COMMENTS: The New American Grandeur

...And in awarding (as if this, too, were an Olympic event) no less than 8,612 medals to those involved in the Grenada campaign, the Pentagon showed it knew what the invasion was truly about...

...A Vietnam Memorial—honoring the dead but not the war—was approved for the Constitution Gardens in Washington...

...For TV audiences that spent a decade watching news footage from Vietnam, it comes as a relief from the real thing, and it has the added pleasure of being directed against an enemy that doesn't fade into rice paddies each evening...

...A sense of authority is what the nation has missed, and it is in this direction rather than toward a new egalitarianism that it has instinctively moved...

...THE NEW GRANDEUR may be described in these terms: Athletic Nationalism • This is something quite different from the emphasis on fitness that has inspired the jogging craze...

...But above all, the New Grandeur means purging the "shame" of defeat in Vietnam and reviving the memory of America in the years between the end of World War II and the death of John Kennedy...

...In the midst of Detroit, where the mirror-glass and concrete walls of Renaissance Center are a barrier to the surrounding slums, the fortress quality of Renaissance Center is its most conspicuous quality...

...The pattern is familiar...

...In open competition they remain our inferiors...

...The Unrepentant Vet • In the crippled vet John Voight plays in Coming Home, we had the new hero of the first post-Vietnam period...

...It offers instead haven from a hostile world, and that is its whole point...

...What they assert is that money and bulk talk...

...There James suggested that the country overcome its vision of itself as weak with a peacetime dedication to goals that required the sacrifice and discipline expected of soldiers in war...

...AFTER DEFEAT IN VIETNAM and years of stagflation, it is hardly surprising that the country should opt for a New Grandeur that puts such an emphasis on the trappings of power...

...For those who want to forget Vietnam, there is the beach-bum detective of Magnum, P.1...

...One might, if one's political leanings were conservative rather than liberal, call the war a tragedy instead of a mistake, but the upshot of both views, especially in the late 1970s, was the same...

...They have been politicians drawn to imperial wars and attracted to the martial values of power and conquest rather than sacrifice and discipline...

...It is deeply woven into our national consciousness and in practice constitutes nothing less than a commitment to a New Grandeur...

...Invade Iran and risk the lives of hostages...

...Audiences chanted, "U.S.A., U.S.A.," like students at a high-school rally...

...In the 1980s the result is a political situation William James described with extraordinary insight three-quarters of a century ago in his essay "The Moral Equivalent of War...

...The overthrow of its pro-Cuban government by a second government we opposed was a dubious excuse for such an undertaking, but in the context of the New Grandeur such considerations were beside the point...

...Tom Selleck), who makes it clear that post-Vietnam America is so filled with opportunities to lead the easy life that any vet with initiative can make a place for himself...

...In an era preoccupied with legitimizing power and affluence, it says one can build without being trapped by urban complexities...

...At Los Angeles, American teams were not simply content to do well...

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...His wisdom consisted in the belief that he was seduced into fighting a war that should never have been fought, and in his crippledness he reminded us that his wisdom had come at terrible cost...

...But in terms of the architectural direction of the New Grandeur, what makes Renaissance Center so important is the overall case it makes for monumentalism...

...Abroad it means ignoring the threat of nuclear war and finding safe occasions to exercise our military might...

...What the $350-million Renaissance Center represents is, however, something more than Detroit's effort to recover from the 1967 riots that saw more than 14 square miles of the city go up in flames...

...The Deserving Rich • For Ray Hicks, the disillusioned Marine of Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers, what is most striking about the America he returns to is how shabby it has become eight years after Vietnam Day...

...television announcers openly rooted for American teams...

...An island with a population equal to Albany's, it had no significant army...

...Man for man" we are still "better" than the rest of the world, they said...

...Hicks's intuitive feelings are not inaccurate...

...With its luxury office space and hotel rooms, the Renaissance Center does not promise to stop crime or house the poor...

...But to the TV audiences that had watched the American army defeated by pajama-clad Vietnamese and American diplomats held hostage by Iranian students, the Olympic victories carried a second and more important message...

...Grenada could not undo the political complexities of Lebanon, but it could repair the frustration of Beirut...

...Athletic nationalism centers on the idea of a once-weak America proving itself physically superior to the rest of the world, especially the Third World, The recent Olympics were proof of how far the country was prepared to carry this kind of nationalism...

...And for those who want to remember Vietnam positively, there is The A Team...

...He made us feel bad about the war, but in the 1980s he has also become the kind of veteran we wish would have the grace to spend the rest of his days in a VA hospital...

...Do much more than mine the harbors of Nicaragua and risk the Vietnamizing of Central America...

...Hollywood, with such films as Coming Home, helped legitimize a new hero, the wounded vet who opposed the war...

...13 The result was an emphasis on winning that showed no sense of restraint...

...But Grenada offered none of these problems...

...Grenada was a safe bet...

...American athletes seemed to feel naked unless they were waving or wearing an American flag...

...Designed by John Portman, the Atlanta-based architect responsible for that city's Peachtree Center, and occupying a 33-acre parcel of river-front land, its five circular towers loom over poverty-ridden Detroit like a gleaming Fort Apache...

...As a recent report from the Congressional Budget Office makes clear, between 1983 and 1985 families earning less than $20,000 a year will lose $20 billion in income, while those earning $80,000 or more will gain $35 billion from budget and tax cuts...

...The difficulty is that, then as now, those best able to advance the idea of a moral equivalent of war have not been progressives...

...And at a time when the terrorist bombing of the Marine base in Beirut had revived memories of America as a helpless giant, it presented itself as the perfect target for invasion...

...A commando unit that served a brief term in prison on trumped-up charges, the integrated A Team shows how powerful a handful of Americans can be when the wraps 15 are taken off and they are allowed to play by the enemy's rules...

...But this mood has not been created by Reagan...

...It represents the heart and soul of the New Grandeur, and what it says is that America can be the powerful America we admire even if we have to endure an extended period of unemployment and deindustrialization...

...As the 1980s reach midpoint, nothing has begun to shape our national life so much as a militant reaction against the feelings of "weakness" that defeat in Vietnam produced...

...Given zoning concessions in exchange for the space they provide the public, the buildings do little to improve a section of the city already dominated by expensive stores...

...Against inferior opposition they often ran up huge scores, and in such sports as swimming, where the American team's stock of world-class swimmers was overwhelming, they took advantage of that too, entering a second string in qualifying relays and a rested first string in finals...

...With enough of both, even in New York a corporation can erect a building that calls attention to itself and through a combination of colonnades, atriums, and indoor shopping malls creates a world all of its own...

...To the smaller countries we defeated, especially in such previously weak American sports as gymnastics, the vaunting of our athletic programs was clear...

...It was visible a century ago in the South where, after Reconstruction ended, the plantation ideal dominated the culture, and it is a pattern evident in our own century in European nations that have lost their empires...

...The time for healing apparently had arrived...

...Ronald Reagan has capitalized more on this change than any figure on the American political scene, and in a speech delivered at West Point in 1981 he summed up the new mood perfectly when he declared, "The era of self-doubt is over...

...We have had to accept limits...

...In an age of constraints, it had found an acceptable imperialism...

...Detroit's strategy is now New York's strategy as well...

...This was the case at the turn of the century with James's 16 peer Theodore Roosevelt, whose vision of the "strenuous life" made the Hunter and the Rough Rider presidential images the nation identified with...

...For the poor and minorities, life in America has gotten worse since the 1960s...

...And in such writings as James Fallows's "What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy...

...In an already overbuilt area, three new buildings— Trump Tower, the IBM Building, and the new AT&T headquarters—loom over 56th and 57th Streets...

...This healing mood is terribly distant now...

...What we need in order to maintain our leadership in the world is the assurance that those at the top of society are guaranteed the financial incentives to continue directing the country...

...the college generation that once had led the antiwar movement acknowledged that in no small measure its protests had come at the expense of a working class unable to escape the draft...

...But what is most important in terms of the 1980s is the political message behind this strategy...

...Acceptable Imperialism • In the post-Vietnam world, the lessons of .Vietnam cannot be totally ignored...

...No one wanted a new war in Asia or a renewal of the draft...

...14 What Grenada provided was a chance to show that if we didn't have to worry about political complications, we could be decisive...

...And this is the case now with Ronald Reagan, who with John Wayne confidence assures us that "America is on the move again...

...Monumentalist Architecture • It is called Renaissance Center, and it certainly lives up to its name...

...Invade Angola and risk getting bogged down in Africa...

...It was not just that we had finally signed a peace treaty with North Vietnam, but that debate over the war had ceased to be divisive...

...and a little further uptown, the new monumentalism is also safely in place...

...Although completed in 1977, Renaissance Center embodies the principles of New Grandeur architecture...

...We've stopped looking at our warts and rediscovered how much there is to love in this blessed land...

...If the cleanup of the Times Square theater district goes as planned, it will be accomplished through a series of massive hotels and office buildings...

...Even the bars he used to hang out in have taken a turn for the worse...

...At home it means a celebration of supply-side economics, an assertion that what counts is not our unemployment or declining industrial base but the prosperity that has recently come to so many sectors of the corporate world...

...The unrepentant vet of the New Grandeur has no such doubts about Vietnam and, as a stock character on prime-time television, he lets us know that we shouldn't either...

...Whether saving innocent Americans from organized crime or rescuing foreign governments from Communist revolutionaries, the A Team demonstrates weekly that Green-Beret tactics can be used to clean up the world...