The Age of Diminished Expectations

...Why not earn some of your credits in the U.K...

...This first is obviously a clone of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple, and the second of Chesterton's Father Brown...

...Should the stretch of stag- nation before eventualperestroikabe a long one, we may as well read our Cassandras, heed their warnings, become informed and incensed, and be that much better prepared for the time when our leaders once again accept or are forced to accept the inevitabil- ity of an age of limits, i-5 largely been forgotten...

...Irritating lapses aside, The Age of Dimi- nished Expectations remains a helpful guide to today's economic conundrums and a necessary tonic for any residual Reagan optimism that appears, as one or more points of light, in the current presidency...

...Economic Policy in the 1990s Paul Krugman M.I.T...

...One school maintains that the profits derive from the increased productivity of a replaced or reordered management after a corporate take-over...

...His book is structured around the tale "Iron John" (or "Iron Hans") recorded by the Brothers Grimm in the last century, but rooted in ancient pre-Christian motifs...

...Not very reassuring after a decade of cowboy swagger...

...And the private eye went over the rainbow...

...We will, as Krugman suggests, be drifting for quite a while...

...The road maps to male maturity contained in ancient stories, rituals, and poetry have up thank-you-very-much by taxpayers now and for many decades into the future...

...James Neafsey I n Iron John: A Book about Men / Robert Bly explores male initia- tion, not as a cultural practice in some distant time or place, but as a pressing need for contemporary American men...

...Following liberal tradition, Krugman REVIEWERS JOHN FEFFER has written on foreign policy issues for a number of journals...

...The other school sug- gests that the profits come from the pockets of workers forced to accept wage cuts or dismissed outright after one of the many industrial restructurings of the decade...

...the newspapers favor graphs and deceptively transparent description...

...JAMES NEAFSEY teaches in the Diaconate Formation Program for the Diocese of Oakland, California...

...We may be in the midst of the age of the establishment triumphant----certainly the present adminis- tration would like us to be--but as long as the inherently dis- ruptive myth of the private eye survives at all, it continues to resist the fate of total domestication...

...Bly makes it clear that the figure of the "wild man" is not a celebration of the bru- tal, macho, irresponsible male...

...7J 3 May 1991:299...

...Should the government aim for greater employment...

...He even offers one or two unorthodox suggestions, for instance point- ing out that a solution to the third-world debt problem could cost roughly one-twen- tieth of the S&L bailout (the trick is to look not at the actual amount of the aggregate debt but at its price on secondary markets...

...TAUGHT MODULES B CREDIT TRANSFER INDIVIDUAL ATTENTION Choose some or aft of the following modules:Principles of Adult Religious Q Religion in Context: Education Religion in Bible Lands O Issues in Theology: Ethical O Specialised Practical Dilemmas in Modern Society Approaches: Teaching the Bible For further information contact: THE REGISTRY, ST...

...298: Commonweal decides that the truth lies somewhere in the middle...

...could no longer perform unilaterally in the economic, political, and military spheres as it had once done during the heyday of the "American century...

...Economist Paul Krugman has brought that analysis into the 1990s, translated into dollars and cents...

...Because in both the detective, the essential, central, and mythic figure of the detective, is subtly denatured...

...His intent is to help men develop a deeper emo- tional capacity for grief, ecstasy, and spirit, to find language and images for their desires...

...But based on the evidence he himself presents in the book, the profits gained through improved productivity could not possibly compare to the profits earned through labor givebacks: the dif- ference is of several orders of magnitude...

...LAWRENCE S. CUNNINGHAM writes the religious booknotes for this journal and teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame...

...There are pros and cons and Krugman presents both sides...

...trade...

...Krugman, by contrast, has pro- duced an economic primer, short and lacon- ic in style, a book that an interested non- expert needs close by to check for the umpteenth time the relationship between a falling dollar and a trade deficit...

...Iron John is more than "a book about men...

...By that time the Tube had displaced the book and the big screen as the cutting edge of national mythmaking, and the detectives it gave us were, on the whole, resonant projections of a kind of national longing for populist nobility...

...American interests," Krugman writes at one point, "would probably best be served by a world of free trade, with the temptations of strategic trade policy kept out of reach by inter- national treaty...

...He is more interested in showing the complexity of problems, the built-in give- and-takes, the economic Gordian knots pulled all the tighter by political consid- erations...

...For ten years now Bly has been addressing such issues in gatherings of men, most in midlife or beyond, who share his sense that something is askew in the soul of the American male...

...Both are vir- tually unwatchable, and both are, I think, highly significant...

...Some may find his approach too eclectic, too wild, to be of any use for seri- ous theology...

...Typically such events include story-telling, poetry, drumming, dancing, and a deep sharing of feeling and personal stories among participants...

...MARY'S COLLEGE, STRAWBERRY HILL, TWlCKENHAM, MIDDX, TWl 4SX, ENGLAND...

...American men have lost connection to their emotional bodies, their distinctive mode of feeling...

...The best aspect of The Age of Diminished Expectations is its accessibility...

...The wild man becomes a mentor to the boy, initiating him into successive stages of manhood...

...His skill as a poet is evident throughout...

...It is not a book aimed at the academic establishment...

...In his commentary on the story, Bly weaves in research from the social sciences, literature, and comparative mythology, as well as personal testimony, anecdotes of contemporary men, and poetry--including his own...

...Reagan's optimism has subsequently proven to be little more than a historic blip...

...The style is direct, free flowing, witty, and passionate...

...Just as in the forties, we had come through a distressing time that we had, somehow, survived (Vietnam, Watergate), and were anxious to consolidate and understand our survival: was there still an America, and did it still make sense...

...He is the author of Beyond Detente: Foreign Policy and U.S...

...TELEPHONE: 011 44 81 892 0051 down...

...Bly looks to the very old images con- tained in myths and fairy tales to ground his new vision...

...The boy, fearful of punishment, flees with Iron John into the forest...

...At many points, Krugman deliberately refrains from providing definitive conclusions...

...Study in this beautiful 18th & 19th Century college setting...

...Along the way, he tackles some popular myths---~e U.S...

...His most recent contribution to Commonweal was "Eastern Europe's Troubled Transition," February 8, 1991...

...Bosley's Fr...

...After a postwar period of unprecedented growth, the American economy settled in the 1970s into what seems to be chronic stagnation...

...These men reinforced his conviction that the images of adult manhood offered by popular culture are worn out, and that a growing number of men are open to new visions of what a man is or could be...

...Though he suspects that the U.S...

...Press, $17.95, 204 pp...

...Dowling is a dotty/cute priest who etc., etc...

...Bly was astounded at the amount of grief and anguish that surfaced at these gatherings...

...Iron John, a wild man covered with hair, is brought up from the depths of a forest pond and imprisoned in a cage in the king's courtyard...

...Instead, his views covertly permeate his analysis, particularly at those times when he attempts to be most even-handed...

...Krugman's The Age of Diminished Expectations derives its impact as much from the clarity of its content as from the stature of its author...

...Branded a dreary pessimist, a Southern nabob of negativism, Carter was incapable of convincing the American pub- lic that the U.S...

...There is a low, resonating string in a man's heart, he writes, "that makes his whole chest tremble when the qualities of the masculine are spoken of in the right way...

...Krugman doesn't offer an array of solu- tions...

...And then came the Reagan/Bush years, and the triumph of the technocrat, the sanctification of corporate greed, and the disengagement of government from the business of life...

...Almost, but not quite...

...Iron John eventually convinces the king's son to steal the key to the cage from under his mother's pillow and release him...

...But without a bit of wildness, "theology," in the words of Lawrence Durrell, "is very old ice cream, very tame sausage...

...Throw in the profits from government kick- backs, favorable tax policy, and outright criminality and the windfall earnings of the 1980s become even more suspect...

...In a chapter on corporate finance, for instance, Krugman discusses two current explanations for the enormous growth in profits made in the field in the 1980s...

...Nor is it a popular self-help book for men...

...Bly's purpose is to set that string vibrating by expressing the richness and complexity of male experience with authenticity and power...

...In preindustrial cultures young men were guided from boyhood to manhood through initiation rituals, stories, and a kind of"cel- lular attunement" to male energies that took place during long hours of living and work- ing in the physical presence of older men...

...Giving credence to the efficiency school allows Krugman to hide behind "normal" economic explanations instead of exam- ining more closely the grossly inequitable aspects of corporate finance that permitted the spending spree of 1980s, a tab picked REAL CtUICHE IRON JOHN: A Book about Men Robert Bly Addison-Wesley, $18.95, 268 pp...

...The awakening of the wild man restores a kin- ship with and care for the wildness in nature...

...The Industrial Revolution, in its need for office and factory workers, disrupted this pattern and separated sons from their fathers...

...Jessica and Dowling, as presented on the Tube, are merely lucky dabblers: amateurs whose real business lies elsewhere, and for whom the possibility of making a difference is subordinate to the business of preserving the order of things...

...The beginning of the 1990s have confn'med the drift of American policy: the savings and loan fiasco, the woefully expensive and questionably ethical war in the Persian Gulf, another recession, a ballooning budTHE AGE OF DIMINISHED EXPECTATIONS U.S...

...Most fathers today have no work to share with their sons and cannot really explain to them what they are doing...

...Krugman's argument is simple...

...Krugman has the laudable ability, rare among economists, to condense pages of complex argumentation into one or two clear para- graphs (an act of rhetorical agility as useful to the layperson as it is probably infuriating to the expert...

...John Feffesget deficit, political stagnation, endemic crime and urban blight, in short a decline in national health facilitated in all respects by hypertrophied military muscle...

...The wunderkind of M.I.T., Krugman is known for his arcane analyses of trade policies and his work with President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisors...

...Then, in 1981, Ronald Reagan unveiled morning in America...

...Paul Kennedy (The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers) and Walter Russell Mead (Mortal Splendor) began the rollback of optimism...

...But Miss Marple and Father Brown were serious--as the detec- tive story tradition is fundamentally serious...

...James Gamer's "Rockford Files," and Tom Selleck's "Magnum EI...

...The wild man encourages a trust of the lower half of the body, the place of sex- uality and contact with the earth...

...The gap between rich and poor has 3May 1991:297 widened, productivity has leveled out, infla- tion continues to infect our economy despite tight monetary policies, and huge deficits have opened up in the current trade accounts and government budget...

...Skillfully monitoring the vital signs, the Cassandras of the latter half of the 1980s had produced several sober, and sobering, reflections on the downward trajectory of American empire...

...FRANK McCONNELL Up the creek without a compass immy Carter's declaration of an "age of limits" at the beginning of his presidential term was a dose of political realism that, for all its empirical valid- ity, did nothing to further his political career...

...all asserted, and most often brilliantly, that we were still a nation of passionate outsiders who could, push come to shove, step in and make a difference...

...Were it simply a matter of throw-away lines such as the one above and were he honest about his ideology like liberal Robert Lekachman or conservative Milton Friedman, Krugman's perspective would be tolerable (or at least assessable...

...Despite all these merits, the book does have substantial blind spots...

...The wild man is rather an image for the instinctive, spontaneous, vigorous energy within men that is capable of fierce resolve and life-giving action...

...Thus, free trade is cham- pioned for national as well as economic reasons (so much for "pure" cost-benefit analyses and policies based exclusively on efficiency and rationality...

...These stages are rep- resented by archetypal figures and situa- tions such as working among the ashes, meeting the sun king, bringing wild flowers to the king's daughter, becoming a warrior, and marrying the royal bride...

...His choice of this image does not represent a reaction to feminism or an attempt to bring back male domination...

...Bly is speaking to men in search of soul...

...the airport bookstand variety is simultaneously digestible and disposable...

...Americans, Krugman argues, have come to treat this hobbled economy as acceptable, even nor- mal...

...trade deficit is related to the rate of domestic savings not high tariffs abroad, bringing down inflation necessarily means accepting recession and higher unemployment, lowering the value of the dollar would have beneficial effects on U.S...

...Of course, Krugman remains true to his profession, preferring an understated style and balanced presentations to irresponsible predictions...

...In Bly's view, the state of the American male is a disaster...

...Should the government drive the dollar ST MARY'S COLLEGE Strawberry Hill II LONDON, ENGLAND College announces a new course MASTER OF ARTS IN RELIGION AND EDUCATION Interested in Studying Religion...

...Mathematical economics, as Robert Heilbroner once point- ed out, combines "rigor" with ';mortis...

...Krugman brings economics, which is after all a social science, from the level ofnumber-crnnching impenetrability down into the public domain...

...Lansbury's Jessica is a dotty mystery writerwho gets involved, willy-nilly and week after week, in real-life crimes against her will...

...Options (Hill & Wang...

...One stars the wonderful Angela BOOKS Lansbury, the other the greatly gifted Tom Bosley...

...The most popular mystery series of the last few years are "Murder, She Wrote" and the "Father Dowling Mysteries...

...will most likely muddle through into the near future, he rates the chances of the bottom dropping out the economy at one in four...

...Theologians and pastoral ministers, for example, might find in it a model of how to retrieve an ancient story and allow it to speak to a wide range of contemporary concerns...

...They are detectives, that is, who almost subvert the strong moral and democratic bias of the detective story itself...

...Yet despite adherence to traditional "value-free" economics and a desire to describe rather than prescribe, he cannot maintain distance: his opinions invariably bleed through...

...He is not, in other words, the type to write a doomsday book...

...Obscurantism had momentarily vanquished realism...

...Morning in America had become morning sickness...

...David Janssen's "Harry O." (who gave his first name to my private eye, if you're interested), Peter Falk's "Columbo" (yeah, he was a cop--but not really, right...