The Age of Incompetence Chapter XXX

When a nation becomes short and mean
February 6, 2010

John Steinbeck    Stephen Bezruchka

Out of a quiet desperation to find something to read last week I turned to a book I'd already read numerous times in the past, John Steinbeck's Travels With Charley. Like de Tocqueville's journey through America a century earlier, Steinbeck in the autumn of 1960 felt a need to get in touch with Americans. So he bought a pickup truck and fitted a cabin on its bed and took off from his home in New York to drive coast-to-coast and back. He took his dog named Charley with him.

I find myself asking the same question over and over; who are Americans? That question hammers at me without respite. We are certainly not the America Steinbeck visited in 1960. We have doubled in numbers without taking the time to ask if all the new pieces fit.

The reason tourists still visit the ruins of Pompeii, I suspect, is because in a fashion they can god-like inspect the ruins of a civilization in the ancient past and then fast forward to the present, again god-like, and take comfort in the idea how advanced we are today. I often wonder if in a hundred years in the future some will sift through the ruins of American civilization and ask how it all came apart so quickly.

For those of us who have lived through the decline it seems anything but quickly, it seems agonizingly slow like a Chinese water torture chamber. What I found of interest in Steinbeck's survey of America in the autumn of 1960 was the following: "Americans from all sections of all racial extractions are more alike than the Welsh are like the English...It is astonishing that this has happened in less than two hundred years and most of it in the past fifty. The American identity is an exact and provable thing."

But today, just 50 years later, all of that has come unglued - if it ever was true. Today America is more divided than at any time since the Civil War. There are red states and blue states and I have read often some of the brightest journalists in America asking has American become ungovernerable? In 1960 the state of California was on the cutting edge, other states and regions looked to California to see what would and wouldn't work. But today California is deeply in debt and broke and ungovernerable. It is a microcosm of America.

I read something two or three years ago that intrigued me because it seemed to me one of those mysterious indicators of something portentous but one of those riddles wrapped in an enigma. It was about how Americans were becoming shorter in comparison to people in other industrial societies, namely Europe.

Let me state the main points of the story. Americans were statistically the tallest in the world between colonial times and the middle of the 20th century. But now we have become shorter than Western and Northern Europeans. "In fact the U.S. population is currently at the bottom end of the height distribution in advanced industrial countries." We are currently in 20th place, ahead of Britain, but below Poland, Hungary and even Portugal!

This might seem trivia, but as the story revealed, "Height is indicative of how well the human organism thrives in its socioeconomic environment." That's what caught my eye and stuck like a burr in my mind. I also found this qualifier, "The stagnation of American heights is clear even if you restrict the comparison to non-Hispanic, native born whites....Rich Americans are shorter than rich Western Europeans and poor white Americans are shorter than poor Western Europeans."

At some point, something toxic invaded American society and it has had disastrous consequences. I grew a good three or four inches taller than my father and that seemed common place for the boys I grew up with more than a generation ago. So when did the toxic element infect American society? I would suggest about the same time the middle class began to feel the pinch and when it became clear to the average man he couldn't support his family on his paycheck alone. When a man feels the deck is stacked against him and no matter how hard he works it's not going to make any difference then he feels a loss of manhood. In short he feels emasculated.

I read another story some years before that stuck like a burr in my mind because it also hinted at something portentous and dire. It was in a national news magazine and the story was called, Is Our Society Making You Sick? by a doctor named Stephen Bezruchka, from the University of Washington. His story was a thesis about the kind of society one lives in determines how well or how sick people get and how long they live. He boiled it down to this: "Research during the last decade has shown that the health of a group of people is not affected substantially by individual behaviors such as smoking, diet and exercise, by genetics or by the use of health care. In countries where basic goods are readily available, people's life span depends on the hierarchical structure of their society; that is the size of the gap between rich and poor."

He then pointed out how in 1970 America was ranked 15th in the world of countries ranked by life expectancy or infant mortality. But by 1995 America was 25th, behind almost all rich countries. Today we are dead last in the industrial world. He used Japan as an example of the reverse.

In 1960 Japan was ranked 23rd in regards longevity, but by 1977 it had overtaken all those above it. What happened in 17 years? Again the comparison to the U.S. is revealing. Twice as many Japanese men as Americans smoke, yet deaths due to smoking are half of ours. After World War II the hierarchical structure of Japan was reorganized so all citizens shared more

equally in the economy. A CEO in Japan today will make from 15 to 20 times as much as a worker in his corporation, but in America the CEO will make 500 times as much as his typical worker! In fact, in economic hard times a Japanese CEO will take a pay cut rather than layoff workers. Just the reverse happens in America. Yet when Japanese emigrate their health declines to the level of the inhabitants of the new country.

But today at the start of the 21st century some Americans are still arguing whether it is good policy to have a universal health program for all Americans. This sends a chilling message to an American worker: drop dead, we can replace you. Small wonder Americans are both smaller and meaner today.

Many years ago I read psychologist Rollo May's classic essay Powerlessness Corrupts and he began it by quoting Edgar Friedenberg, "All weakness tends to corrupt, and impotence corrupts absolutely."

Since about 1968 we have done a marvelous job of whittling down the status of the American worker. We have year by year, decade by decade, stacked the deck against him. Conversely we have perversely helped those who need no help, the rich. It would be well to remember two things Pres. Kennedy said, the first at his Inauguration, "If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich." Trickle down economics under Ronald Reagan began the assault on the working man. The ruling elite have forgotten another truism Kennedy said, "Those who make peaceful revolutions impossible will make violent revolutions inevitable".

The wealthy on Wall Street and in Washington would evidently not care if those below turned into physical midgets, so long as they could continue their pampered lifestyle. But they forget when life gets too mean even midgets revolt. At some point American workers might say to the elite, drop dead, we can replace you. Paybacks are sometimes hell.