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America's new sentimental journey, believes Psychologist Gordon, may spring from the active efforts of many Americans to find something better than "the depersonalization of sex and relationships" that has occurred in recent years. Others think that, in some mysterious way, it is related to a conservative trend in national politics; even Jimmy Carter, with his homespun ways, kissin'-cousin courtliness and studied gentility, is given credit for restoring some sentiment to the land. To many, the search for form and formality, the yearning for tradition and sentiment, are part of the mysterious emotional process by which the nation is healing itself from the bruises and fatigue accumulated during recent years. Those years produced, in numbing succession, the civil rights upheavals, riots, assassinations, the Viet Nam War, Watergate, oceans of porn and a life-style whose followers were seldom tempted to distinguish self-indulgence from self-realization.
It is easy to challenge the description of the current mood as a return to romance, if only because America's essentially romantic character has never really been in abeyance. Even in a basically romantic country, however, romanticism has its highs and its lows, and right now it is flying high. Besides, what hap pier condition can visit a land whose national ideals and myths are known as the American Dream? Ah, perhaps that is it, the exact word to describe the new sentimental journey on which the U.S. appears to have embarked: dream. Americans have finally begun to dream again—and high time too, after nearly a generation of nightmares.