Bye-Bye American Pie

Nick Gillespie from the December 1996 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

Beyond aesthetic predispositions, however, the myth of a ruined America is wrapped up in an emotionally understandable embrace of a soft-focus past, in which things were more orderly, more honorable, more easily understood--if only because they are a known quantity. Hence, Bob Dole can be "the most optimistic man in America" and longingly refer to his impoverished, war- torn youth as a "better" time for the country. This is, of course, the lament of every generation, and it is not without genuine pathos. The old world forever gives birth to a brave new one marked by strange people, strange customs, and strange developments.

We hear this plaintive echo in the line from Springsteen's "Youngstown": "You tell me that the world has changed." Change, every bit as much as time, has become the thief of hope. Interestingly, the fear of change is not precisely fear of shifting economic tides. Fear of change in contemporary America has to do with a larger dread that the future is building into a massive tidal wave--of immigrants, of information, of postindustrial innovation--that threatens to engulf everything we once called America. The flood waters of an ever-changing world are rising, this line of thinking goes, and soon everything we stood for, everything we lived for, will be a soggy ruin, a latter-day Pompei.

During a moment of clarity in Independence Day, Frank Bascombe muses an analogous thought and puts a telling baby boomer spin on it: "The strongest feeling I have now when I pass along these streets and land and drives and ways and places...is that holding the line on the life we promised ourselves in the Sixties is getting hard as hell. We want to feel our community as a fixed, continuous entity...as being anchored into the rock of permanence; but we know it's not, that in fact beneath the surface (or rankly all over the surface) it's anything but. We and it are anchored only to contingency like a bottle on a wave, seeking a quiet eddy. The very effort of maintenance can pull you under."

A similar sense of exhausting effort and waning community pervades David Beers's Blue Sky Dream: A Memoir of America's Fall from Grace, a book more complex and ambivalent than its subtitle suggests. Born in 1957, Beers chronicles his upper-middle-class youth in California's Santa Clara Valley, made possible by his father's corporate career as an engineer at Lockheed Missiles and Space Co. Beers's family was part of what he calls the "blue sky tribe," benefactors of the Cold War buildup that both poured money into California's economy and, as important, gave disparate people a sense of solidarity and common mission. Unlike today, growth and confidence--"a sensation of forward momentum"--were taken for granted.

Beers stresses that this version of the American Dream--complete with cradle-to-grave job security, steady promotion and raises, and fashionable, ever-appreciating tract housing--was not without costs. His father, Hal, a former Navy jet pilot, chafed against playing the role of organization man, often taking his frustration out on his family, whom he verbally and sometimes physically abused; conformity was rewarded over individuality; innovation was viewed with suspicion.

In its best moments, Blue Sky Dream ponders the ironies of winning the Cold War, which, with the subsequent decline in defense spending, pulled the plug on a sizable portion of the economy, not just in California but throughout the country. (A left-liberal who has worked for Mother Jones, Beers also muses about the fact that he owes most of his advantages in life to a system he deems corrupt and immoral.) Replacing the monolithic, bureaucratic military-industrial complex of his childhood is the constantly changing culture of Silicon Valley. There, job tenure is measured in months rather than years, and the only guarantee is that there will be no guarantees-- or, rather, that there will be new and equally turbulent places to move on to. Beers recognizes that mobility does not necessarily mean insecurity. He tells the story of a 35-year-old downsized Lockheed employee who, after an initial period of discombobulation, goes on to find wealth and personal happiness by embracing change, risk, and adaptability.

Indeed, Beers can appreciate the liberating aspects of such a new world. Reflecting on the willingness of his father to share the shortcomings of stolid, corporate life, he writes, "I thank him for the doubt and pain he has revealed to me, layer by layer, not just through his stories but even when I knew it as inchoate anger. I am grateful because all of it showed me why the culture of the corporate bureaucracy was a way of work not only to be avoided but unlikely to thrive forever....If my father had not exposed for me the flaws in its foundation, would I have managed to be so far clear of the blue sky monolith when the toppling began?"

And yet, even as he charts the demise of that stultifying order, he laments the lack of a national American Dream that will regiment individuals into a tightly woven community. He cites 1995 focus-group discussions that "found Americans believing their economy was 'unraveling before their eyes,' believing that no institution--government, corporations, the media--reflected their concerns." Oddly, for Beers, the freedom to pursue one's ends seems to hold a higher price tag than subjugating them to the common good: Such freedom terminates in a war of all against all. Blue Sky Dream's final image has Beers sitting in a flight simulator by which he and three other "co-pilots" fly over a virtual Earth. As he approaches the Golden Gate Bridge, his plane "is suddenly in free fall, the hydraulic rockers beneath me pitching me forward, the pixilated azure of the Pacific Ocean filling more and more of my windscreen....I had not recorded the fact that this day's other fliers, my squadron mates, were not only allowed but invited to accumulate extra points by shooting down one of their own."

Throughout all these stories is a sense of despair and disappointment that the world turned out differently than anticipated. It is probably no coincidence that the tide of declinist stories has risen as the baby boomers cruise into true middle age and a keener appreciation of their lives' successes, failures, and future possibilities. The first boomers turned 50 this year; Springsteen is 47; Ford is 52; Beers speaks of "approaching middle age." As the boomers fully inhabit the seats of cultural production, they are realizing it is no easy task to age--a task made even more difficult by their generation's great emphasis on youth. Contingency, change, and flux, all of which have always been abundant in American life, are easier on the young, easier to take when you have little to lose and much to gain. And paradoxically, as people begin to reap the benefits of the choices they have made and the paths they have pursued, roads not taken often become all the more alluring. The "downsizing" of the American Dream may ultimately stem from the boomers' acknowledgement that their world, like the one before it, will inevitably give way to another.

As important, those uncomfortable with change can little appreciate or acknowledge what Joseph Schumpeter called "creative destruction," the process by which a market-based society "administers existing structures"--how it renews, revamps, and revitalizes itself. Instead they see mostly destruction; change is usually for the worse. Even someone like Beers, who acknowledges positive elements in a mobile economy, seems highly uncomfortable with such a pattern. The news thus delivered has a relatively uncomplicated connection to the world it seeks to describe. Certainly, the human condition is often harsh, difficult, unjust, heartbreaking, desperate. Alas, such is life--a fact properly reflected in the stories we tell, from Oedipus Rex through contemporary tales. But life also includes hope, joy, growth, change, discovery. When our storytellers fail to capture, to document, to explore the creation of new worlds along with destruction of old ones, when they mistake our past for heaven and our present for hell, we are left with a cultural imagination that is severely impoverished and, ironically, bereft of dreams for the future.