Abandon hope, all ye who enter this article.
You can pick it up later on your way out, should you survive the enveloping darkness.
I am a pessimist by temperament and trade, prey to intermittent clouds. Left to its own devices, my mind magnifies everything it glues on to, no matter how far off or unlikely. I can vividly recall walking home when I was seven or eight, glancing up at the moon in the night sky and becoming convinced that it was moving closer, on a collision course with Earth—heading straight for us. This prospect I found unnerving. My parents, neither of them professional astronomers, put my fears to rest with home-cooked wisdom (“The moon’s up there every night and hasn’t crashed into the earth yet, so don’t worry about it”), but for a bad-news bear, fears are put to rest only to hop out of the box later in a new guise. In retrospect, my earth-moon crash scenario was probably an offshoot of the atomic anxiety hanging over all our heads back then, “then” being the grainy days of the Cuban missile crisis, Nikita Khrushchev’s “We will bury you,” Fail-Safe, On the Beach, Dr. Strangelove, Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” and the grim parables of The Twilight Zone, where host Rod Serling, biting off each phrase along the dotted line, would perform a wry eulogy to mankind’s folly in messing with creation. It was only a matter of time before the space aliens made us their pets. To pick up a newspaper, to turn on the news, to flip on the radio, was to risk an injection of jitters administered in the authoritative suit-and-tie tone of the period (which is why a front-page headline such as u.s. sees much to fear in a hostile russia, The New York Times, August 22, 2008, carries a retro tremor). And that was before the assassination of President Kennedy, the strickening force of which exceeded all of our stored-up apprehensions.
Bad news blights the front page during even the rosiest stretches of rising G.D.P. and relative calm, but there are periods when mortal crises and massive bombardments of the heebie-jeebies seem to be the daily norm—at least three periods in my lifetime:
• The brief span of the Kennedy administration, with the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis, the erection of the Berlin Wall, and a motorcade in Dallas.
• 1968, when everything went off the rails with the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., the Tet offensive, the riots at the Chicago Democratic convention, the anti-war protests—a curtain of flames from napalm dropped in Vietnam to burning cities at home and draft cards sacrificed to cigarette lighters on the steps of courthouses.
• 9/11, with the falling towers, the smoking gash in the Pentagon, and the subsequent anthrax scare.
An argument can be made that Watergate deserves inclusion on any Dark Days of the Republic highlight reel, and it’s true things got pretty hairy with the “Saturday Night Massacre,” when Nixon fired Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox Jr., and Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus followed him into the drink. But the live-documentary drama of the Watergate hearings and the exposure of the White House taping system opened so many cans of worms it was a squirming spaghetti platter for scandal junkies. Such a motley, compelling gallery of characters, from E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy to Egil Krogh to Martha Mitchell to the lethally precise John Dean, with instant catchphrases (“twist slowly, slowly in the wind,” “modified, limited hangout”) doing so much to enrich our journalistic lingo. While the panelists on Washington Week in Review and the long-gone Agronsky & Company seemed to be presiding over a wake, their countenances freighted with the grave consequences of a president resigning in disgrace, it felt like Christmas every day for those of us following each new turn in this Shakespearean serial. Beneath the oily tarp of the Watergate cover-up rustled the enterprising zeal of Woodward and Bernstein and others who furnished the scandal with an underdog rooting interest. Their efforts proved victorious against President Nixon’s lunar shadow, releasing a sigh of relief that lulled us into a false security about the integrity of our institutions. Major stories are still broken, Abu Ghraib being the best example, but they seem to make not the slightest diff.
Let’s be honest—this new millennium, so far it’s been a huge disappointment. It was preceded by a false alarm (the Y2K rollover), was cursed by hanging chads (the Florida recount), and has been held hostage ever since by the ministry of fear, with Americans meekly removing their shoes for the privilege of flying in airplanes charging fees for pillows and blankets. It’s been seven years since 9/11, no follow-up attack has stabbed our shores, and yet the front pages of so many papers resemble the end is near signs toted by bearded prophets that were once a staple of New Yorker cartoons. The decade has traveled from bin Laden’s cave to the Dark Knight’s Batcave in a jagged thrust of clenched force and unleashed chaos. Even an unforeseen blossom of good news, such as the declining death toll in Iraq, seems almost incidental in the log stream of general lousiness. Journalism used to perform a higher civic function than it does today, so spanked up is it with gaffes, gotchas, spin-doctoring, celebrity pimping, crisis-mongering, minnow-brained punditry, drama criticism practiced from under the troll bridge (usually at the expense of Democrats—Al Gore’s sighings during the debate with George Bush, Hillary Clinton’s “cackle”), and instant amnesia. To watch archive footage of TV reporters from the black-and-white era with their measured intonations and ashen visages—before everybody burst into Michael Kors orange—is to crack open the crypt on a more responsible, somber, and, yes, duller era, when journalists still conducted themselves as a priestly caste serving the needs of an informed citizenry, as opposed to catering to cud-chewing dolts. Those days are gone and there’s no point in mourning them, the Walter Lippmanns and similar wise men (and women) having proved worse than useless when the Vietnam War sawed the country into two with its lies and delusions. But the intelligent drone of old-school journalism served to extend a support bridge through national trauma, the term “anchorman” symbolic of the media’s role in securing coverage of the news with weight and authority, a fixed point in a sea of raging foam. Now it’s all raging foam, a steady, indiscriminate diet of excitation to keep us permanently on edge.
To pick up The New York Times each morning and brave the headlines—at conference on the risks to earth, few are optimistic, August 24, 2008—is to understand why generalized anxiety disorder is the world’s No. 1 psychological condition. Even more anxiety-inducing are the paper’s science pages, which make you want to roll out of bed in a fetal ball, especially the medical coverage, the happy hunting grounds for hypochondriacs, with Jane E. Brody digging up the latest rare disease about to hit it big, and bummer case studies such as that of the elderly patient with spontaneous gas gangrene left to deal with her own mortal fright: “She never made it to the operating room, and as far as I know, none of her doctors discussed her imminent death, then simply sat with her.”
