The Great Divide:

...So many other values have diminished: patriotism, religion, family...

...His vision of a vibrant subterranean coalition of truth-seekers, trade unionists, the poor, and the ignored seems nostalgic at best...

...It is the way you keep score...

...One of the book's heroes is Jean Gump, a grandmother and antiwar activist currently imprisoned for a 1986 Plowshares action...

...As one self-described Wall Street robber baron puts it while outlining the monastic exertions (marriage is frowned upon) expected from the young, sixty-hour-a-week futures trader, "Everybody must adjust to the marketplace...

...But it's no lie...

...It is the cleft that has cut us off,'' he writes,' 'one from the other and, indeed, from our very selves...

...Idle sociological speculation, a kind of latent Eric Sevareidism, clutters the remarks of many of those interviewed...

...Without a sense of social and historical rootedness, Terkel suggests, we are incapable of sustaining a humane vision of the future...

...The divorce rate has tripled...

...The Great Divide purports to document the disorder wrought by Reaganomics and our return to "traditional values...

...Looking for the soul of a great nation, Terkel finds us clasping to our hearts the blasphemous notion of the "self-made" man, the business-school mystique of the autonomous individual...

...The "great divide"-a term borrowed from Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page-is not a pleasant sight or sound...

...But that is another book review...

...Who dares blame America first now...

...A unionized caterer who specializes in a meals-on-wheels program for strikebreakers...

...Television is fucking up the country completely, making us more violent and more druggy...

...Consume, look after number one, pamper yourself...

...All that is really left is money...

...Bouza, as gallant as he is outspoken, is a piece of work...

...A nation of resolute strivers, we never tire of proclaiming our individuality as we all scurry toward the same narrow turnstile...

...Bruce Bendinger, ad man and former political operative for Gerald Ford, doesn't hesitate to speak of blame...

...It's one of the few values that survives...

...Chesterton's first principle of democracy- "that the things common to all men are more important than the things peculiar to any man"-comes to mind...

...Talk about the occasion of sin...

...Values like money...

...Calling the widespread amnesia about the Great Depression, the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam, and other detours on the road to Disneyland a "collective Alzheimer's Disease," he worries that American concerns have become so foreshortened we can't read our own names for the designer labels...

...The Great Divide will depress you, and bore you, and may even wear you out...

...Connie is a member of the Willow Creek Church, a suburban nondenomi-national outfit ministering to the Chicago Bears and the spiritually needy two-BMW family...

...He talks with bankrupt farmers, incipient Nazis, unemployed blue-collar workers, every kind of minister and believer, and with a passel of the uneducated and virtually inarticulate young destined for the economic oblivion of the "service industry...

...Even if one agrees with the implied diagnosis, the presumed cure seems meager, even dull...

...There are few surprises, and the laughs, when they come, are mostly unintended...

...I have to protect the people I love...

...All of Terkel's off-stage coaxing fails to soften the picture...

...An ingenuous and overachieving Indiana CPA who volunteers for combat against the Sandinistas because "I have a responsibility to my mom and my sister and the girls I go out with...

...He detects the stirrings of something bold and common-sensical and redemptive in isolated acts of witness and resistance, where the meek have taken on the "Big Boys...

...The unmistakable contemporary voice- the white noise-of the Chicago disc jockey who speaks with a boisterous inanity of "the ying and yang thing...

...Barbara Brandon, Ayn Rand's hagiog-rapher, gives breathless witness to the solipsism Rand passed off as philosophy...

...With the blind devotion alchemists had for lead, we peddle the base metal of self-interest thinking that by some miracle it will turn into the common good...

...Minneapolis police chief Anthony Bouza, who barks like the New York City cop he once was, makes the summation for the prosecution...

...Rand even railed against the sentimental populism of Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, outraged over the immorality of Jimmy Stewart issuing uncol-lateralized loans...

...A glorious indulgence for some, a grievous insult to others...

...We are screwing the poor people...

...Terkel, whose The Good War won a Pulitzer Prize, has the cauliflowered ear of a Christmas eve confessor and the great good soul of a man who likes his politics partisan, his conversation candid, and his patriotism with dirt under its fingernails...

...Alas, how dreary we often sound...

...BOOKS Blithely self-centered, if not mean-spirited THE GREAT DIVIDE Second Thoughts on the American Dream Studs Terkel Pantheon Books, $18.95...

...The family is disintegrating...

...Still, it's one thing to nod sagely about "economic restructuring," another to hear the voices of those undergoing the painful metamorphosis...

...In an unapologetically anecdotal fashion...

...At seventy-six Terkel has lived through more harrowing political catastrophes than Ronald Reagan's charisma or the ascendancy of the yuppie...

...Personal ambition has run amuck, Terkel 's correspondents report, and the widening chasm between races, between rich and poor, young and old, worker and manager threatens to swallow up the noble American Dream of a common civic life where the equality of men was thought to be not wishful thinking but actually edifying...

...Since I became a Christian, I don't worry about the Bomb," she says...

...The drug culture among the young is growing...

...Or Dan Quayle' s, Connie...

...In The Great Divide: Second Thoughts on the American Dream, he has put together another varied collection of Americans talking about themselves and their neighbors...

...Terkel, who hosts a radio talk show in Chicago when he's not chronicling the class struggle, finds a blithely self-centered, if not mean-spirited country out there...

...And, to be honest, the deification of the oppressed is often cloying...

...Terkel wants to remind us that citizens, not entrepreneurs, build democracies...

...He has earned the right to be optimistic...

...Where Terkel moves among the poor and working class, schools don't teach, streets aren't safe, the rich get richer, and everybody else watches TV...

...Terkel celebrates her civil disobedience as an act of democratic participation, part of a too-easily-forgotten legacy of con7 used to be a gentleman and a scholar, but there was no money in it...

...As George Herbert Bush is wont to say, the people have spoken...

...Who can doubt but that this worship of the peculiar divides us now.ship of the peculiar divides us now...

...There's a major shift in American values, between the haves and the have-nots, the rich and the poor...

...cern for the common good that is as American as the invasion of Grenada...

...If this is news, it is old news...

...Paul Baumann This is the book Jeane Kirk-patrick and her pettish cadre of blame-the-blame-America-firsters have been waiting for...

...Miss Rautbord speaks of President Reagan as the man who "stopped a speeding bullet.'' She throws fundraisers for Ollie North and likes to say "something entertaining'' to brighten the day of the homeless people she steps over in the streets...

...As Terkel acknowledges in a rambling sixteen-page introduction, the America he found this time out is more somber than the one reported on in his earlier books...

...Our restored status as a uniquely blessed people...

...We now speak of an underclass...

...Yet the sovereignty we so piously surrender to the grasping self is the very thing defeating us...

...It' s in God' s hands...

...And what if the fault is not in one's Republican neighbors but in oneself...

...Who dares to question America's ex-ceptionalism...

...Terkel is astonished at how fragile historical memory has become, especially among the young...

...What are they telling us to do...

...That old warhorse Studs Terkel, that's who...

...Connie's sense of assurance is as inviolable as the local zoning laws...

...But what he hopes for-that "what we profess to believe in this drifting decade may be something wholly different from what we really believe''-isn't readily evident in the ninety-odd testimonies gathered here...

...Now that's a fastidious woman...

...Sugar Rautbord, a Chicago socialite- the indispensable Sarah Lawrence graduate-and a housewife named Connie compete in the Miss Congeniality category...

...Indeed, impatience grows reading The Great Divide...

...What she thought of men's rightful superiority to women would bring a tear to Archie Bunker's eye...

...What has the American Dream become...

...There's the "dentist-entrepreneur," with his chain of dental parlors, his bizarre spittoon collection and quirky license plates (CUSPID, etc...

...What this all amounts to is a familiar and discouraging story...