Decade of
Denial: A Snapshot of America in the 1990s. by
Herbert London.
Lexington Books.
2001. 181 pages, $24.95
Reviewed by William B. Allen*
If
you think that life in America has gone from bad to worse in the past decade
and if you would find a grim pleasure in reading an elegantly acerbic
description of the nation’s ills, then Decade
of Denial is the book for you.
Herbert London’s snapshot of America in the 1990s brings into sharp
focus the consequences of the wrong turn that the nation took sometime during
the 1960s. His witty account of the effects of the baby-boomer generation’s
“adolescent fantasies of utopia,” combined with the pervasive “nihilistic
relativism” of the age, depicts all too accurately the truth that we have lost
our way.
If,
on the other hand, you seek a substantive analysis of the factors that have
contributed to our sorry state or for directions on the way out of the abyss,
you must await the sequel. London, professor of humanities at New York
University, cautions that his purpose
is not to offer a history of the 1990s, but rather a set of anecdotal
illustrations, drawn largely from his own experience and put forward in an
“earnest effort to understand” those experiences. The fact that he has captured so well a portrait of the mass
culture of today makes one wish for equally cogent musings on how and why its
physiognomy became so shaped.
What
are the prominent features in his portrait of America? While touching on nearly all aspects of
contemporary culture, London focuses particularly on problems within these
arenas: media, sports, education and morality.
He opens with the prediction that we need not worry whether or how the
airwaves will be filled once we all have access to five hundred television
channels, because, he reassures us, “Everyone has an opinion, and every opinion
will be expressed—on the air.” Our
national penchant for voicing our opinions and our lack of concern about
whether those opinions are knowledgeable, shocking, base, or harmful have
baneful effects. Excellence, judgment,
and truth have all been sacrificed to the god of egalitarianism. By denying the existence of external
standards of any type, we have also denied ourselves the opportunity of the
very striving that not only creates excellence but advances humanity itself.
London
conveys the calamitous effects of this denial most tellingly in his extended
discussions of “lower” education (where educators have replaced academic
objectives with “psychobehavioral goals”) and “higher” education (where postmodernist
educators pronounce that “Bugs Bunny is as valuable as Socrates”). His accounts of multiculturalism,
affirmative action, cultural faddishness, the erosion of the curriculum, and
many of the other ills of our educational institutions are, overall, on
target.
His
chapter titled “Cultural Fall-Deeper” is at once the most and least satisfying
part of the book. Here he attempts more
in the way of analysis and diagnosis than is undertaken elsewhere. After lancing four wrong-headed notions that
stand out among the welter of pernicious notions of the past decade, London
nevertheless finds hope in his conviction that there is more “flexibility,
fungibility, and adaptability on earth” than we might at first assume. Amidst the cultural and political decay of
the 1990s, there is yet a prospect for rebirth and renewal. This welcome spate of thoughtful reflection
both on the causes of our problems and on the potential for solutions would
have worked much better were it not immediately followed by a jarring lapse to
blast the image of a woman wearing a lacy dress with combat boots, lamenting
the manner in which women’s fashion “conveys mixed sex cues.”
Decade of Denial proved ultimately
unsatisfying to this reader as a result of its dizzying meandering from one
topic to another. For example, in the
short twenty-two pages of the “Cultural Fall-Deeper” chapter, London takes us
on a whirlwind tour of complaints about the O.J. Simpson trial, racial
double-standards, Hollywood celebrities’ propensity for adopting causes, the
loss of common sense in our society, the Marxists’ search for ways to stay in
business after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the impact of soft money on
political parties, the lack of moral perspective in most children’s books, the lack
of an historical perspective in newscasting, and the “health gestapo’s”
campaigns against tobacco and fast food.
I’ll stop here, although that means leaving off the last several topics
of the chapter.
Decade of Denial will find a large and
appreciative audience who is willing to accept the book on the terms on which
its author presents it. Many readers
are certain to applaud London’s decrial of the nation’s “precipitous slide into
vulgarity, greed, and all-around slackness.”
Many readers will also rally to his call for the nation restore its
hallmark characteristics of optimism, virtue, and a belief in merit. Nor was this often contrarian reader unmoved
by his rhetoric. My wish was only that this well-crafted rhetoric were used not
merely to compose a picture but also to analyze its composition.
William B. Allen is professor of political science
at Michigan State University.