Political Booknotes Review
Noah, Timothy
Political Booknotes Divided We Fall: Gambling With History in the Nineties Haynes Johnson Norton, $25 By Timothy Noah If any proof were needed that the culture of TV gab is polluting print...
...Here's the real thing: More and more, Americans are affixing responsibility for the nation's troubles on the country and its leaders—and on themselves...
...Brogan noted long ago, the hardest task for a people forced to change is to acquire new attitudes and unlearn old lessons...
...Thanks for dropping by...
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...Of one out-of-work Scottish miner, he wrote: "Like so many unemployed men he spent too much time reading newspapers, and if you did not head him off he would discourse for hours about such things as the Yellow Peril, trunk murders, astrology, and the conflict between religion and science...
...I don't mean to belittle the pile of urgent national problems through which Johnson rummages...
...Political Booknotes Divided We Fall: Gambling With History in the Nineties Haynes Johnson Norton, $25 By Timothy Noah If any proof were needed that the culture of TV gab is polluting print journalism, this book is it...
...it is real...
...Next...
...It produces an overpowering and destructive urge to pooh-pooh every contemporary problem cited by Johnson, much as Ben Wattenberg did a few years ago in The Good News Is the Bad News Is Wrong, a perverse and unconvincing book that dismissed most of the social ailments commonly diagnosed in the mass media...
...As the historian D.W...
...They have lost faith, yet they retain, I think, an underlying confidence...
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...They disgorge their least interesting opinions (i.e., the ones most likely to fit whatever bland point Johnson is trying to make), and then retreat to the anonymity whence they came...
...Public schools, once the glory of American democracy, the way to a better life for generations of immigrants and the binding glue of economic and social classes, have become society's dumping ground...
...They are certain, yet somehow unsure...
...Even before he became a respectable TV fixture, Johnson, when reporting on his conversations with concerned Americans, never departed in tone from a familiar blend of piety and condescension...
...Orwell, though a profound egalitarian, wasn't afraid to tell his readers how much he disliked some of the miners he encountered...
...Can this be true...
...But Johnson hasn't the vaguest notion what to do about this, and for much of the book, as he lurches groggily from one tangent or another, one is liable to forget this is the point...
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...Everyone knows this...
...Next...
...Can you imagine Haynes Johnson ever saying anything that irreverent about one of The People...
...The point is, we are divided as a nation—by class, race, region, mutual suspicion, etc...
...The author, Haynes Johnson, is a longtime panelist on "Washington Week in Review," and reading his new tome is not unlike clicking the remote from channel to channel...
...For me to pass among the American people at this fleeting yet crucial moment in history, touching an outstretched hand here, accepting a gentle kiss on the foot there, was as stirring and moving for me as a journalist as it was for them as the American people...
...Agreed...
...This once-over-lightly approach trivializes the problems Johnson writes about, especially since he clearly has no interest in considering any bold approaches to solving them...
...Johnson may bridle at being characterized as a pundit...
...But if you want the evidence, don't go looking for it here...
...OK, so what exactly is Johnson's point...
...But the people in this book come across not as individuals whose particular experiences shed new or surprising light on a subject but as two-dimensional stand-ins for various predictable points of view...
...taking the pulse of the nation, speaking to millions of ordinary Americans, be they shopkeepers, or baseball fans, or Presbyterians, and all of them agree with remarkable unanimity that this is a very critical time for our nation...
...Americans are nervous, yet they remain calm...
...after all, his longtime print specialty has been writing about social problems through the voices of ordinary, out-side-the-Beltway Americans...
...Great writers who work in this form—like George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier, his classic account of the deplorable working conditions of miners in the prewar north of England—show their respect for the people they write about by presenting them in all their human complexity...
...But it is also by now familiar and deserves from journalists more than the march of platitudes to which it is routinely subjected on TV public affairs shows and, increasingly, in pompous "opinion leader" books like this...
...Consider: Larry Pugh, who manages a hospital in Waterloo, Iowa: "I see a serious deterioration, almost an eradication, of the middle class that I grew up in...
...Yet they also know America still possesses enormous resources, backed by an energetic, resourceful people...
...In Timothy Crouse's book on the 1972 campaign, The Boys on the Bus, one national political reporter said this of Johnson's lengthy Washington Post mood-of-the-country pieces: "[Johnson] tells me what's happening, but he can't explain it...
...You think Kinsley was exaggerating...
...civility and attempts to reach consensus are declining...
...For that, you have to go to the title...
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...Awareness of a new life-threatening menace like AIDS, striking suddenly and spreading through the culture, intensifies apprehension and stress felt by numerous Americans...
...Timothy Noah, a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly, is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal...
...Violence in America is increasing...
...More than anything else it is fear over the economic future that most powerfully affects Americans...
...B Luis Guillen, a Latino senior at the University of Wisconsin: "I have a lot of friends of Mexican descent who refuse to speak English...
...Today, the effect on the reader is the same...
...Americans may be divided, Johnson argues, but they are increasingly willing to sacrifice in the name of the country as a whole...
...I defy any reader to remember any striking details about Johnson's collection of ordinary Americans, all of whom are presented as uniformly saintly...
...They do not need to be told that their country no longer enjoys the unsurpassed position it held for a generation after World War II...
...I hope so, and sometimes I even think so...
...In a 1981 essay in The New Republic, Michael Kinsley burlesqued Johnson's style: I'm just back from Out There...
...The good news, Johnson finally concludes, is that Americans are more interested in solving long-term problems (like the deficit) than they were during the get-mine-first, live-for-the-minute 1980s, and that this was expressed when they elected Bill Clinton president...
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...Amy Dickenson, a research assistant (well, all right, Johnson's research assistant, though he doesn't say so until the acknowledgements): "I know that the world I knew as a child, living on a small dairy farm, has disappeared as surely as if it were blown off the planet...
...Americans I met understand this...
...Though Johnson's attention span seems shorter now, he's been at this for years...
...Despite the end of legal segregation, de facto segregation still exists...
Vol. 26 • January 1994 • No. 4
