AMERICA
Of callouses and troubles
MURRAY KEMPTON
New York—There was a time not too long ago when the bombing of a bank in New York City would have been a matter of widespread comment and alarm. By now, random violence is so routine that the New York Times the other day reported an attack on the Bank of Brazil at the bottom of page thirty-three with an introductory paragraph plainly bored with the whole business: For the third time in two weeks a bank was bombed here yesterday . .
Someone firebombed the largest furniture store in Asbury Park, NJ, and several hurt. dred young blacks were reported to have stood about chanting 'Burn, Baby, Burn' while firemen fought the flames. This callous spirit seems typical of this summer. Asbury Park has a mayor who !ast month dismissed its current civic disturbances as less in- convenient than they might have been— because the Negro rioters had so far shown the grace to damage no neighbourhood less worthless than their own.
Two policemen are killed outside a South Chicago housing project; riots in Houston and Hartford have caused the deaths of at least three Negroes; policemen and outlaw citizens alike seem to regard shooting at one another as more and more an ordinary custom in the routine of their rounds. Grand juries indict policemen for taking money from gamblers and refuse to indict them for shooting citizens. The State of Connecticut forbids a rock festival and threatens to arrest any musicians who appear there with intent to perform; in the meantime, their stranded audience wallows in the fields around the site, openly buying drugs which make its nights a horror with no interference from the law. So the drug salesman is free to move where the rock singer can go to jail even for appearing; the policeman will be punished when he takes a bribe and forgiven when he uses his gun.
There is, in all this, less malignity than resignation to failure. We have come to take for granted our inability to solve these conditions; we barely notice those nasty, brutish and short episodes which used to disturb us as evidence of their non-solu- tion.
The country has ceased to reach out for its alienated. One hears instead the iron clangour of the judgment that generally they get what they have coming to them. We seem no longer to believe in ourselves as a united social order; division is now assumed to be permanent; one takes one's stand. Frank Sinatra's decision to support Governor Reagan for re-election in California might be seen as the most portentous single political event of the 'seventies, being an enlistment in the war against the young so at variance with this consequential recruit's whole prior history as to suggest itself as a token of a sweeping mass shift from tolerance to outrage. Sinatra has been for years his generation's symbol of rebellion, as Governor Reagan has been its symbol of conformity. Sinatra made his way by offen- ding movie producers as Reagan kept his by comforting them. Yet they are together now. The struggle in each of us as we grow older is between treason to one's class or one's generation. Sinatra's decision is for the mo- ment disturbingly typical; even he has joined the middle American in the sense of being under siege.
The Reverend Mr Billy Graham is also a fresh (and almost as unexpected) a recruit to this garrison. Mr Graham has owed the tolerance he has enjoyed until now from agnostic and sceptic alike to his habit of being entirely agreeable to every American without reference to creed or age or resistance to the Holy Spirit. But even he has joined the war now. At Shea Stadium last month, more chillingly than would have been possible for him a year ago, he absolved the old from the sins of the young: 'Parents who have reared their children right should not carry guilt if the child goes wrong. It was not the father's fault that the Prodigal Son chose to live a wicked life.'
There is, then, a general hardening of the attitude thanks to which respectability is enabled to concentrate upon the deportment of the victim and thus to blame him for the sin. Mr Nixon, some saving politesse aside, appears to reflect that attitude well enough to have earned considerable political profit from it. The complaints, more and more isolated, that he has failed to unite the society can hardly carry much weight with voters less and less inclined to feel the need to unite with any faction except their own. The President, without having brought all of us together, may very well have formed enough of us into battalions to have found himself a majority, even though one has trouble avoiding a sense of its fragility.
All our discontents and distempers suggest a failure on Mr Nixon's part to bring tran- quillity and confidence even to his own ma- jority. He is essentially a child of that Great Depression whose survivors were made not more adventurous but more cautious by the experience, having learned that changes are apt to be for the worse. The Depression mind remains dominant in our political ma- jority; and any politician who would keep his hold on it must, above all else, make this constituency feel secure. Mr Johnson failed, after all, because he made uneasy so many of the voters who otherwise agreed with him on most issues. The McCarthy movement could hardly have been so successful if its symbol had not been a man essentially so calming. Ideology is less useful to an American states- man than the gift of tranquillity.
Mr Nixon's posture is sedate in general, buf interrupted by frequent enough fits of public desperation to disturb too many of those voters it is his business to keep calm and confident. The alarm over Cambodia was insufficiently confined to persons of the sort whose votes he has lost anyway. He re- mains a President trusted by fewer people than agree with him. His advantage at the moment is that he presides over a majority whose members plainly want most of all just to be let down. His peril is that he does not seem quite the man secure enough in himself to promise security from being troubled to the rest of us.
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