Here lorrie,
Read something written by a capitalist, for a change.
jim
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The Washington Post
Yet the Nation Thrives
By George F. Will
Sunday, January 3, 1999; Page C07
Contemporary politics has three peculiarities. The strongest passions --
Republican hatred of Bill Clinton; Democratic loyalty to him -- are incongruous,
given the nature of Clinton. Second, political ferocity increases as the stakes of
politics shrink. And as saturation journalism drenches the public with news
from Washington, the nation participates less and less in the passions swirling
around the national government.
Disgust with Clinton is by now nearly coextensive with the truly adult
population, and is intense in the Democrats' congressional cloakrooms, where
members of the world's oldest political party resent the degradation of it, and
them. However, hatred of Clinton is strange. Large passions should be called
forth by largeness, and Clinton is defined by littleness.
He is the least consequential president since Coolidge, who was of small
consequence as a matter of political conviction -- hence he was, in his way,
large. Clinton had one large purpose, health care reform, but he entrusted it to
his wife, who botched it. There have been only two large events involving the
national government in the Clinton years: The economy balanced the budget,
and Republicans forced welfare reform on a reluctant Clinton.
Yet the nation, rather impertinently, thrives. In 1997 violent crime declined 7
percent, to its lowest level in 24 years, partly because the prison population has
more than doubled in a decade. In New York, homicides are one-third of the
1990 level, and below the 1964 level. The American Enterprise magazine
reports:
The number of welfare recipients is declining, as is illegitimacy, teen-age sexual
activity (after two decades of increases); births to teenagers (down 12 percent
since 1991); and abortions. The percentage of Americans saying abortion
should be "legal under any circumstances" has fallen from 34 to 22 since 1990.
Church attendance is rising (55 percent of teenagers attend church at least
once a week, up from 47 percent in 1975). By 78 percent to 15 percent
Americans endorse "encouraging a belief in God" over "encouraging a modern
scientific outlook." Since the late 1970s the percentage of Americans saying
that religion is "very important" in their lives has increased from 52 to 61.
By 66 percent to 28 percent, more Americans worry about the nation
becoming "too tolerant of behaviors that are bad for society" than about it
becoming "too intolerant of behaviors that don't do any real harm to society."
Beginning in the early 1980s -- during the "decade of greed" -- there has been a
sharp increase (adjusted for inflation and population growth) in charitable
giving.
Gregg Easterbrook, writing in the New Republic, notes that health is broadly
improving. This is largely because individuals are behaving more sensibly
(about food, drink, tobacco, exercise, sex). In 1985, 17 percent of high school
seniors had tried cocaine; in 1996, 7 percent. A forthcoming book by
University of Connecticut Professor Everett Carll Ladd reports that far from
becoming an atomized nation of broken social bonds, America's social fabric is
being rewoven by (for example) the 59 percent of parents of school-age
children who participate in their children's classrooms. There has been a
doubling, between 1977 and 1995, of the number of people volunteering for
charities.
Most people are busy behaving well, are disgusted with people who are not,
and are convinced that good behavior locally -- in society's little platoons:
families, churches, civic organizations -- matters more than governmental
measures. Which helps explain why people are consuming less and less
traditional journalism.
The television audience is being fragmented by cable and satellite systems, and
by the siphoning off of that audience by online information providers. In
August, cable viewership exceeded that of ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox combined.
The volume of Internet traffic is doubling every 100 days as upward of 7
million households go online each year. All this is sharply reducing the
networks' prime-time audience (down 9 percent this season) that feeds viewers
to local news programs. Those programs are also losing depoliticized viewers
to "Frasier" and "Friends" reruns.
Total national newspaper circulation fell from 63.1 million in 1984 to 56.7
million in 1997. The Boston Globe recently reported that in November,
Boston's top three TV newscasts dropped 50,000 households below their level
a year ago. (Among the top 10 media markets, Boston has the highest
percentage -- 79 -- of cable subscribers.) The Globe's and Boston Herald's
weekday circulations have declined 10 percent and 25 percent respectively in
the 1990s. Boston ranks second among national media markets in regular daily
newspaper reading by adults, but readership is down from 75 percent to 69
percent since 1994.
Americans are defining, and finding, news in new ways. Their
self-emancipation from traditional sources, and from agendas set far away,
reflects the decreasing relevance of the national stage, the performers on which
resemble -- and are going the way of -- vaudevillians.(emphasis jimpit)
© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company
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