America's nostalgic liberalism:
Carlin, David R. Jr.
"Mrs. Weatherby, I hope you will just talk freely about yourself and how you feel about your life in this house; and also about your neighbors and your family. First, though, I do want to assure...
...In a burst of very satisfying indignation we almost persuade ourselves for a moment that we are living once again in the golden age, when the only serious obstacles to wordwide freedom and civility were Asiatic benightedness and Russian perversity...
...Sure he says he'll cut it off as soon as he can borrow a chain saw...
...Now Cora launched into her own recital...
...The Hialeah postcard was not there...
...I got this one child, my daughter Gloria, married to a fine man and they got two lovely children...
...There was the memorable occasion, for instance, when Alexander, 1 _9 i i i I I I I DAVID R. CARLIN, JR., a frequent contributor, is a Rhode Island state senator...
...I been living here in this house all my life...
...As soon as she plugged in the coffee pot, Cora tore into "Milo' s latest idiot scheme...
...Whether measured in terms of the numbers of victims involved or in terms of the malice of the perpetrators, each of these was a far, far more horrible crime than either the shooting down of the Korean plane or the taking of hostages in Iran...
...Like my husband's rose garden, y'know...
...Hearing old Fletcher thus promoted and disposed of, I glanced at the mantel...
...Then we influenced the world more by our example than we do now by our might...
...Bastidas, a branch of whose maple hangs over her driveway...
...She had emptied the usually overflowing orange plastic ash tray from The Dells, but the table's surface was still covered with a gray mottling of old Marlboros and spilt coffee...
...T HOUGH THERE ARE nO doubt many reasons for this disproportionate reaction, let me call attention to one reason -possibly the most important of them all...
...Just when you think the Russians may be moving ever so gradually toward a more civilized state (their young people wearing jeans and listening to rock 'n' roll, their government officials and factory managers taking kickbacks, their political dissidents being sent to psychiatric hospitals instead of the Gulag) they proceed, like not-quite-Hellenized Macedonians, to shoot down the Korean Air Lines plane, killing 269 persons...
...Think of Argentina and "the disappeared...
...T HE RUSSIANS are to European civilization what the Macedonians were to ancient Greek civilization...
...Though its hour is past, it is well that someone should keep this vision alive, if only as a piece of nostalgia...
...First, though, I do want to assure you of the value of your opinions...
...z...
...Bastidas is an engineer who was born in Ecuador...
...Having discharged the full force of our indignation on crimes which are, so to speak, of a human scale, how can we possibly respond to crimes a hundred, a thousand, or ten thousand times worse...
...Congressman, while the remaining victims, from a number of nations, were all civilians -- women, children, and old folk among them...
...In many ways, of course, our outrage is easy to understand, both in the Iranian case and the Russian...
...In those days America was not yet a superpower...
...When my folks died I stayed here, and I married Fletcher Weatherby, a building contractor...
...we were still something better than that...
...I've called Sanitation and Forestry and the Corporation Counsel's office...
...When my family moved here everybody was Swedish or German, or a few Norwegians like us...
...Think of Cambodia...
...In many respects the Macedonians looked and acted like members of the Greek world...
...And by nineteenth century standards the incidents of the hostages and the Korean airplane were terribly shocking, reminders that the world is not yet a completely civilized place, that despite all our progress there are still some semi-barbarous regimes tragically deficient in humanitarianism and respect for legality...
...Our conscience cannot really grasp the enormity of such crimes...
...Old-fashioned liberal democracy, with its hope for a world in which free and reasonable men would dwell in peace with one another, was arguably the noblest political vision humankind has yet achieved...
...punishing Thebes for resisting him, spared the house in which Pindar had lived while tearing every other building in the city to the ground...
...We realize that senior citizens like y o u r s e l f . . . "' Cora's back stiffened...
...But our deepest nostalgia is for the golden age of liberalism, an era which commenced its career in America in 1776, reached the height of its career during the nineteenth century, and came to a sudden and catastrophic end in August, 1914...
...i i i i i ii i i I I i l l I OUR OLD-FASHIONED REACTION TO FLIGHT 007 America's nostalgic liberalism DAVID R. CARLIN, JR...
...Kids come through the yard and tear everyl I l i i thing out, all the roses...
...The answer is, obviously, that we cannot...
...We have, in short, a nineteenth centtiry political superego...
...something was always just a bit awry...
...She and Milo say all the time, 'Mama, come live with us,' but I say to them, 'You got your life, I got mine.' Even if I can't keep up like I used to...
...As Cora hit this high-minded note, I knew that she needed no help from me...
...Think of Biafra...
...You just have to be careful what you say to them...
...For who knows, perhaps after a few centuries of gigantic horrors, the world may someday once again feel a desire to become civilized...
...Why do we strain at Soviet and Iranian gnats while swallowing great quantities of camels from Cambodia, Argentina, and elsewhere...
...After Auschwitz, after the Gulag, after humanity's living for a generation under the nuclear sword of Damocles, what are a few dozen hostages or an airliner shot down...
...When I could resist my prying impulse no longer, I asked, "Cora, what did you think about the research project...
...I didn't mind talking to her...
...Yet it is the plane and the hostages that provoked us to our huge righteous indignation, while we remained collectively almost indifferent to the other, the far vaster, the far more savage crimes...
...As for genuine twentieth century horrors, the nineteenth century conscience hardly knows how to respond, for they exceed the bounds of the imaginable...
...The next time 1 stopped in, I did notice that the Hialeah clubhouse was once more leaning against the bud vase...
...But can you trust those kind of people...
...What American could fail to be indignant at crimes like this...
...and yet they weren't quite Greek...
...We go numb -so numb in fact that we may be induced to participate in twentieth century crimes ourselves, e.g., the obliteration bombing of cities, including but not limited to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and preparations for the thermonuclear destruction of a great portion of the human race...
...In response to the question, "To whom would you turn for financial advice or assistance," Cora invented "my son-in-law Milo, real good at handling money...
...Think of Uganda, of El Salvador, of the Vietnamese "boat people...
...Cora proceeded smoothly...
...But I get some real good food and I meet some nice people at the nutrition place...
...We were the most conspicuous embodiment of the age's leading social and political ideal, liberal democracy...
...Now he wants to buy into a pistachio nut farm and needs $2,000, from me, who else, and he sure won't get it...
...How often I have heard her say, "Sure I'm an old lady, but don't call me no senior citizen...
...As the interviewer's set speech came to a close, Cora shifted her weight, and a puff of dust rose from a break in the upholstery...
...Commonweal: 114 The Russians, I'm afraid, are hopeless...
...The last thing I heard was a good word for Milo...
...Less fascinating, but still instructive, has been the American reaction to this tragedy...
...Of international crimes in recent years, only the taking of hostages in lran moved Americans to the unanimous and heartfelt indignation they expressed when the Soviets destroyed the Korean plane and its passengers...
...moreover, they weren't just any compatriots, but diplomatic officials, representatives and symbols of the nation...
...You mean that odd-looking person who asked me all those questions...
...There's no harm in it, I guess...
...Only a nineteenth century liberal could react as we have done to the Soviet and Iranian events...
...it is equally difficult to decide whether these deficiencies manifested themselves more plain!y in the perverse downing of the plane or in the equally perverse refusal to repent afterwards...
...This American nostalgia for nineteenth century liberalism doesn't say much for our realism...
...But so what...
...But by twentieth century standards, those incidents are mere trifles...
...In reflecting on this event, it is difficult to decide which is more astonishing, the callousness of the Soviets or their stupidity...
...Cora doesn't have much time for housekeeping, but she had for this occasion cleared away some of the coffee cups, old copies of The Enquirer, and pill bottles, to make room for her questioner's equipment...
...and only cynii:s or exceedingly sharp-eyed readers of the signs, of the times suspected that the world as a whole wasn't going'to follow us in the direction we were heading...
...nor can we find our way back to the world we think we have aright to be living in, a world in which such crimes -- so huge, so monstrous to conceive -- are impossible...
...They'd borrow this or that element of Greek culture (e.g., they'd hire Plato's star pupil to tutor young Alexander), but just when you thought they might be getting the hang of it they'd go ahead and do something indicating they had missed the whole point...
...Henry Luce called the twentieth the "American century," but it was really the nineteenth that deserved that name...
...For seven years now I been a widow...
...We are, as everyone knows, a nostalgic nation, in love with Fonzie and Harry S. Truman among others...
...After all, those were our countrymen held captive in Teheran...
...At that moment it will be helpful if a nation or two still remembers, as a kind of family tradition, the last time such an attempt was made...
...Sometimes Cora calls him, "that wetback...
...I invented-a spaghetti sauce that needed stirring and turned to leave...
...Naturally, things aren't the same no more...
...II, ,, I ~ , ," e, . ~ ' " ,11, """ ~tJ *f 24 February 1984:115...
...And the plane that went down in the Sea of Japan carried to their deaths more than sixty of our fellow-citizens, including a U.S...
...Live and let live, I say...
...But in comparison to other events in recent times, the hostage and airline affairs, dreadful though they may have been, were small change...
...What a relief it is, then, to discover from time to time a good old-fashioned, human-scale, nineteenth century political crime, like the killing of airline passengers or the taking of hostages...
...She also reported a heated exchange with Mr...
...Even if the old timers are dead or moved away, whoever's here now, they got their rights like the rest of us...
Vol. 111 • February 1984 • No. 4
