Is there any great cause today that can be said to unite the American people? While we were in Paris a couple of weeks ago, we thought of two: the control of drugs and the defeat of AIDS. But neither cause finds the people altogether trusting of government or confident that our country is doing the best it can. There’s a hope that other countries will help pull our chestnuts out of the fire. Maybe Peru and Colombia will cut off the drug supply; maybe the Pasteur Institute can come up with something.
And what of America? “The American Idea, of unlimited possibility and the transformation of humanity,” writes Pfaff, has become increasingly impossible to sustain. “In successive elections in the late 1970s and the 1980s, Americans elected or reelected Presidents whose principal, even sole, qualification for that office was their ability to make Americans feel better about themselves and about their country.”
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“Pat Moynihan came in a couple of weeks ago, and we had dinner,” said Pfaff, “and he was saying that the one taboo thing in Washington is to suggest anything that involves raising taxes.” Moynihan wondered rhetorically why Europe has been so much more successful dealing with housing, transportation, medical insurance, and such matters. “They spend money,” he told Pfaff. “But that’s what is unacceptable in Washington. You can’t spend money.”
“I don’t think it’s either. I think it is ignorance, a certain canonization of ignorance in American society. I think it’s a breakdown of schools. The people are not really seriously taught. It’s certainly a consequence of the trivialization of issues by television, and the press, which has deteriorated very seriously. But it sort of disqualifies us from grown-up discussion.”
“I think of somebody like George Marshall–who’s the equivalent of a George Marshall today?–who was offered a million dollars in 1950 for his memoirs and refused, saying one does not profit from public service.”
“And that, you see, exists here now. My children’s friends very much have a sense of ‘We’re at a great moment in European development, and it’s up to us to meet the challenge and create Europe, and it’s all very exciting.’ Sure, they expect to have good careers while they’re doing it, but there’s a sense of corporate and collective responsibility which it is their generation’s obligation to meet.
