The war is the most important issue in the election, although it does not seem that many people, maybe not even George McGovern, any longer see it that way. What a band of Arab terrorists did in Munich the United States is doing daily with our bombing of North Vietnam. We are not halting Hanoi's efforts in the South—the latest Pentagon intelligence reports say as much. We are holding a nation hostage, not merely threatening to blow it up if it refuses our demands, but doing so, bit by bit. The whole process, at the present rate, may take about two years. There is talk, however, of accelerating the destruction after Election Day (if Nixon wins or if he loses?); and there is always that famous "afternoon" in which we could reduce North Vietnam to rubble.
Much of the world choked in midbreath, stunned, at Munich, yet has grown used to Vietnam. The old truth about the Big Lie—if you make it big enough you can get away with it—appears to have its parallel in the Big Terrorism.
Stewart Alsop recently devoted a column to the "dirty business" at the Watergate, the issue which the Democrats persist in considering as the Administration's Achilles' heel. It js Alsop's opinion that "what happened at the Watergate was not just another Washington mess. It was just about the scariest and nastiest thing that has happened in Washington since Joe McCarthy was in his heyday." But Alsop also recognizes the resounding lack of public concern, and he is worried. Is the public really so cynical about politicians as to accept bugging and burglary as just part of the game? "If that is so," he concludes, "the democratic political process in this country is in deadly danger."
It is hard to read such a statement without wondering just where Alsop has been for the past years. Why should the public be upset by the Watergate caper when it is by and large uninterested in the fact that one general, or maybe several, or maybe the next Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, repeatedly bombed another country without authorization, and falsified their reports? (Just the other day, Air Force General John D. Ryan informed a Senate investigating committee that he "couldn't guarantee" it "wouldn't happen again," probably a realistic assessment in the light of current events, but still a remarkable declaration for a military commander.) If the bombing of dikes and the use of weather control over Laos remain cloaked in uncertainty, the Pentagon Papers reveal that both were calmly contemplated as possible war measures by policy makers; should the public which shrugged off that get excited about bugging and burglary? The public has learned to live through outrage after outrage—covert actions, atrocities and cover-ups. Indeed it has been tutored in its unnatural calm by men like Alsop, who long caricatured the opposition to the war, called resisters cowards, and never failed to express their own doubts in terms that were "realistic" and "unsentimental."
In an article in Social Policy, S. M. Miller and Ronnie Steinberg Ratner write that just as the 1950s were the Era of American Celebration, we may now have moved into the Era of American Resignation. That resignation, which Mr. Alsop feels is so dangerous in the Watergate affair, is the same resignation which so many Americans feel about a war they can no longer justify but "well, what are you going to do? . . ." It is the same resignation which leads to the conclusion that "everything has been tried" and there is really very little we can do, as a nation, about inequality, poverty, urban blight and racial injustice.
Whether this will be the Era of American Resignation is one of the great intangible issues in the election campaign. For if that is the route we choose to go, it will indeed be because we chose. Resignation is being offered as a policy by a range of intellectuals and political advisors; it is precisely, they believe, the tonic the nation needs. I can hardly add behind which candidate these views have crystallized.
America, say the voices of Resignation, is at the end of its tether. It is a good society as far as it goes, but it no longer has the wherewithal—the money,the imagination, the social sense and flexibility—to redeem its promises in the foreseeable future. It may be able to apply a salve here or there, but truly decent housing, health care, and schooling are unlikely, indeed unrealistic goals; while almost certainly unachievable are the narrowing of the gap between races and any significant alteration of the national distribution of wealth and power.
The best thing for America, then, would be to lower our aspirations to fit our limited capacities. Lowering our aspirations, of course, must be done within the confines of the present social patterns. It does not mean, for instance, any tampering with the terrific dynamic of aspiration built into the economy, entertainment and advertising. It does not mean lowering the aspirations of the middleand upper-classes. It means learning to live with the destiny of the losers, like learning to live with Vietnam or with Watergate. That, in turn, implies a constellation of public policies and attitudes which will be examined in a further column.
