Where is the Space to Chase Rainbows? by John Updike

John Updike is perhaps best known for his quartet of novels chronicling Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom, including Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit Redux. He has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the American Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Why, when we have it so good, do we feel so bad? The question suggests its own answer; because Ameri­cans had it so good, they feel bad now. Not altogether bad, of course, and not equally bad in all sectors of the society; obviously, there are worse fates on the globe than to be a citizen of the United States. Few residents of our worst ghettos would swap their assets for a one-way ticket back to Africa, Mexico, Eastern Europe or Vietnam. One would concede that the quality of the life led by the average American, measured in space, leisure, and cost of daily living, compares favorably with that of the average crowded, hard-worked Japanese, and is not markedly inferior to that of the dwellers in such socialized high-tech utopias as Switzerland, Sweden, and the united Germa­ny – all of which, recently evince their own discontents. Americans still have it good.

But we should have it good, with our gor­geous stretch of the planet's real estate and our remarkably enduring and adaptable political institutions. Nature and the Founding Fathers have been kind to us, and World War II was less hard on us than on any other major participant. We emerged from that holocaust with a dispro­portionate share of the world's wealth and power, and it was inevitable that the proportions be adjusted, as the wounded nations recovered their wealth and the poorer nations strove to claim their own share of the finite global resources. Nor could our claim to unsullied inter­national success and virtue be endlessly sus­tained, as the failed Vietnam intervention and its domestic repercussions showed us. The post­ Vietnam era has read to our heavily blessed country a number of lessons in the reality principle, whose assimilation should make the United States, in the end, a better - more reasonable, less self- righteous - global citizen.

I write the above paragraphs, as it happens, on my 60th birthday. In my 60 years of being an American I have seen, through the shifting lens of my own life, considerable social change. The years began in a small Pennsylvania town where I was made to feel, threadbare and Depression-bound though the world around me was, cherished - cherished by a society that erected schools for my education, playgrounds for my entertainment, libraries for my edification, police stations for my protection.

Perhaps my sensation was a trick of egocentric perspective - a child cannot but feel himself the center of the universe - but certain architectural remains corroborate it. In the nearby city of Reading, the municipal high school was a kind of cathedral, looming ornately above its neighborhood - not merely constructed, but constructed with a flourish that showed where the society placed its pride. In my little community of 5,000, the two school buildings were similarly eminent; we moved through them in steady fashion, after sixth grade graduating from one to the other. The importance of our education was a central strand of the town fabric. The school grounds included a playground and several baseball fields where one could improvise games under a light canopy of adult supervision. It was a hardscrabble, still rather rural world but a generous share of its resources seemed devoted to the young. The school system and its satellites were the factories, as it were, wherein Americans were made – a process worth investing in, even in hard times.

Now, we read in the papers and see on the streets, children are the poorest class of our society - nearly one-fourth live below the pov­erty line. Millions live in environments where families are chaotic, the drug dealer and the pimp the only visible role models, and the police the only agents of discipline. Public schools, running on tightened budgets, can do little more than physically restrain the inwash of hopeless, brutalized adolescents. Every major city bears the signs - vandalized playgrounds, dangerous parks, desecrated statues, ubiquitous graffiti - of a common civic life swamped by the wrathful indifference of young people to whom society offers little but eventual shelter within the world's biggest penal system. In the middle class, the young, reared on seven daily hours of television-watching, are simply less educable, as slumping SAT scores show. Their high schools no longer look like castles but like second-rate airports, low-slung and shabby, while the soci­ety's riches are reserved, in a curious geronto­cratic shift, to the old, with their Social Security, their pensions, their Medicare, and the govern­ment entitlements that account for close to 30% of the national budget. A nation where the old are coddled and the young are deprived of both purpose and means is surely one where people are entitled to feel bad.

This has become a nation in which it is increasingly difficult to establish an adult life. For my generation, coming of age in the 1950s, a job, a car, a house, and the appurtenances of family life were not difficult to acquire. A boom was on, but the cost of living was still modestly pitched. When I decided to leave New York (where we were paying $150 a month for a Greenwich Village floor-through) and go live in a New England small town, I figured that by selling six short stories a year I could support a family that had come, by 1960, to include four children. Our first house, not a small one, cost $18,500; our next, a rather grand one, in 1970, what now seems a paltry $80,000. I was fortu­nate but not unusual; most of our friends, also in their 20s, owned their houses and had lots of children. These children, coming of age in Seventies, found housing almost impossibly ex­pensive, and have delayed marriage, by and large, until their 30s. When they marry, both partners work, and even so, they scrape by, with secondhand cars and handed-down furniture.

My generation lived better than its parents which made us feel good; but we live better than our children, which makes us feel bad. “Diminished expectations" is the name of new game, domestically as well as internationally. Our present discouragement is not rooted in statistics but in sensory impressions - squa­lor of midtown Manhattan, for instance where homeless beggars line Fifth Avenue, sidewalks are cluttered with buskers and hustlers and pushcarts, and the Japanese own Rockefeller Center. The triumphant Japanese raid on our domestic automobile market lies at the very heart of our discouragement: our quintessential native industry gutted by an invasion of better made, lower-priced foreign cars. We sense that the vast 1980s explosion of corporate acquisitions and junk-bond floatings was a storm of meaningless activity that left us without ability to make anything - this having been, as our schoolteachers used to tell us so proudly citing Henry Ford and the Wright brothers and Thomas Alva Edison, a nation of makers. The pioneers who perfected the apple-corer become the flaccid starers at the Sony upstairs. Just the muscle tone of Americans is discouraging to contemplate - either the artificially swollen pecs of exercise freaks or the utterly limp abdominals of junk-food-fed channel surfers, mainlining electronic visuals. Not many generations ago, this was a nation of firm-bodied farm folk, and the sheer suety pallor of our consumerism, of our “service economy," is enough make us feel bad.

We feel bad about lawyers. We have 5% of world's population and about 30% of world's lawyers, none of them good for anything much but dealing with other lawyers, generating mega fees that cumulatively function like a black hole at the center of the business world, sucking dollars into it, causing every manufactured item from dental floss to hydraulic presses to cost more. We feel bad about bankers. It turns out they are not colorless, punctilious caretakers of our money but big spenders, wild and crazy lenders in gold-­trimmed cowboy boots, the wastrels of the Eighties, rolling up billions in bankruptcy with­out so much as an "I'm sorry." We feel bad about corporate heads, who with giant salaries and rigged deals looted their companies as shamelessly as Third World dictators looted their impoverished countries. We feel bad about doctors. The old-fashioned country G.P., with his horse and buggy and little black bag of sugar pills, has become the white-collar gouger of the urban hospitals, running thousand­ dollar tests on comatose street people and propelling a ruinous runup on medical costs the country over. Except for the very rich and the legally penniless, nobody can afford to get sick in this country. The well intentioned Medicaid and Medicare programs have be­come excuses for a ruthless rip-off of govern­ment tax dollars; breakthroughs in medical technology produce nightmarish prolonga­tions of natural life and a costly, predatory exploitation of our fear of death.

AIDS adds to the smog of malaise. Our bodily fluids, the lubricant of intimacy and the nectar of life, have become death potions; the sexual revolution of the Sixties, however unrealistic its sweet mystic hedonism, surely didn't deserve this murderous molecular backlash. We are all potential contaminants of one another; toxicity is thoroughly internalized. We feel bad about pollution - every sort, from the HIV virus to atomic waste, from the overflowing landfills to the eroding ozone. The human species, the United States in the forefront, is rapidly using up the world, while enjoying it less and less Farms into housing tracts, downtowns into cardboard shantytowns, small towns into strips of highway junk stores, urban projects into giant crack houses - the transforming decay spreads while the average citizen leads a chicken-coop existence, office cubicle to sealed car to snug, burglar-proofed quarters where the televised world is piped in like chemically sanitized water.

We feel bad because a once sinewy nation, exultant in the resourcefulness that freedom brings, now seems bloated and zombified, pillaged and crumbling all around us. Enough of our original Puritanism remains to generate self-disgust. Benjamin Franklin's exhortations to thrift haunt us, in a world that makes a debt not merely a necessity but a virtue. On the personal scale, credit card companies beg us to buy more than we can pay for; on the national scale professedly conservative, benefits-pinching­. Presidents yet run up ever more billions in the red, and despite a weak dollar a staggering trade imbalance persists. Americans feel bad, I think, because we have gone from being the world’s chief creditor to being one of the world’s biggest debtors, and no amount of soothing statistical analysis from economists can allay our inner conviction that so many negative numbers must add up somewhere, that there must be an eventual reckoning.

Our pessimism dates from the optimism the Sixties, when John Kennedy to would "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend" to advance the cause of liberty, and then Lyndon Johnson simultaneously launched the War on Poverty and the war against North Vietnam. Guns and butter, we could afford everything; there was nothing America could not do. As recent events show, the Red Menace proved easier to defeat than the internal enemy. There is still a shameful amount of poverty and social derangement in this country, and it is harder than ever to ignore. It takes its revenge in making our cities danger­ous and unsightly; rural poverty can be shut into its countryside, but urban poverty affects the centers of infrastructure and the capitals of wealth and culture. Until the legacy of black slavery is erased, and the myth of white suprema­cy forgotten, the United States will have a sore spot for politicians to exploit. Strides in race relations have been made in my 60 years, not only on the statute books, but in the impalpable realm of popular culture. Black musicians, black comedians, and black athletes are heroes to white as well as black youngsters, an effortless racial mixing takes place at least on television screens, and black men and women can now be seen in business suits all across the country. Nevertheless, the majority of the descendants of the slaves are still sunk at the bottom of the economy. Large numbers of the white popula­tion see blacks as criminals and welfare sponges, and the once solidly Democratic South now delivers solidly for the Republicans, in a vote that must be termed reactionary. And this is another reason for feeling bad. The expanding economy that once promised to carry all minor­ities and immigrants upward with it no longer expands. American openness and generosity, expressed in the unfenced shape of our front yards, now threatens to turn defensive, protectionist, exclusionist, isolationist; the fences are going up, in our minds and on our properties.

The brief euphoria that greeted the effective prosecution of the Gulf War should be understood, I think, against the background of pessimism. Having been for years bombarded with tales of Pentagon inefficiency and extravagance we were amazed that the high-priced “smart” weapons actually seemed to work (many didn’t, it turns out). Remembering the protests, draft defiance, and miserable mire of Vietnam, we were gratified to discover a generation of young men and women who, having signed up basically for a free education in a peacetime military force, nevertheless willing and able to fight a war. Having associated the military with the disgraced Vietnam policies, we were relieved to see generals we could admire, briskly achieving a clearly defined goal against a villainous and boastful opponent. But the aftermath has muddled the victory with stalemate, and the possession of the world's undisputed champion military machine makes Americans, I think, more uncomfortable than not. We are a nation that likes its military glory in spurts, in the service of a crusade; and then set aside; we do not in our hearts aspire to be an international enforcer or a mercenary army for the oil-consuming nations.

What do we aspire to? What the Declaration of Independence promises: the pursuit of happiness. The chance to get ahead. Enough space to chase rainbows in. The fact that, compared to the inhabitants of Africa and Russia, we still live well cannot ease the pain of feeling we no longer live nobly. American plenty, to taste right, needs a seasoning of idealism; the land's abundance was taken as God's provision for a freer, more equal, less encumbered life than Europe could provide, except to its anointed nobles. Now the land feels encumbered and squeezed and depleted; the ground feels soft under us, the air is robed of ozone by the aerosol in the spray cans busy defacing our public monuments with gaudy nonsense; things don’t get better and better every day; and we naturally feel bad.