Social Retreat and the Tumler

...Try heckling a TV set: it's small satisfaction...

...You no longer had to be weighed down by conscience...

...Some called it realism...

...for blacks, 32 percent...

...Then it was as if Ed Koch looked into the mirror of New York and turned pale...

...These two developments showed that the city could still be a place of cultural vitality...

...But clearly the state of the city's political life ought to dismay even conservatives, at least those who genuinely care about democratic politics as a process of activity rather than a mere ritualistic vote every few years...

...and as both cause and reflex of the above, the near-collapse of liberalism, as both political force and voice of protest...

...What made New York a place one loved—its diversities, its unconventionalities —is being swept away by the forces of money, the developers and foreign investors, the corporations with their sleek facades...

...We all expected some trickle-down effect," Jones told the New York Times, "and it's not working...

...The city, we were told, was in bad financial shape and so belts had to be tightened (whose belts...

...Perhaps things will improve...

...He became rather cunning in his ability to insinuate unsavory messages without using unsavory words...

...Not yet visible, impulses of renewal may be gathering...

...Entirely gone is the street meeting, the soapbox oratory favored by left-wing groups but also practiced by Democrats and even Republicans...

...He was not a villain and he was not a reactionary...

...Perhaps it's the feeling of the Reagan and Koch years that "nothing can be done" that led to such passivity...

...He now spoke out forcefully, describing the incident as a "lynching...

...This of course is an impression, and impressions can be overstated...

...In fact it was good, it was American, to revel in your indifference to the plight of the weak and the losers...

...Once begun, such adaptation has a rhythm of its own...

...Maybe, I tell myself, you feel that way because you're getting older and old people are notoriously cranky...

...The days of Reagan and Koch are coming to an end, and a new "American newness" may be waiting to be born...

...I hate the fast-money greediness that's taken over Manhattan...

...The city's elected officials, according to Jones, "seem to have given up on the notion that they can do very much" to help the poor...

...Social guilt is not the most helpful of sentiments, but if there is reason for guilt, then better that it should be visible than not...

...I don't see anybody charging down to Washington, and that starts to make it questionable how serious they are...

...Can one say as much for our literary life...

...I grow sad when the Thalia movie house—where I first saw Grand Illusion— is closed down because the developers are closing in...

...New York becomes harder and harder to live in...

...Serious, devoted, and good-spirited writers continue to live and work in New York...

...Again, I don't want to romanticize...

...I doubt it...

...it has become a no-party town, with the barest participation in primaries and little more in elections...

...Once he spoke, people could unbutton their petty contempts...

...Reaganism's triumph was registered most vividly in ideological atmosphere and social FALL • 1987 . 407 FROM A NEW YORK JOURNAL tone...

...He had a gift for touching the half-hidden sentiments of lower-middle-class whites in Queens and Brooklyn who had come to fear and despise blacks...

...Many of the formal meetings held by political parties were occasions for bull and hoopla, but people like Franklin Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson—to say nothing of Norman Thomas—did now and then say something significant...

...Gradually showing that streak of skepticism which, like a gray underside, had run parallel to the idealism of the immigrant Jews, he came to enjoy the violation he was staging of his earlier self...

...But it can't be bad character alone that's responsible for my alienation from a city where I've spent most of my life and about which I used to say that a day away was a day lost...

...If the developers tighten their grip on Manhattan, driving out small storekeepers and booksellers and offbeat movie houses, and the city, dispensing tax breaks and helpful indifference, acquiesces with at best a weary version of the "drip-down" argument—why that's the way things are, the way they've always been...

...Gone, or almost gone, is the public meeting that required only the cost of hiring a hall and printing leaflets...

...David Jones, the society's general director, now believes that the number of poor New Yorkers may approach two million by the end of the decade—despite an economic boom that has brought the city's unemployment rate to its lowest point since the 1970s...

...He was to Reaganism as LaGuardia had been to Roosevelt's New Deal—the municipal broker for the dominant social force in the country...

...the glitz of midtown contrasted with the devastation of large sweeps of Brooklyn and the Bronx—a few of the signs...

...What is it then...

...You no longer had to feel "bad" or "guilty" about the blacks and the poor, you no longer had to agonize about Vietnam As a contribution of far-right ideologues, there began also to appear a peculiar kind of social nastiness, a pseudoaristocratic Ivy League disdain for the plebes...

...410 • DISSENT FROM A NEW YORK JOURNAL during the war, the many European artists who came to New York as exiles...

...What have I become...

...But there is another reading of what has been happening in New York...

...These were local manifestations of a national political trend, climaxed by the victory of Reaganism, the most explicit effort we have yet seen to hobble the welfare state...

...He hated the hooliganism and the killing...

...The old Partisan Review group broke down into a number of bitterly antagonistic cliques, often assailing one another...

...I share the anxieties of other New Yorkers about violence...

...The Culture of the City There are good things, also...

...Statistics apart, the signs of social and economic polarization seem more visible, more gross than in earlier years...

...The abstract expressionists owed a great deal to earlier artistic groups, first the school of Paris and then, "While New York remains a city of gold for those at the top of the economic ladder, it has become a city of despair for many elderly, for the homeless, for women and children barely subsisting on public welfare...

...The tumler had wanted to lull and divert, not arouse anyone—certainly not see anyone hurt...

...I=1 FALL • 1987 411 412 • DISSENT...

...I think they've given up even before they've made the fight...

...Low rationales for Koch, often provided by Koch himself, carried a sharp message: enough chatter about reforms, enough weeping over the blacks, listen instead to the wisdom of Queens streets and make deals with Stanley Friedman and Donald Manes...

...You can find reports in the papers about the poor or the difficulties of working-class families trying to scrape by...

...In New York, through the chatter of the mayor, it was "translated" into an abandonment, first embarrassed and then defiant, of social feeling...

...the withdrawal of many blacks to their own areas, partly as a nursing of wounds incurred during the black-nationalist phase of the late 1960s, but mainly as a sign of disappointment with the failure of the liberal promise (Kennedy, Johnson, Lindsay) to deliver...

...He had been a mainstream liberal who had gone south to join the protests against Jim Crow...

...I rage against the snarls of traffic in a Manhattan where the Koch administration encouraged a wildly excessive concentration of luxury towers but did nothing to save the subway system...

...The mood of the city seemed to grow sullen, as if in contempt of earlier feelings and visions...

...None of this was initiated by Koch, and much of it he could not have imitated even if he had wanted to...

...if there really wasn't much you could do about municipal problems in a moment of social retreat (and who can doubt that if there had been a liberal president Koch would have been glad to adapt to him...

...But the profound changes brought about by television in our political life remain, and it would be foolish to suggest that anyone, left or elsewhere, quite knows how to cope with them...

...In the cultural life of New York during the decades since the Second World War, there were two major outbursts of creative talent—the first in art, with the abstract expressionists of the 1950s, and the second in dance, particularly through the genius of Balanchine...

...the collapse of the New York left, never strong enough to make policy but once a significant prod for liberal coalitions...

...There are important ways in which life in New York has improved over the last several decades, but in one crucial respect, especially to be noted at a time when the Constitution is being celebrated, I see regression...

...A mere memory is the full-length (say 30-to-40-minute) speech that major candidates felt obliged to make...

...The old cry of American rectitude—it's wrong, it's unfair—hardly provides a sufficient analysis of society in the age of the multinationals, but now, when that voice sounds dimly and infrequently, one realizes how much it can be missed...

...But now he was the mayor...

...Nor was Koch lacking in gratitude: he nominated the Post for a Pulitzer Prize in 1981...

...A new study commissioned by the society has found that the situation has become even worse...

...One rarely hears any longer expressions of social dismay or anger or even guilt...

...while major concessions were to be made to the real estate developers in Manhattan...

...When I encountered him during the early 1960s as a neighbor in an apartment building, he seemed a quiet, somewhat withdrawn chap...

...Thirty-eight percent of the city's children were poor...

...if you had to deal with Reagan's gang and even with a picklehead like Senator D'Amato —then Koch would not only play the role, he would play it to the hilt...

...The beat writers brought something new to the culture of the city—you had to engage with them whether you liked them or not—but only one of them, Allen Ginsberg, has remained as a significant figure...

...There were also sophisticated versions of this message: life is unfair and what can you do about it, meanwhile it's better to have a rough sort of social peace, graced by Koch's vaudeville, than to continue with the tensions and irruptions of earlier years...

...Those sleek, dark-curtained limos driving through streets in which thousands of people are homeless on winter nights...

...But what has been lacking now for some years is a fresh surge of energy, a new direction or a new idea, a shared and irresistible impulse that could give writers the feeling that they are part of a "movement" or "trend" that might, if only slightly, reinvigorate American culture...

...If people sometimes talked nonsense, at least they talked directly, face to face...

...This was the conclusion of a 1984 study commissioned by the Community Service Society, a New York City social welfare organization...

...Nor was he stupid...

...and whatever their flaws, such meetings signified a degree of participation and interest that TV simply cannot elicit...

...They struggle with impossible rents...

...As long as he was alive and working, that seemed an important reason to stay in the city...

...From playing along with this new social mood, Koch after a time began to play it...

...Did he ask himself: What has happened to me...

...And with these changes, politics becomes increasingly the province of the rich, for only they can afford to buy, or finance, "time" on the tube...

...Quick to sense the change, Koch attached himself to it...

...What have replaced all these are the slick 30-second TV ad, the vacuous one-sentence "statement" for the evening news, and "debates" in which candidates are given two minutes to respond to questions that (assuming they knew the answers) ought to take twenty minutes to answer...

...But what seems to have all but vanished from the discourse of the city, perhaps even its consciousness, is the stress liberals and radicals used to place on the outrage, the violation of moral norms and democratic values that the extremes of wealth and poverty represent...

...Back in the 1930s, when there was still a Socialist party, we would hold, before election day, meetings of a few thousand people in Hunts Point Palace in the Bronx, where people waited patiently for Norman Thomas to arrive while lesser comrades talked or mumbled...

...Attending a public meeting at least meant that you had to leave the house and go to a hall...

...We live, as Dickens once wrote, with "a loose belief that if the world go wrong, it was, in some offhand manner, never meant to go right...

...We have been witnessing • the gradual disintegration of the New Deal tradition, once vibrant in the city, but over the years suffering the failures of its success and then an inability to cope with such barely definable problems as stagflation, the black lumpen proletariat, and the drawing apart of the city's ethnic communities into suspicion, fear, and contempt...

...A democratic society must rest on the persuasion that politics is essential to the life of its citizens, that through politics they express their interests and values, and that it is finally through an unencumbered participation that citizenship becomes a reality...

...About the Rich and the Poor There is statistical evidence that the contrast between wealth and poverty in New York has recently grown sharper...

...If the mood was indigo...

...Koch's "comic" style embodied the street wisdom that you can't fight City Hall, a notion especially convenient when you happen to be running City Hall...

...For Hispanic New Yorkers, the poverty rate was 43 percent...

...Such a persuasion seems more in question today, as one looks at the life of the city, than a few decades ago...

...What is not overstated, I'm convinced, is that the shared perception regarding extreme inequities of wealth and poverty—the perception shared among both "ordinary people" and cultivated elites—has changed...

...The Koch who announced that "blacks [are] basically anti-Semitic," who described Congressman Ron Dellums as a "Watusi," and who (his finger to the wind) changed his condemnation of Bernhard Goetz's subway shootout to a statement that a grand jury's decision not to indict Goetz for murder was "right" —this Koch knew something about the uses of popular prejudice...

...For several years a gray, uneasy social peace settled over the city—a peace resting not on integration or genuine sentiments of community but on strict separation of ethnic, racial, and class turfs...

...It was as if a message were coming out of City Hall: "All right, let the blacks have their welfare, but let's not hear any more talk about discrimination or injustice...

...A budget crisis, no doubt constraining expenditure, became the occasion, though hardly the sole cause, for a rightward shift in social policy...

...It's hard to know to what degree the breakdown of political life is the consequence of technological changes largely beyond immediate social controls and to what degree it reflects an "inner" political development that may, in time, change...

...Within the world of dance there was a similar internal flowering— something that takes on a dynamic of its own, quite apart from the larger society—but to a considerable extent this was due to the gifts of one man, George Balanchine...

...they dream about escaping the noise, the dirt and the dangers of the city, though not many move away...

...He sensed that activism was out of fashion and he realized that to remain a liberal would mean to pit himself, maybe hopelessly, against the powers of Washington and without much support from the people of his city...

...In 1984, 1.7 million New Yorkers—almost a quarter of the city's population—were trapped below the poverty line, as defined by the federal government...

...Only 70 percent of poor families were insured by Medicaid...

...Koch became what the Borscht Belt calls a tumler, the sort of entertainer whose gift for comedy isn't always to be distinguished from his ability to make noise...

...It is television, of course, that seems mainly responsible for the changes in political life...

...and 50,000 families were below the poverty line even though their main wage earner was working full time...

...Still, who can say...

...The mood of the city now revealed a weariness with the language of idealism, a coarsening of social sentiments, a resignation before inequities that had once troubled consciences...

...Until, that is, Howard Beach...

...Much of the soapbox oratory was wind, but at least it FALL • 1987 . 409 FROM A NEW YORK JOURNAL gave audiences a chance (which they often seized) to fire questions and heckle...

...And he had his rewards: popularity in the city, large sales for a rather mean-spirited book, an increasingly cozy relationship with old-line Democratic pols like Donald Manes and Stanley Friedman, and the warm blessing of the New York Post, Rupert Murdoch's vile sheet...

...the turning inward of the Jewish community, not to the neoconservatism of a few intellectuals but to a gradual "conservatizing" of its liberalism...

...What mattered now was personal assertiveness, the aggression of winners, the coolness of top dogs—a style blending bluff social Darwinism with button-down superiority...

...But did he find himself wondering what 408 • DISSENT FROM A NEW YORK JOURNAL connection there might be between the snarling hatreds of the Howard Beach hoodlums and the social tone, the vibrations of attitude, marking his years in office...

...It's not exactly a bad time, it's only a flat time...

...New York today is no longer even a one-party town...

...Enough already...

...the growing reaction against the protests and excesses in the cultural styles of the late 1960s...

...Madison Avenue below 96th Street and Madison Avenue above...