Is America Losing Its Heart?

During the 1988 presidential campaign, Republican smear leader Lee Atwater warned George Bush that his “kinder, gentler nation” routine was nice but wouldn’t win any votes. Instead, Atwater led Bush on the warpath, attacking the Democratic opposition with every weapon in the political arsenal, from the Willie Horton/prison furlough affair to the notion that Democrats would raise taxes.

Now Atwater finds himself suffering with terminal brain cancer, and his world view has changed radically. His own kinder, gentler side is revealed in a first-person piece in Life’s February issue.

“Long before I was stuck with cancer,” he writes, “I felt something stirring in American society. It was a sense among the people of the country--Republicans and Democrats alike--that something was missing from their lives, something crucial. . . .”

“My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood.”

Atwater’s transformation has not been complete--strong conservative ideals, traces of arrogance and mean-spiritedness remain. But by some strange twist of political consultant karma, Atwater’s voice this month blends in harmoniously with a chorus of decidedly liberal magazine writers.

In the face of war, several publications are singing the same song. They argue that the United States has lost track of the human compassion and respect for care-giving that assures its survival. There are domestic battles, they suggest, that are every bit as important as those fought in the Persian Gulf.

In a package of articles titled “Fatal Distraction,” the January/February issue of Washington Monthly discusses “the big problems that go unsolved while America is obsessed with Iraq.”

In one piece, for instance, David Halberstam argues that Japan’s economic victories over the United States have been achieved in large measure because of U.S. preoccupation with foreign affairs.

America’s years of greatest glory “resulted from a time when a nation’s economic power came from its sheer physical size, (and) its natural wealth. . . .” he writes. But as the world became more crowded and complex,” the advantage was held by the more disciplined society, which wasted less and used its resources--human and natural--more carefully and skillfully.”

Perhaps the most important key to Japan’s success, Halberstam believes, is the emphasis it puts on the long-term welfare of the society as a whole, as reflected in its strong educational system.

America’s apparent contempt for education, on the other hand, reflects the ruling elite’s basic disinterest in the citizenry, he suggests, warning that a wise Establishment, “knows it isn’t good enough for just its own children to do well, to get on an elite track, because if its own children are running a country where 60% of the children cannot make it, something terrible is going to happen.”

In his introduction to the package, Editor Charles Peters urges a move toward “moral capitalism,” a capitalism informed by “conscience and human caring.” One example--examined in the magazine--would be for the insurance industry that protects corporations to be required to warn the public of certain dangers it knows about--something insurers reportedly didn’t do with either the Dalkon Shield IUD or asbestos.

The January/February In Health magazine goes further. In a cover story entitled “Liberty, Justice, and Insurance for All,” it examines Canada’s national health insurance program. While the author of the article does not draw conspicuous conclusions, he departs from our neighbor to the north with the belief that despite its problems, Canada’s health-care system is more economical and humane than what we have in the United States.

The best and most comprehensive article in this month’s spontaneously published care package, however, is hidden deep inside the January Atlantic Monthly.

“As a society,” author Suzanne Gorden writes in an excerpt from an upcoming book, “we cannot seem to muster the political will to care for the most precious things we produce--other human beings.”

Armed with enough statistics to clog a computer, she catalogues the domestic woes in the United States: impoverished children, high infant mortality, 37 million uninsured people, lousy education, dismal child care, and so forth.

Gordon’s solution is “A National Care Agenda.” And she might have used Lee Atwater as an example to illustrate the necessity for her program.

Facing death, Atwater laments in his Life article that his career robbed him of time with his children. Gordon says that “time is the main item on the national care agenda.

“The ‘80s,” Atwater writes, “were about acquiring--acquiring wealth, power, prestige. . . . But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. . . . I don’t know who will lead us through the ‘90s,” he adds, “but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul.”

All of which sounds good, but it should be noted that as his illness worsened, Atwater recalls giving George Bush this bit of advice: “Shift the national attention to foreign affairs. . . .”

REQUIRED READING

Black professor Shelby Steele is “the latest of the ‘neo-con’ twits” white imperialists have planted to distract African-Americans from their struggle against oppression, black writer Amiri Baraka says.

“Baraka has stayed too long at the barricades,” Steele replies. “There are bird droppings all over his shoulders. He’s all alone, and we can see in his dull eyes that he’s in the grip of a dead dream.”

Despite a few ad hominem jabs, the Baraka-Steele debate is powerful stuff, published in full in the February issue of Emerge.

NEW ON NEWSSTANDS

Greenpeace Magazine has been circulating among the 2 million members of that militant environmental group for some time. Now, at $1.95 a copy, it’s on sale on the newsstands. The premiere issue of the bimonthly features investigative pieces on “The Children of Chernobyl,” on the overfishing of sharks, and a how-to-stop incinerators guide. ($20 a year, Greenpeace, 1436 U St., NW, Washington. D.C. 20009)

Life magazine may go weekly. An experimental, scaled down version of the magazine will go out to a test market of subscribers and readers at large in March.