TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/111290/1112640.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.2 KB | 127 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 118

In the Land of Barry and the Pilots


By Lance Morrow


    Two patients lie in the emergency room, beset by mysterious
pains. When the doctor arrives, one patient asks, "What's wrong
with me?" The other patient, who is an addict, pleads only, "Can
you give me something for the pain?" The two questions come from
different universes.

    The U.S. has got into the habit of responding to its crises
by lurching into emergency rooms and pleading for the painkiller
first. Some important part of the American mind has gone over
into a territory of denial and evasion.

    Once the avoidance begins to work, the patient cares less
about the diagnosis. Fear loses its power to instruct. Urgency
vanishes before magic. The country glides into a toxic
subjectivity. The eyes glaze a little, and clouds close over the
glimpse of death. The problem will vanish, the earth will get
well. The mind billows off to locate better memories, if it can
(old glories, myths of its own innocence, old muscles, resources
long since squandered, wars won when the nation was young and
saved the world, when its virtue shone and sped by on tail
fins). Americans con themselves with nostalgias. Was it during
the 1980s under Ronald Reagan, the child of an alcoholic, that
the addiction to this dreaming got out of hand?

    But the pain-killer wears off, the patient wakes. It is not
morning in America anymore but a somewhat frayed and bloodshot
season. American politics (shortsighted, vicious, stupid)
plunges on. The government cannot pay its bills and goes on
putting up the great-grandchildren as collateral. Congress and
the President perform a dance of breathtaking fecklessness over
the federal budget.

    This is the shape-shifting landscape of addict and
alcoholic. The two terms mean in essence the same thing: a
powerless dependence upon one drug or another, whether the
chemical is legal or illegal. Here boundaries blur and melt.
"Responsible" adults -- fathers, mothers, bankers, Senators,
solid citizens -- become dangerous aliens. Their cars fly across
the median in the middle of the night. The high began as a
creamy indulgence and ends as a squalid necessity, a fix. The
soul begins to die. It passes over into realms of the surreal
and savage, into moral blackout and passivity.

    The rot in private minds eats away at public responsibility.
Judges in separate courtrooms the other day pronounced sentence
on Marion Barry, the mayor of Washington (six months for
possession of cocaine, the drug that is tearing his city apart)
and on three Northwest Airlines pilots who, while drunk one
morning last spring, flew a Boeing 727 with 91 passengers aboard
from Fargo, N. Dak., to Minneapolis. Mayor Barry, still running
the addict's street con, portrayed himself as the victim of
racial prejudice and, worse, as a man who has recovered from his
problem and mended his ways.

    The mentality of addiction, of alcoholism, prevails in zones
of American life even when no drugs are involved. Americans are
addicted to television, a true enslavement, a dreary mania. When
diversion is all, real life vanishes. Americans are addicted to
the consumption of energy, to profligate plastics and
convenience power in all its fuming, humming expressions --
cars, motorboats, air conditioners, home appliances. They are
addicted to credit and debt, to mobility, to high speed. The
American addictions tend to have this in common: a hope of
painlessness.

    But to live painlessly is to live powerlessly as well.
Addictions, chemical and otherwise, rob people of their
abilities. The attention grows dull and scattershot. Curiosity
dims. A motif of escape prevails -- not adventurous escape, but
a fade into drifting blankness or, conversely, into the sort of
agitated irrelevance that rackets around, say, in political
campaigns whose biggest issue is flag burning.

    A people does not have to be literally drunk or drugged to
be self-deluding, grandiose, self-destructive, improvident and
allergic to reality. A perverse style takes up residence in the
mind, a sort of civic dybbuk. Things go out of control (the
mayor; the captain in the cockpit; the national debt; the
savings and loans, once prim as small-town librarians, that went
as crazy as the gaudiest binger).

    Every society has its obsessive traits. To name them is to
trivialize them, of course, to neutralize folly in cliche.
Germans are addicted to order and scatology, the French to an
empty elegance of language, the Italians to cynicism, the Irish
to language and self-pity, the Slavs to romantic depression.

    Fundamentalist Islam, addicted to its ruthless clarity under
God, condemns the Great Satan of the West, with its vices, its
drugs and pornography, its demolished families and disastrous
morals. Perhaps there is at work in the world some law of
compensation enforcing the principle that greater material
blessings, as in the West, bring on commensurate miseries
(cirrhosis and gout and custody fights and homelessness).

    In his diaries Jean Cocteau wrote, "Stupidity is always
amazing, no matter how used to it you become." Addictions are
usually amazing as well, and as mysterious as stupidity. The
obsessive persists in the folly over and over again, always
believing that this time the result will be different. In some
sinister way, ignorance is becoming an American addiction --
part of a quest for painless life. Americans have come to shoot
ignorance like dope. Ignorance is, after all, one of the most
powerful anesthetics. Obliviousness pulses now with a willful,
aggressive glow -- a sort of active impatience, a passion to
escape knowing.

    Why this American addiction to the painless? The idea of the
nation's Manifest Destiny, of its ascendant virtue and
inevitable success, was driven in the past by the professed
ethic of hard work and sacrifice. But somewhere the hardworking
part of the formula got lost.

    Did the American Dream all along mean nothing more than the
quest for painlessness? It is tragic if the dream has become a
delusion, a mirage that, as the doctor would say, is part of the
sickness.