Remember when you went away and I got on my knees and prayed you never come back? Well, you keep coming back so I'll go away cause you driving me utterly MAD!

Mayberry R.I.P.
by Frank Rich
New York Magazine
July 22, 2012

Declinist panic. Hysterical nostalgia. America may not be over, but it is certainly in thrall to the idea.



 

The wave of nostalgia for Andy Griffith’s Mayberry and for the vanished halcyon America it supposedly enshrined says more about the frazzled state of America in 2012 and our congenital historical amnesia than it does about the reality of America in 1960. The eulogists’ sentimental juxtapositions of then and now were foreordained. If there’s one battle cry that unites our divided populace, it’s that the country has gone to hell and that almost any modern era, with the possible exception of the Great Depression, is superior in civic grace, selfless patriotism, and can-do capitalistic spunk to our present nadir. For nearly four years now—since the crash of ’08 and the accompanying ascent of Barack Obama—America has been in full decline panic. Books by public intellectuals, pundits, and politicians heralding our imminent collapse have been one of the few reliable growth industries in hard times...

Depending on the political coloring of the authors, the books have different villains: the tea party, coddled Wall Street plutocrats, coddled welfare-state entitlement junkies, the yapping and trivializing news media, broken schools, a polarized and broken Congress, a politicized Supreme Court, a socialist president. And China Über Alles (with an occasional cameo by India). The books’ pet issues also vary, from the collapse of the family to the debasement of cultural values, the demise of political compromise, the extinction of the “vital center,” the president’s feckless “leading from behind” in foreign affairs, the rise of income inequality, the ballooning of the national debt, and unchecked federal spending. But the bottom line is nothing if not consistent, and is most concisely summed up in a tirade delivered to a hall of college students by Aaron Sorkin’s alter ego, a television anchor played by Jeff Daniels, in the HBO series The Newsroom: “When you ask what makes us the greatest country in the world, I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. Yosemite?”...

Some declinists who should know better retreat into the those-were-the-good-old-days bromides that characterized the Andy Griffith hagiographies. Thomas Friedman and Charles Murray have little in common politically, but Friedman’s love letter to his old neighborhood in the Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park in the sixties and Murray’s paean to his small hometown of Newton, Iowa, in the fifties—both presented as middle-class Utopias united by solid values and a faith in the common good—are interchangeable. And no wonder: According to the U.S. Census, both towns were more than 99 percent white at the time the two men graduated from high school. Would the midwestern nirvanas of St. Louis Park and Newton have been so friction-free if black or immigrant aliens had moved to Maple Street before Friedman and Murray left town for college? To measure the rapidly evolving America of 2012 against the segregated white America of a half-century earlier is as empirically spurious as contrasting the current bankrupt plight of Stockton, California, with the solvency of Mayberry (which, let us not forget, was not a documentary slice of sixties America but a repurposing of Hollywood back-lot sets first built to stand in for Atlanta streets in the 1939 Gone With the Wind).

Still, our legion of white-male Cassandras may not be wrong. America may well be in a fateful decline. But given that the country has survived a civil war, two world wars, the Great Depression, 9/11, and the quagmires of Vietnam and Iraq, is our current crisis proportionate to the doomsday hysteria—or have we lost perspective? Is it really true, as a Friedman friend is quoted in That Used to Be Us, that “at no time in our history have our national challenges been as complex and long-term as those we face today”? Is the Harvard professor Niall Ferguson right to cite the elimination of Western-civ survey courses at elite universities as an indicator of Western civilization’s endgame? Is Michael Sandel, also of Harvard, correct to call our volunteer military (numbering 1.4 million on active duty, or roughly 0.45 percent of the population) the country’s “last repository of civic idealism and sacrifice for the sake of the common good”?

Or is something else going on here? A more revealing question raised by our declinist panic is why it has been accompanied by a strange parallel infatuation with American exceptionalism. This once little-heard term, sometimes wrongly attributed to Tocqueville, was coined by Joseph Stalin in a 1929 anti-American sneer. Now it is flung about as the ubiquitous, defensive measure of America’s global standing. And it’s often used, Joe McCarthy style, as a cudgel to bash those who are judged to have hastened our decline by being insufficiently jingoistic—notably the president, who came in for a fresh and particularly cartoonish barrage of slurs on his bona fides as an American from Romney partisans last week. How much our declinist panic has to do with the actual facts of America’s case and how much it has to do with the fact of Obama is not always clear...

A decade later, just as Mayberry was being readied for prime time, fears of decline were ratcheting up further. Bipartisan panels of elite leaders convened by the Rockefeller brothers in the late fifties—ranging from liberal stalwarts like Adolf Berle and John Gardner to conservative grandees like Henry Luce and Henry Kissinger—published their collected findings in a 1961 report titled Prospect for America. “The number and the depth of the problems we face suggests that the very life of our free society may be at stake” was the opening sentence. This history has been either forgotten—or willfully blocked out—to such an extent that a period marked by rising civil-rights conflict is now routinely trotted out by some 2012 declinists as a Platonic baseline of American unity, centrism, and fairness against which today’s America can be found so sorely wanting. That nostalgia for what never was tells us more about the roots of the current declinist panic than any of the pie charts and graphs used to track America’s present statistical erosion.

In decoding that panic, our fixation on American exceptionalism, or the depletion of same, is an invaluable tool. Exceptionalism is actually something new in the usual declinist mix. As a 2010 Washington Post examination of the craze noted, until recently the term had been “rarely heard outside the confines of think tanks, opinion journals, and university history departments.” A blogger for The Atlantic who did the requisite number-crunching found that the locution “exceptionalism” had been used by national publications only 457 times between 1980 and 2000, and 2,558 times in the following decade. But “since 2010, it’s gone viral, leaping into print and online publications roughly 4,172 times” as of March of this year...

It doesn’t take much imagination to understand why Obama, branded as an outlier to the “real America” by Palin in 2008, would be held to a different standard than his predecessors by a modern GOP that is almost as lily-white as Mayberry. But declinists not normally engaged in conservative partisan politics have fallen into the American-exceptionalism trap as well by buying wholeheartedly into the right’s elevation of Stalin’s coinage from near obscurity to a jingoistic buzz term. Murray writes that the country will be on the right track “only when we are talking again about why America is exceptional and why it is so important that America remain exceptional.” Friedman and Mandelbaum second the motion: American exceptionalism “has to be earned continually” and “is now in play.” Their intention may not be to join the right in tarring Obama with America’s collapse, but in this hothouse political climate that is the practical effect...

None of this makes us No. 2 to China, an autocracy riddled with state and business corruption and often abridging the basic human rights that, for all our lapses, are more often honored than not in 21st-century America. We’re not Greece. We’re not even post-empire En­gland. But if we were to slip into so much as a tie for No. 1, that would drive many Americans nuts, because if anything is baked into the national character, it is that we must be the alpha dog, the leader of the pack, the undisputed world champion. Yet the alpha dogs of our own economy now inhabit a realm so far removed from most of their fellow countrymen that the whole idea of No. 1 is becoming an unattainable abstraction to those below. This is why the platitudes to be found in some of the declinist books fall flatter than usual. When Murray airily calls for “a civic Great Awakening” and a return to “founding virtues,” or when Friedman and Mandelbaum urge us “to reconnect with the values and ideals that made the American Dream so compelling,” the words have about as much value as a subprime mortgage in the context of our current Gilded Age...

Lost in all our declinist panic is the fact that the election of an African-American president is in itself an instance of American exceptionalism—an unexpected triumph for a country that has struggled for its entire history with the stain of slavery. “Only in America is my story even possible,” Obama is understandably fond of saying, knowing full well that as recently as the year of his birth, 1961, he would not have been welcome in Mayberry, let alone the White House. That his unlikely rise has somehow been twisted into a synonym for America’s supposed collapse over the past four years may be the most disturbing and intractable evidence of our decline of all. 

 emeraldrose63 wrote: 
Filled my VW for $3!

 Prodigal_SOB wrote: 

I can remember when gas was .26 a gallon at the 7/11 in Houston, way back when I was in elementary school.

 emeraldrose63 wrote: 
I remember a Coke being 10 cents and a bag of Wise chips was a nickel: I don't remember extra sales tax - but that was quite a while ago.

 emeraldrose63 wrote: 
I remember getting the 8 oz bottles for a nickel out a machine with a lever you had to pull that mechanically moved the next bottle to the door.  We didn't have a sales tax back then.

you could by a coke for .10 plus a penny tax?

 rosedraws wrote: 

do you remember it??  It had an impact on me for sure. 

 jagdriver wrote: 
I'm on the list of my girlfriend's Top 5 New Hampshire Friends you know.

 rosedraws wrote: 
Thanks, my New Hampshire friend.

 ptooey wrote: 
It's amazing how this one little PSA is truly the foundation of all my beliefs about race and prejudice.

 ptooey wrote: 
TOO FUNNY!    thanx!

 Welly wrote: 

I love Boz. His Dig album from about 2001 is fabulous! And if you visit the Music News thread, there is a series of links to a recent Steve Miller interview whereby the latter talks about teaching Boz how to play guitar when they were both at the U of W Madison (where I also briefly attended).

 meower wrote: 

"Jimmy's my Jewish friend."   I remember, but can't seem to find video online.

Edit:  HAH!!

Does anyone remember the Public Service Announcement from the 70's on TV with the boy and his grandpa, and the boy says "grampa what does prejudice mean?" and grampa says "why do you ask Tommy (?)" and the boys says "well, my jewish friend Joseph (?) says that I'm prejudice." and grampa then gives a short lecture on the simple fact that Tommy is referring to his freind Joseph as Jewish makes him think that Tommy may be prejudice?

or something like that......