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The young may be absorbing the new atmospherics from movies and TV. Five years ago, the nation watched a crop of elegiac Viet Nam movies such as Coming Home and The Deer Hunter. At the end of The Deer Hunter, when the hero has returned home, the crowd in a dingy bar in a Pennsylvania steel town sings God Bless America, but sings it so thinly and tentatively that the hymn becomes not an affirmation of the nation but a wistful dirge, the memory of something that the war destroyed. Today, the tones of patriotism in entertainment are loud and clear and sometimes tinny with the sound of jingo.
Television has Call to Glory, a sort of military soap about a fighter pilot and his family in the Kennedy era. The Right Stuff was not enough to give Senator John Glenn the Democratic nomination, but it was a fine glorification of the early days of the American space program.
One fascinating exercise was called Red Dawn. In the guise of a sort of right-wing adolescent version of For Whom the Bell Tolls, it is an allegory designed subtly to reverse the moral onus of the Viet Nam War. The U.S. is invaded by Communist forces (Cubans and Nicaraguans in the service of the Soviets), and the teen-age American heroes and heroines take to the Colorado hills to form a guerrilla band. The Americans become the Viet Cong, the little guys, the underdogs fighting for their own land. The Soviets become the oppressive great power (the Americans in Viet Nam), the occupiers with superior forces and sinister helicopter gunships. Thus the guilt belongs with the Soviets, and an odd kind of subliminal absolution descends upon the American viewing audience.
The potential power of mood, of attitude, is immense. "Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm," Emerson wrote. But Americans sometimes consider matters of mood to be unmanly, or fraudulent, or self-deceptive. "It's almost like the old ghost dances that the Indians used to go through in hopes that they could bring back what they had lost," says Carol Stack, professor of public policy at Duke University. "People today are performing their own version of the ghost dance, only it's not called a ghost dance any more. It's called being patriotic." Americans tend to deny that their own moods matter. Still, it is collective psychology--collec tive mood--that drives the economy up and down, and not the other way around.
"America is back," Reagan liked to tell his campaign audiences. It is true, up to a point. In many ways, the nation is psychologically back. It inhabits itself again, more or less comfortably. One of the most encouraging aspects of the current self-confidence is that it signals an acceptance of great changes. "Healthy societies, like individuals, need periods of rest and < consolidation after periods of strenuous activism and crisis," says Jeffrey Alexander, a sociologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. "Many of our social critics are selling the American people short with this notion that the upbeat mood is some kind of pseudo-event engineered by Reagan and the money he spent on commercials."