A Distorted Picture of the U.S.
DOLMAN, JOSEPH
A Distorted Picture of the U.S. Restless Nation: Starting Over in America By James M.Jasper Chicago. 295 pp. $25.00. Reviewed by Joseph Dolman Editorial writer, "Newsday" Many years ago,...
...The affluent suburbs of Atlanta today are filled with families just a generation or two removed from miserable existences on the land...
...In the absence of government programs, many other countries would have poverty rates like ours, but after government intervention none do...
...The small-town South of the early 1900s was the very picture of rootedness...
...By the time Rudolph W. Giuliani ran for mayor in 1993, about one New Yorker in seven was on some kind of public assistance—and not even the extreme wealth of Manhattan could offset the onerous financial burden for ordinary middle-class families throughout the city...
...The situation could get ugly...
...It recommends distancing ourselves from our traditional myths...
...And it wisely avoids the temptation to bash massive immigration for what Jasper perceives as our lack of community...
...At the bottom of the ladder," he declares, "the United States also has higher rates of poverty than other prosperous countries, even though it is the wealthiest of them (and hence has the means to do something if it wished...
...Thus, part of the reason Americans are more productive than the citizens of comparable countries is our working more...
...But this did not seem to make anyone kinder or more socially oriented...
...Jasper takes a gloomier view...
...a nation that lets rootless con men reinvent themselves incessantly...
...His advice never varied...
...Roads were terrible, schools lapsed into decrepitude, public transit was unreliable—and on and on...
...Exterminate most of its native people...
...That attitude bothers Jasper, whose "recipe" for concocting the United States goes as follows: "Take an enormous territory, rich with deep forests, the blackest soil, every manner of animal, vegetable and mineral, and endless navigable rivers and coasts...
...Inevitably, the city was faced with a serious structural deficit...
...Has our mobility skewed a realistic grasp of our problems...
...We must pretty much take his word here, because he never clearly explains what "other prosperous countries" he means, how they calculate their poverty rates, or exactly how their numbers compare with ours...
...Despite all of its famous shortcomings, the America I know is not nearly as soulless, as mindless or as troubled as the one he describes...
...Above all, if only we had kept moving until we grabbed the prize...
...From the antigovernment cant of Ronald Reagan to yesterday's campaign speeches of that great New Yorker, Hillary Rodham Clinton, we are true-believing individualists and deft makeover artists...
...A penchant for hard work and long hours is one of the things that has made our economy the envy of the world...
...That way, Americans might realize "individual upward mobility is difficult and rare," and "they would not necessarily expect it or blame themselves for not attaining it...
...In any case, you can be sure that more communities have suffered because too many of its members weren't working than because too many were...
...Is the underlying assumption here correct...
...There is only one problem: His overall picture of the United States is seriously distorted...
...Reviewed by Joseph Dolman Editorial writer, "Newsday" Many years ago, when newspaper newsrooms were noxious dens of cigarette smoke and teletype clatter, I worked with an editor atthe Atlanta Journal who would occasionally pull me aside and share his insight on how to deal with management...
...New York experienced an exponential growth in its welfare programs during that period...
...Then, over 400 years, repopulate it with immensely diverse folk, from all around the globe, whose only common feature is their restlessness...
...Has our economic progress been as underwhelming and halting as Jasper argues...
...Hold everything...
...And remember, the myth did suffer some rocky years in the 1930s as the economy endured a seemingly endless tailspin...
...As New York City—among other places—discovered in an arduous public policy progression from the 1960s into the 1990s, reducing or eliminating poverty is not merely a matter of will...
...I'm also skeptical of the argument that a more rooted community would be a more compassionate community...
...I think a sound economy—maintained by the honest sweat of willing workers— will do infinitely more to support a sense of community than some two-month grant of company-paid idleness...
...Jasper's worries to the contrary, I think I'll stick with the advice of the old editor...
...Much of this is right, of course...
...Most of them love where they live...
...It's a matter of will...
...Jasper does not prove the case...
...This is especially true for men, who are still often expected to be the primary breadwinners and still define themselves through their work more than women do...
...Who knows what will happen when the economy weakens and the job market is flooded with the least employable of the former welfare recipients...
...It urges Federal Housing Administration policies that might make it easier to renovate old homes...
...Blacks came in for the worst discrimination, of course, but poor white families did not fare especially well either...
...But then we get to the central problem of this book...
...Those policies have worked so far because of a robust economy and because the brunt of the new Federal welfare reform program has yet to be felt...
...What that gets you, the author contends, is a nation long on individualism and short on community...
...As traditional Americans right out of the Jasper playbook, they voted with their feet and moved on to more hospitable locales...
...As James M. Jasper might explain, the old fellow's near-religious belief in the power of motion is the very essence of the American character...
...And if you doubt our head-overheels idolatry of the wealthy, I invite you to scrutinize the New York tabloid coverage of Donald Trump on any given day...
...As a result, about the only thing growing in New York City was its immigrant population and its social service sector...
...In short, he seems to say, our work ethic can be harmful to our sense of community...
...From Appalachian strip mines to the ugly urban sprawl around cities like Atlanta, to the decaying industrial neighborhoods of New York City, we are a people who extract what we want from a place and walk away...
...Did generation after generation of Americans get it completely wrong...
...a nation that hates the poor, adores the rich, looks askance at government, and places an irrational trust in the market economy...
...Well, what's wrong with that...
...Relatively few Americans—immigrants or native-born—ever strike it rich in our lottery of an economic system, yet we usually blame ourselves, not the system, says Jasper in his new book: If only we had worked harder...
...For example, Jasper writes: "Not stopping to rest is the literal meaning of 'restless.' Because they care so much about material success, Americans work more hours per year than the citizens of any other advanced industrial country...
...Nuggets of truth and glimmers of intelligent reflection are scattered throughout this work...
...For one thing, most Americans find work ennobling...
...Should we be looking harder for structural faults within the system...
...Mobility may deflect some dissatisfaction with the economic system—but I think a broad prosperity deflects more...
...In several European nations, the author notes, two months of paid vacation per year is now standard...
...The notion is awfully hard to swallow...
...The United States is one of the few countries without any national legislation providing vacations to its citizens...
...If they don't see it your way, just start walking...
...In their fight to get ahead," he says, Americans "may simply not have the time to build ties with other people...
...Never mind that he had been trapped in his same copy desk job for 30 years...
...They were forced to pay some of the highest tax rates in the country and got some of the worst government services...
...Rather, I would merely like to note that, contrary to Jasper's belief, government does not know exactly how to keep people out of poverty...
...Jasper makes it all sound so wonderfully easy, but he is dead wrong...
...To be fair, Restless Nation does offer a menu of reasonable antidotes for some of the more destructive aspects of our compulsive motion...
...Jasper's comments about welfare are even more exasperating...
...Other countries, less wealthy than the United States, simply try harder to keep their citizens out of poverty...
...As far as I'm concerned, the option to walk when circumstances demand it represents democratic power at its best...
...I'll keep a bag packed—just in case...
...Meanwhile, thanks to one legacy of slavery, some of the richest white families had a remarkably lax work ethic...
...Justtell 'emyoukeepabagpacked," he growled...
...Tell 'em there's a wide open road out there...
...If only we hadn't compromised so quickly...
...So did scores of major employers, who grew tired of the high costs and the low quality of city life...
...It advocates company policies that are more sensitive to the benefits of stability...
...I don't mean to suggest that Giuliani and Congress and President Bill Clinton ended the dilemma a few years ago when they initiated programs designed to push people off welfare and into the workplace...
...Jasper hints he will deal with the South in a later volume, but I wish he had said more about it here...
...The myth could not endure for so long without delivering something to the true believers...
...Within its caste system virtually every citizen had a distinct role—and the faces around the town square hardly ever changed...
...a nation that voraciously chews through its natural resources and then searches for more...
...And the suburbs of Long Island are filled with SUV-owners just a generation or two removed from the tenements of Little Italy and the Lower East Side...
...But that is a small quarrel, given what he writes next: "The difference between the United States and other advanced industrial countries is simple: They have programs that compensate for market failures and we do not...
...Jasper's account of our boom towns is especially entertaining...
...He paints his portrait of the American character with broad verbal strokes that are refreshingly free of academic jargon...
...By the time Congress revised Washington, D.C.'s welfare system in 1996, even many die-hard liberals were quietly admitting that traditional programs were failing to move people reliably from welfare to work...
Vol. 83 • November 2000 • No. 5
