Clear itself - observations of American's social and political demise - Column

National Review, August 15, 1994 by Florence King

Increasingly, letters to the editor and calls to talk radio are kicking off with: "If this were a sane country . . ." It isn't, of course. People deprived of rational thought always go bonkers.

Our deprivation continues apace. Recently in an electronics store at the mall, I was one of a crowd of shoppers watching a bank of television sets all tuned to the same channel. The news came on and a man-in-the-street interview began. Suddenly, eerily, there were two dozen images of the same earnest citizen saying in unison with himself: "We can't balance the budget on the back of the Titanic."

I broke up, but no one else reacted except to give me a dirty look. Our sense of the absurd, that great ballast against neuroticism, is gone. Our civic life is so riddled with banalities and cliches that their precise arrangement no longer matters; we can scoop them up and dump them together like the contents of a spilled handbag. By now "the backs of the poor" sounds almost the same as "the deck chairs on the Titanic," so - hey! - it's close enough.

The logical fallacy of petitio principii has become our way of life. Confronted by ravines of contradiction, we step over them like so many puddles without stopping to ask the obvious questions. If, as countless elegies to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis claimed, "she taught us how to behave with taste," how come it didn't take? If "she taught us how to grieve with dignity," why is everyone crying on television?

If genetics is the hot new science with all the answers, why is it racist/classist/elitist to say, "The apple never falls far from the tree"? If a role model disgraces himself, why do we absolve him because we can't afford to lose him as a role model? If "mental illness is no longer a stigma," why do politicians think they can destroy their rivals by digging up proof that they once saw a psychiatrist?

It's getting harder and harder to follow an American discussion. We used to chide worryworts with: "Suppose one thing, suppose another, suppose a jackass was your brother?" Now, however, supposition is the handmaiden of political correctness. I often run into this because of my penchant for voicing unthinkable opinions. "I'm sick of women," I will say, and my opponent retorts, "Suppose you substituted blacks for women in that sentence?" It goes on. "Bugger the spotted owls." Suppose you substituted Jews for owls? "Brand criminals on the forehead." Suppose you substituted gays for criminals? This is not sensitivity but rhetorical tumult.

It's no wonder that the stores are filled with clear cola, clear beer, clear dishwashing liquid, clear deodorant. The clear craze reminds us that there once was a time when ideas were "as clear as a bell," good people were "as transparent as glass," and our heads were on so straight that we could "see right through" a charlatan. Now the only thing we have that's clear is clear itself, so take a sip or a squirt and forget our mental chaos.

America is starting to look a lot like the Middle Ages, when morbid fears and nervous prostration took up a large chunk of everyone's time. Where medieval man saw stigmata we see skin cancer. They were invaded by incubi, we are invaded by aliens. They carved gargoyles with chilling reality, we computerize dinosaurs with Virtual Reality. They dreaded plague, we dread the faceeating virus. They had food tasters, we have the Food and Drug Administration. They imagined their wells were poisoned, we imagine everything is poisoned.

Medieval eclipses were underexplained and ours are overexplained, but the resultant mood of foreboding is the same. And while our commitment to diversity obviates the hunchbacked gypsies that reduced Cob and Perkin to jelly, the lawsuits growing out of the Americans with Disabilities Act produce just as many nightmares.

Then there is leadership. We assume that medieval man was emotionally secure despite the uncertainties of daily life because he had godlike rulers called the Lionheart, the Bold, and the Hammer. They, however, were the exceptions. More often than not, Cob and Perkin could trace their worst seizures to the very foot of the throne, for the most unavoidable source of medieval mental strain was, by charming coincidence, the same as ours: the Pious, the Fat, and the Mad.

Bill Clinton entered office to hosannas of "He speaks in complete sentences!" He doesn't now. One moment he is red with rage, pounding the podium and yelling about stolen bathrobes and jumping into tanks. The next he is glassily detached and blankly ethereal, his voice taking on the meandering gauziness of a Debussy tone poem as he calls the dollar's drop "puzzling" and sighs over an economy that is performing "in a funny way."

I would not be surprised if he became the first sitting President to crack up. What better way to acquire the national constituency he so desperately wants? All he has to do is pull his old trick of leading where everybody else is already going.