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Now there is more disposition to believe that problems can be solved. Goethe once said, "America, you have it better." The new American spirit agrees. The American renewal is a reassertion of man as shaper of the world rather than--the '70s model--as victim or passive partner.
The Reagan idea, congenial to people such as Ueberroth and the yuppies, reverts to an American model in which the individual was free to move relatively untrammeled across the landscape. It is a model especially useful now, at a moment when the country needs entrepreneurial imagination, new forms, new ideas, new combinations. During the '60s, the baby boomers substantially lost their respect for the authority of the older generation ("Don't trust anyone over 30," said the arrogant children), and the fact gives them a certain creative freedom now. Many of them are working, after all, in high-tech fields that are new territory. Experience is not of much use there. The past does not help. In their ambitious embrace of the future, the yuppies are very American in the traditional way. They proclaim again the unique American sense of pioneering. Jefferson said the old world of Europe was disease and decay; the future lay in the new. Henry Ford uttered a succinct American formula: "History is more or less bunk."
A "national mood" is a mosaic of subjectivities. It is certainly not unanimous. Ask an Arizona copper miner out of work three years if he is feeling buoyant about America. Ask a Nebraska farmer who has just lost his land to a bank foreclosure. Ask Tony, a Hispanic veteran in a city-run shelter in Harlem. Part of his intestine is missing, left in Viet Nam. "I know they don't owe me nothing," he says. "But I have the feeling they do. When the Kennedys were around, it was a whole different country."
"Everyone is worried about his job," says Verdo Ligon, the business agent for a woodcutters' local union in Roseburg, Ore. "The lumber industry may go down in its entirety. People are out there trying to feed their families." In Oakland, the Rev. Willie J. Smith runs the Pilgrim Rest in a mostly black neighborhood. Says he: "The Administration counted on the trickle-down effect. They said, 'Let's give 'em the Hollywood approach.' But the people don't get turned on by whether or not they are going to have enough money to buy the Mercedes-Benzes they see on television. They want enough to buy grits to feed their children."
The mentality behind the American renewal owes something to a habit of extremism, or at least exaggeration, that seems bred into some of the baby boomers. In the '60s, the U.S. seemed to many of them the worst place in the world: "Amerika." Now it seems to many, or at least to their younger siblings, the best place in the world.