Dying of Despair: Slouching Towards Bethlehem Fifty Years Later
It was time that saw unemployment cut in half, the S&P triple off its generational low to record highs, positive GDP growth for 26 of 28 quarters, and housing costs stabilize. Domestic oil production rose to forty-three year highs to keep gas prices manageable. It was at time where those in the privilege class, those in their peak years, should have been basking in affluence. Instead they were dying of despair, doubling suicide rates, reaching new highs in opioid consumption and keeping the toddler in the car seat.
In my despair, I turned to literature for condolence.
The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and common place reports of a causal killing and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that held the society together. People were missing. Children were missing. Parents were missing. Those left behind filed the desultory missing-persons reports, then moved on themselves.
It was not a country in open revolution. It was not country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and G.N.P high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been spring of brave hope and national promise, but it was not. All that seemed clear was that at some point we had aborted ourselves and butchered the job, and because nothing else seemed so relevant I decided to go to San Francisco. San Francisco was where the social hemorrhaging was showing up. San Francisco was where the missing children were gathering and calling themselves “hippies.” When I first went to San Francisco in the cold late spring of 1967, I did not even know what I wanted to find out, and so I just stayed around a while and, and made a few friends.
So Joan Didion begins Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which captured a feeling at the time, a feeling not unlike our own.
The center was not holding
Didion opens a 44 page piece with a non-descript, short passive sentence. But the sentence invokes one great text and sets up a riff on another. The Second Coming, Keats' poem about his despair following World War One, captures a familiar feeling: Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. The first stanza reads a list of wrongs, like Didion’s first paragraph. Didion’s title calls Keats and her first line invokes him. Will the collapse birth a new beast?
The New Journalism focused on narrative. The author played Nick Caraway, a minor character narrating a great tragedy. A role fitting our human instinct. We make stories to explain events. We have a role in the story, but not as the prime mover. We make creation stories and fertilization stories. We encounter facts counter to those stories; we make new stories. The new stories override the old stories, the culture shifts, religion evolves, perspectives change. The facts haven’t changed, our perception has. Stories shape our perception. We complete our understanding when we fashion a narrative, which incorporates the new facts. Sometimes we play the sole narrator, sometimes through multiple stories we arrive at the same point: the collective consciousness.
It was
Charles Dickens opened A Tale of Two Cites with an “it was” list — it was the best of times it was the worst of times, it was the season of hope it was the season despair -and so on. But our school teachers discouraged “It was” sentences. Passive sentences, bad. “To be” sentences — best to avoid. What is “it”? Didion opens with the “it was” beat for three sentences in each of the first two paragraphs.
In The Death and Life of Great Cities, Jane Jacobs testifies to the torn cities, while celebrating cohesion within her village within a city, her Greenwich Village. Jacobs describes how the bonds that held the center together broke: the rites of passage and the initiation traditions. The rich life of the tenement and the neighborhood watch vanished. Recent studies confirm that integrated neighborhoods have less crime. But we grow stratified — Trump voters talked less to Hillary voters, than Bush voters talked to Bill voters.
In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam announces the death of social life America that followed Jacob’s urban decline. Social capital evaporated with a flight from the torn cities to the safe suburbs. But a cul-de-sac cannot raise a child.
As snakes
Snakes don’t care. Cold-blooded means more than thermoregulation. Predators, loners, schemers, lurkers, Slytherin — the youth sloughing and slouching towards Bethlehem. Waiting to be born. Shedding skin like snake, a little consonance and imagery. A rebirth like a new spring, late and cold. Back to our reptilian roots.
In Loneliness, John Cacioppo proves loneliness drives declines in sociability's other ingredients — social support, openness, social skills, self esteem, optimism, and positive mood. Loneliness increases anxiety, anger and shyness. In other words, loneliness drives more loneliness.
The loneliness cycle causes health issues. Lonely people eat fattier foods, workout less in middle age, and wake-up with more cortisol. Cortisol constricts blood vessels. Studies show increase cortisol levels cause mutations at the cellular level. Loneliness changes our DNA.
The games that held society together
Jacobs found the village’s life in sidewalk games and street ball, Putnam found us too self absorbed to teach others how to play in our solitary leisure.
I had a friend, not a jock, who remarked that kids who don’t play Little League are not well-adjusted. I had a coworker, an egomaniac, who shared his distaste for team sports on Superbowl Monday. Kids who play Little League, like adult kids who play major league baseball, can be self-centered egomaniacs, but they know that there is no “I” in team, even if there is an “m-e”.
Our missing
Missing or misplaced appears five times in the opening, evoking passive loss. Children appears three times, missing and drifting. Didion plays with “child”. The children leave home to become hippies, a three-year-old starts a fire, and a five-year-old drops acid while reading a comic book.
Desultory
We don’t use desultory often. We find its meaning ambiguous and sound puzzling. Desultory can mean without plan or without enthusiasm or occurring randomly. Where the desultory papers filed without enthusiasm or haphazardly? Routinely, the only adverb in the paragraph, evokes a lack of enthusiasm, but not haphazardness.
It was not
In open rebellion and under siege, the second paragraph follows the first paragraph’s opening template. The sentence pushes forward, the question that the opening non-descriptive past tense sentences begged — where are you and what are you referring to? The third sentence answers patiently: the United States of America, the full name, and time — the cold late spring of 1967.
G.N.P
Gross National Product measures the production of nationals, wherever nationals work. Since nationality of corporations is a fiction layered on a fiction — corporations aren’t people and don’t have citizenship, Gross Domestic Product — the production within the domestic borders, is the better and contemporary number — our borders are definite, concrete at points. Before globalization, this distinction mattered less, and our government used GNP. We don’t punctuate TLAs anymore either.
Didion gives few verifiable facts. She offers a few relative generalizations on the economy and weather.
In 1966 GNP grew over 8%, but slowed to about 2.5% the next year. Market historians classify 1966–1982 as a long bear market.
New York had a cold spring. A March blizzard brought below average temperatures to April and May. But Chicago had the hottest day of the year in May and San Francisco reported an average spring. Weather is relative and often a trivial conversion, but Didion uses it to set a mood — like the October Sana Ana wind in Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream or the hot dry wind of a Colorado summer in her John Wayne love song.
Facts are not stories. You remember your feeling, the characters and what happened.
We had aborted ourselves and butchered the job.
Abortion doesn’t belong in sales pitches or local ledes. Murdered, maimed, committed suicide don’t ignite abortion’s political fire. No, we aborted ourselves. Worse, we butchered it. Like a failed back-alley abortion we are hemorrhaging, bleeding to death. We had one job.
I decided to go to San Francisco
Didion’s new journalism style puts her into the narrative. The last four sentences use San Francisco — twice as the subject and twice as the direct object. She finds San Fransico emblematic of the national despair. Her San Francisco would be our Las Vegas. She doesn’t break the paragraph because the first three sentences are about our country and the last four are about San Francisco; San Francisco is about the country.
When I first went to San Francisco in the cold late spring of 1967 I did not even know what I wanted to find out
The last line echoes the Bell Jar’s first line — It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed in the Rosenbergs, and I did not know what I was doing in New York. Didion tells us about the friends she made in San Fran, like Esther Greenwood tells us us about the deviant Southern belle, the bigoted Kansas conservative and the devil in Prada.
Christopher Robbin
The piece shifts — a poem in the form of a missing person’s report that hangs on a telephone pole on Haight Street in San Francisco. The anonymous author lost her Christopher Robin. Didion plays on the missing children report. She looks for the missing persons, the lost children.
From the sixteen-year old runaways, to the five-year old on acid, to our own butchered abortion, the whole piece is a loss of innocence, and losing Christopher Robbin conveys that loss through metaphor.
Didion looks for Christopher Robbin and finds Deadeye. Deadeye, a drug dealing biker, gives some drive to the narrative of meeting people doing drugs — the friends she made. Didion captures their dialogue and getting high, the pasts they run from and they futures they put off. They don’t work. Getting high doesn’t lead to anything productive, like writing or art.
Didon’s friends play out the pathologies that flow from a conformist society. The necessities of a World War, a war on Korean peninsula, another in Southeast Asia and a cold shadow war cultivated conformity. Conformity, a basic social pressure, has always run strong in America. Cotton Mather had his Salem witches. Nathaniel Hawthorne pinned his Scarlet Letter on Hester Prynne. And Arthur Miller reflected his Crucible back to Mather — a full circle of puritanical conformity.
Prior wars initiated the surviving youth into society, but by 1967 the faults of urban flight propagated rebellion. The soldiers who came back bought a home in the suburbs or went to college on the GI Bill. The 1967 generation used that infrastructure to rebel. The generation found nurture on college campuses and refuge in torn out cities.
2017’s Pathologies
The dying of despair study: Mortality and Morbidity in he 21 Century links our current phenomenon to generational movements, namely the decline of the white “working” class.
What our data show is that the pattern of mortality and morbidity for non-white Hispanics without a college degree moved together of lifetimes and birth cohorts, and that they move in tandem with other social dysfunctions, including the decline of marriage, social isolation, and detachment from the labor force…. Ultimately, we see our story as about the collapse of the white, high school educated, working class after its heyday in the early 1970s, and the pathologies that accompany that decline.
To skin it another way: loneliness is killing these people.
The study charts the loss of sociability for high school educated whites. Difficulty relaxing, mental distress, body-mass index, difficulty socializing, sciatic pain, and chronic pain has increased. As have people at risk for heavy drinking, not in the labor force, never married, and not married. Respondents report more pain — physical and mental. Pain means prescription drugs.
High school educated whites report less social connections — families and community. Community is rooted on our DNA. Everyone needs to feel socially connected. Low social connections create measurable health defects. Low social connections in mass lead to isolation and war.
As Victor Frankl wrote- the salvation of man is in love and through love. The high-school only whites miss deep interpersonal connections. Minorities may have churches and community support systems, college educated whites have alumni networks and fraternities, but what about the blue collar whites?
Dependent on the government, unable to maintain a family unit, drugged up with no life purpose, high school whites miss the conduits for socialization. Loneliness leads to loneliness, despair to death. Only real friendship, love, and community activities offer the prescription, therapy and hope. Hope that a second coming will not come.
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