America on the run
Nicholas von Hoffman
Washington 'Man Knocked To Knees By Unidentified Bird — Kansas City, Missouri, (via the Associated Press) — Richard Less, thirtynine, was attacked by an unidentified bird While jogging. Less, who is sixfoot-four-inches and weighs 185 pounds, was knocked to his knees by the attack, Which left him with three scratches and four Puncture wounds. A passing motorist saw the attack.'
Run for your life, jog your anxieties away, there's a best-selling book out here Which describes the spiritual and psychiatric benefits that come to those who drive their cardio-vascular systems past pain and b. reathlessness to trot on out the other side into the crystalline world of pure hyperyentilation. For years we've had a perfectly innocuous president's council on physical fitness, which told us to eat sensibly and get a little regular exercise: for a short few Weeks during the Kennedy administration there was a vogue for going on fifty-mile hikes. None of it resembles the rage to run Which has now Struck the upper-middle Classes. The corpulent, the sedentary, the indolent and the lethargic are in their jogging outfits, pounding down boulevards behind the exhaust from diesel buses and alone on rural roads followed by puzzled, laughing dogs. Women in cocktail frocks discuss heroic changes in their pulse rates, a Pledge to run life's long race to the furthest finishing lines. The lower social orders, still drinking beer, eating white bread and farting frankfurters, are resisting the call to jog. They can't hold out much longer. The radio and television are loaded with slim and gutless Physicians promising a long life and a healthy one to those who dare to risk shin splints and bruised knees pounding the streets in Pursuit of immortality. It can't be long before Americans will be like the Chinese a few years ago, up en masse an hour earlier: 220 million of us panting through the street, park and alley. Torn Wolfe calls phenomena of this sort Part of the 'Me decade', but every decade is the Me decade; what shifts and blurs is who we think 'Me' is and what seems to make sense in the taking care of Mr. or Ms. Me. Another best seller rattling around here is entitled Looking Out For Number One. Number one's mood, as the world tumbles toward the Eighties, is a bleak con viction that you'll make it on your own or you won't make it. It's individualism without boldness, without self-confidence, with the frightened hope of lasting a little while longer, of avoiding disaster, postponing a tragedy. The single runner trying to perse vere in health, pushing himself through the smoggy morning with the announcer on his mini-micro radio warning him, 'the air quality index is in the poor to bad range. Children, old people and those with lung conditions are advised to stay in today.' The runner pushes on in the choking determination that if the society can't clean up the air, his private exertion can preserve him.
Do for yourself, run for yourself, and don't count on help or support from the outside. The statistics on divorce and family break-up aren't quite so bad as the feeling of abandonment, separation, broken promises and the sense we're letting each other down over the breakfast table, in bed, on the job. 'I don't know one, not one happily married couple,' the woman shrieks at the cocktail party in hilarious misery. Everybody is reading a book called Passages, in which life is seen as a succession of locks on a canal, phased and staged unhappinesses debouching at the end onto the low waters of death.
In the blues or the inward miseries, we pass our time contemplating our suffering guts. 'You boys are crazy, crazy, crazy, that's what you boys are,' the woman says upon hearing of yet one more relationship that dissolved and died because he wouldn't, he couldn't, he didn't make love with her. Somewhere in our mottled and spotted land, the bedsprings bounce and men and women pant for better reason than a long run. The young people, whose lusts haven't yet been destroyed by their psYchologies, do: and maybe there is joyous copulation among steel workers and migrant Mexican agricultural workers, or in the cheaper suburbs, but since it was discovered by the whites that blacks can have the most awful sexual problems too, the legend that poor people get the best loving has lost currency. Earlier this year, the New York Times ran an article quoting various Manhattan-types who've gone asexual. One suspects, however, these are the same persons who year by year have followed fashion through bisexuality, to homosexuality, to pederasty and finally bestial descent on the monkey cage in the Central Park zoo. That's not the same as the recurring case of the sudden frigid male, usually in his thirties or early forties, who collapses in the yoke of holy matrimony. Maybe it's just the old yen for young women in a society where mistresses are rare, expensive and difficult, but the women in a social position to scream and be heard are doing so. The men tend to be morose but they go off to see the shrinks, join the therapy groups, and read the books in the trek across the mountains of the mind towards the apprehension of the great unrealised self.
The quest for the unfound self, like our painful body culture, calls forth no splendid egocentricities, no free-handed motions of the mind and soul. Temporarily at any rate, the taste for extravagance is gone. All the theatrics of the previous decade have languished for lack of faith in anything much but learning how to cope, to deal with, handle, to accept, to maintain. Those are the verbs which express this moment's highest reasonable expectations.
Survive is another word you often hear, as though we have just come through a perilous trip in 'Nun country'. We're always talking about ourselves as though we had recently undergone a testing and now it's enough to sit still and breathe heavy, asexual breaths in the grass. The surviving and the running for dear life, the living by minimalist strategies, go hand in hand with drug taking. Yogurt fetishists who trot mountain trails for pink lungs take reckless amounts of dope. The pronouncements and the proclamations that accompanied dopetaking ten or fifteen years ago are unheard of now. Devoid of any assertions of grander meaning, it's private, like so much else which didn't used to be until the bad consequences emerged. When that happens you have to know how to cope like Betty Ford, who coped with the cancer and coped with the booze and the pills; last week she announced she was going into hospital to get a face lift so she'd have a new visage for her new, new life. That's coping, all right, but is it self-realisation?
What good will it do anyway, to realise this .minimal, diminished self — leaving scrambly, ratpaw prints on the surfaces of our internal organs — if the Visigoths are coming? The premonition of bad things to come is so strong, from time to time you wonder if people aren't wishing for it. The relative prosperity of these past two years has been ruined by anxiety that it isn't real, it can't last, that this is an imaginary moment. In reality the goths have infiltrated the walls, so don't pay any attention to good news.
If we have any good news, which in fact there is a modest supply of — even the news from Camp David was good at last — we can't recognise it and we certainly can't celebrate it. In comparison to the marching, singing, debating and brawling nation of a decade ago, the only thing you can say is we've gone dead on ourselves. This might be a nasty, reactionary little period, except we don't have the emotional energy for anger or vindictiveness. For weeks now, teachers and other government employees, who've been striking all over the place, have been arrested and carted off to jail. Nightly scenes of that sort on television ought to call forth some strong sentiment one way or the other. There's none, which may explain why you run into so many people who say they've joined a therapy group so they can learn to express anger.
Although that may be the only emotion therapists try to develop in their subjects, it's not the only one we're unable to feel just now. Humour, wonderment, and the other small pleasures can't be entertained by solitary runners in a cancer-survival race. Warriors are grim persons of necessity and we're engaged in that struggle the media refers to as the war against cancer, bulletins about which flow from the GHQ in Bethesda, the national cancer institute, by the day if not the hour. New cures, new safeguards, new appeals for money, old admonitions to examine your body for the five signs or the ten questionable conditions. Catch it early, catch it late, operate, radiate.
The oncoming ice age of inferiority, so often predicted by grouchy social critics, doesn't depress us so much as it makes us glum. It puts us in a state of mind that wouldn't let us enjoy our food even if they didn't put chemicals in it. We can't entertain ourselves and we can't be entertained unless it is by disaster movies, preternatural fish munching on our legs, airplanes crashing into thronged football stadia, floods, fires. earthquakes. At least there are no famine movies yet, death by starvation doesn't divert us.
Sometimes this pause is likened to the Fifties, and Dwight Eisenhower did preside over some dull months in the calendar but, for America, that was a time of preparation, a time of swelling tensions, of stretching and pushing outward. It was also a time for building the post-war world, the moment when future and fantasy would be made real. Disneyland, the promised fun-land, was built at affordable admission prices and no one guessed we might exhaust our imaginations. This year, though, the business press has been writing that the boom in playland Utopias is over. No more big money to be made because, on top of everything else, with the low birth rate we're running out of children.
Could that last American frontier be an amusement park? We haven't had a future dream since Disney died, and the rumour got all over that he really wasn't dead, but had had himself frozen at absolute zero, to lie rigid on the second floor of a firehouse in Anaheim, California, until the doctors could figure out how to cure him, whereupon there would be a thawed second corning. Parents no longer tell their children .it will be better when they grow up. With Disney cold as an ice cream stick, what future is there to dream, what pictures to paint? It has never happened before, that Americans have not had a brighter tomorrow enflaming their heads, making them awkward, energetic, and purposeful. And the reason isn't oil or economics or moral fibres, the reason is we can't imagine. But cock an ear. The laboured breath and rubbered footfalls can be heard. The runner runs beneath the leaves in the sunlight.
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