own neighborhoods. They juxtapose the soap commercial and the political commercial, and are aware that the same minds have corrupted themselves to bring both messages to them.

THE YOUNG SEE, if they cannot always explain, a society that—lacking the guts even to face it—pursues the possession of things as though it were a Godhead, or the Holy Grail, were located in the bucket seat of a Thunderbird. They see, in short, a society that has worked so long and passionately for Mammon, it can no longer distinguish between Mammon, God and Caesar. (Is it unimportant that they also see a society almost ludicrously prurient that makes voyeurism into a big business?)
Perhaps the young cannot explain what they see; but they have the ability to attack, or to withdraw. Alone, they are not likely to carry themselves or us to a more reasonable, more honest, decent, basically civilized society. But, as they turn away from what we have created, they can make the rest of us look more closely at what we are, make us wonder why. It was the young—blacks first, and then whites—who did that for us in civil rights, which in turn opened our eyes to the country's widespread poverty. When we failed them there, and failed ourselves, we exposed the American crisis. It was the young who began the opposition to the war in Vietnam, and who largely continue it. The young have done more than their share; if the job of keeping the American flame alive is to be done, it shall be done by the rest of us, or not at all. But if we are to do that job, we have much to learn, and to unlearn.
It has been said that all societies have the defects of their virtues, the weaknesses of their strengths. America's strengths have resided in our long history of hard work, the great emphasis on individual reliance accompanying the process, and the uniquely favorable natural and historical context within which it all took place. Not just the technology, goods, capital, markets and people available to us from the rest of the world eased our development; we were much prompted also by the political and economic ideas of Europe. Perhaps the most noteworthy defect of our growth is that it has been too easy. It was too easy for individuals to become well off, or even rich; too easy for Americans and for America to make it. As we made it, we naturally gave credit to institutions and to individual qualities that were able to work well, or at all, in critical part only because of the favorable context within which they functioned.
We mistook good fortune for a kind of shrewd native genius—a genius, we thought, that enabled us to make capitalism work in a way that nobody else could match. We have been able to find the cause of individual well-being in personal virtue, and of individual suffering in character deficiency. And, of great relevance for our present agony, our perspectives on war are much shaped by our never having suffered military defeat. War is something our side always wins; one consequence of that, as a friend has put it, is that “Americans don't hate war enough.”
There is, of course, more to be said; suffice it to say that out of our history—a history of hellbent money-making without noticeably severe consequences—we have developed a social outlook. It is an almost frivolous outlook that has made us seem charming to others in the past. We have allowed ourselves to believe that the existence of genuinely serious, highly complex and deep-seated social problems is scarcely to be believed in; as a corollary, we act as though problems both arise and can be resolved in the short run, required for the task of even partial social reconstruction who, indeed, have done much to create the problem as it now stands -and nod our heads in solemn sorrow when we hear that the money has gone to waste, that the program peters out. (But we barely murmur when the costs of our military folly rise to ten times that amount for a ruthless witless, suicidal war.)
We spend a few billion dollars over the years, presumably to aid the economic development of poor nations, and recoil in disbelief as conditions continue to deteriorate in the recipient countries (and they are, to boot, ungrateful). We send, at first, some thousands of soldiers, and later some hundreds of thousands, to Vietnam, and puzzle over a quite with appropriately modest policies. Faced with the legacy of centuries of slavery and racism ,we congratulate ourselves on a few pieces of disgracefully limited legislation, and are undisguisedly horrified (or angry; or, some of us, pleased) when the principal product is a rise in bitterness and hostility, and a worsening of the problem. As is our wont, we find the culprit not in our shortcomings but in those who point to our shortcomings. We appropriate a few billions for a war on poverty, allow the program (except in its figureheads) to be run by local politicians, business firms and tired social workers who possess neither the attitudes, the ability nor the morale satisfactory arithmetic of slaughter that somehow fails to turn the trick.
In sum, we find ourselves shocked, disappointed, horrified and puzzled, as we face problems that seem intractable, that defy American-style solutions. The world, we are almost prepared to believe—perhaps, as LBJ once said, because “they weren't reared like us”—is not American. Nor, it seems, is much of America.
It seems, indeed, that we have outrun our luck. We gained strength and power almost effortlessly; in doing so, we left behind the world in which that power was gained, whether at home or abroad. “There is no failure,” a British economist attempting to explain British stagnation once said, “like success.” “Whatever is,” said Veblen, “is wrong.” Both meant to suggest that the techniques employed to climb a ladder are not those needed to keep one well situated at the top. For Americans to accept the need for deliberate change implied by those views would be for them to accept something else: We are not unique.
We could be; indeed, it appears that we shall have to be, to survive as a decent society. History is littered with the wreckage of societies that were the Americas of their day—whether Greek, or Roman, or Florentine or Spanish—societies that took to themselves that arrogance of wealth and power that is now ours. But those societies, it can and must be said, faced neither the challenges nor the possibilities that America faces today. Neither their professed aims nor their economic strength gave them the responsibility or the power that we hold. The turbulence that roils the waters of America comes not because there are new elements walking the earth: poverty, violence, indignity. The turbulence is a product of an underwater volcano that combines need, aspiration and a sense of the possible with the stated aims and obvious capabilities of America to weaken the hold of ancient evils over the conditions of man. It is too late for us to shut up; we must put up or blow up.
When the protest against the war in Vietnam was in its early stages, Hans Morgenthau wrote that he was less fearful of what would happen if America were to lose than if it were to win that war—because of what would become of us while and after we won. In that fear, he was quite justified. But the question remains: How did America allow itself to become involved in the war in the first place? This is not the place to recite the history of our involvement; it is enough to say that it goes back at least fifteen years. But it is not enough to say that Americans didn't know about it; any more than it is enough to say that white Americans didn't know about the condition of Negroes in America until 1954 or 1960. That some Americans knew about both conditions is to say that most Americans who chose to could have known; that we did not choose is more significant than our ignorance.
It is not reaching egregiously far afield here to point to the Good Germans of the twenties, and to their society. That society, it is now conveniently forgotten, was in the late twenties considered to be an entirely marvelous place. Scientists, painters writers, dramatists, architects, engineers, film makers, political scientists, economists—or just plain swingers -flocked to that Germany. It was, between 1925 and 1930, something like a Mecca for the priests and worshipers of the dazzling 20th century—much as America was to become later. Less than a decade later, one needs no reminding, Germany was the cesspool of Western civilization.
America is not Germany; there are many ways in which it is not. But it is important for Good Americans to wonder what the Good Germans were doing in the late twenties. (We know what the Bad Germans were doing.)
Some Good Germans were, as they long had been, conscious of the monster struggling to break through the crust of their civilization. They wrote books, articles, plays, sermons, lectures and political speeches to their fellow citizens, and to the world. Most Good Germans, we may believe, were partaking of the splendors of Germany, and hoping for the best. Many, certainly, were not entirely sure that what was struggling beneath the surface was in fact a monster. It looked and sounded like a monster, but perhaps that was because of the way it had been raised; it could be tamed. Germany, after all, did deserve a place in the sun; Versailles did have to be corrected (peacefully, one hoped); it was, in any event, better not to rouse the ire of the beast by arguing with it.
It must be said, too, that to call a monster by its name even in that splendid Germany was already to run certain risks of seeming to be unpatriotic, of being taken for a Jew or a Communist, of seeming to be vulgar, a troublemaker, of becoming, at least, unpopular. It came to pass that the Good Germans disappeared from, or in, Germany-by emigration imprisonment, silence, death or by becoming, finally, Bad Germans.
The lesson of the Good German, like any lesson from another time and place, can be no more than suggestive; but is it not at least that? A Good American cannot really emigrate. He can, of course, stay silent and hope for the best. He then distinguishes himself from the Bad Americans only by feelings of self-righteousness and superiority, mixed, perhaps, with guilt. Like the Good Germans.
Is there no other way for us, today? There are other ways, but they all require confrontation with oneself, and with one's society.
The first step is to recognize our individual powerlessness, as matters now stand; to recognize that as American citizens we exercise few if any significant choices about the condition of our lives, or the lives of others for whom we profess to be concerned. We must confront the location and the uses of power if we. are to understand and free ourselves from our powerlessness, and that entails discarding the easy myths about our economy, our politics, our social style—the In myths that comfort us in our powerlessness. We mist relearn to value integrity above appearances, to care about the condition of our self more than the condition of our car-and that means, because of the idealistic way in which we have been raised, to care a great deal about the condition of man in general, and to do so seriously. In turn, that means taking the plight of others as our own plight; among other things, it means ceasing to feel guilty and to feel instead a sense of responsibility. Guilt leads to feckless charity; responsibility ordinarily leads to involvement, and the latter to heightened awareness. We must care considerably more, it should be said, that some people are called “nigger” than that we are called “good guy,” even if that means being unpleasant to some of those we call our friends. We must relearn, as much as we can, our nation's history, to understand what we were and are from the point of view of our victims.
All this sounds too much, yet it is far too little. What the individual does within himself will build his character, but it will not change his society much; and our society requires much change. We must seek new ways to organize, develop new programs around which to organize, and work with and induce others to do likewise. We must not allow ourselves to be debilitated by the widespread preconception that for something to be worth doing in politics it must clearly promise success (or profit, or a merit badge). “Success” can be had by working within the respectable political organizations, but it is the success of reworking the status quo. Those organizations, whether national or local, have for many years said all the right things. The best possible light in which to cast their failure, the failure of America, is to recognize that at their very best the major political groups work for limited reforms in a limited way, and that limited reforms are doomed to fail both because they are limited and because they are reforms. As reforms they are resisted; and because they are limited they are resisted successfully. They are absorbed by the system.
That system, political, economic and social, is named industrial capitalism. Let us assume that it worked wonders in the past. But the wonders it worked were wonders of production, which rose so rapidly and spread so widely that it did in fact seem that political and social problems would disappear soon. The productive wonders of our society have recently been so great as to put to shame our economic accomplishments of the past. Are there careful students of contemporary American society who can still believe that our political and social problems are susceptible to improvement by sheer economic success?
It should be clear, rather, that the social priorities of industrial capitalism have now become dangerous to the possibilities of civilization. To achieve high GNPs in our economy is a relatively simple task; to achieve social balance and decency under the best of conditions would be immensely difficult. We can no longer afford to be mesmerized by a social philosophy that leaves to grace and good luck what only creative and determined hard work might achieve. America's problems, at home and abroad, are deepening and broadening. They are rooted to the economic, political and social structure and outlooks of our society-indeed of Western civilization. It is not enough to hope for the best; to wait for Bobby.
“We must,” as Lincoln declared, “disenthrall ourselves.” We must set forth a new declaration of independence—to be free from hypocrisy and sham and acquiescence in a foul world, free to work for a new version of first things, a definition that puts man and his condition at the center of our thoughts and of our deeds. If we do so, as we do so, we shall find that young and old, black and white, poor and not so poor, are possessed of marvelous energies and constructive ideas, that we all have a morale and a character we have not dared to ponder—that America! can once more make ourselves, and much of the world, shiver with delight.

Aug 8, 2000