With So Much, ‘Why Do We Feel So Bad?’

President Carter got the tar knocked out of him for speaking of malaise in 1980. But now, 12 years later, even Forbes magazine is questioning America’s psychic health, wondering on the cover of its Sept. 14 issue, “Why Do We Feel So Bad?”

Could it be that Reagan’s “morning in America” is over?

Forbes says no but offers plenty of commentary to the contrary.

This ad-fat 75th anniversary issue is impressive. The highlight is analysis of the topic by top-notch writers.

For example, UCLA’s James Q. Wilson says, in a well-reasoned piece, that while America has become prosperous, prosperity doesn’t necessarily deliver all the goods: Americans believed “that if you went to school, worked hard, saved money, bought a home and raised a family, you would enjoy the good life.”

They were right, he says, but not about the attendant belief that communities as a whole would improve along with the lot of individuals.

Novelist John Updike jumps into the discussion with an eloquent catalogue of how society has fallen short of our expectations.

In his Pennsylvania hometown, for example, “the municipal high school was a kind of cathedral, looming ornately above its neighborhood--not merely constructed, but constructed with a flourish that showed where the society placed its pride. . . . The importance of our education was a central strand of the town fabric. . . . The school system and its satellites were the factories, as it were, wherein Americans were made.”

But now, he says--without making reference to California--”Public schools, running on tightened budgets, can do little more than physically restrain the inwash of hopeless, brutalized adolescents . . . to whom society offers little but eventual shelter within the world’s biggest penal system.”

Another view comes from Henry Louis Gates Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois professor of the humanities at Harvard, who argues that “for black America, these are the worst of times . . . and the best of times.”

Gates acknowledges that “the most pernicious forms of racism--the stereotyping of an individual by the color of (one’s) skin--still pervade white America.”

But he also notes that despite overwhelming odds, “Afro-America’s affluent elite is larger than it has ever been--a legacy of the post-civil-rights era and just the kind of corporate and governmental programs of intervention that have fallen into such disfavor of late.”

Blacks who make it, he says, do so through education and family and community support. But there is a longstanding attitude that to make it in America is to forfeit what it means to be black. And he takes exception to that.

“As crazy as this sounds, recent surveys of young black kids reveal a distressing pattern. Far too many say that succeeding is ‘white,’ education is ‘white,’ aspiring and dreaming are ‘white,’ believing you can make it is ‘white’. . . . We need more success individually and collectively, not less.”

Novelist Saul Bellow presents what might be the most intricate and intriguing analysis, warning that Americans are ripe for manipulation.

“There is simply too much to think about” these days, he writes. “This is what makes packaged opinion so attractive.”

But alas: “Reading and hearing what most editorialists and TV commentators tell us about the Los Angeles crisis, for instance, forces us to recognize that few opinion makers are able to think at all. To leave matters in their hands is an acute danger,” Bellow says.

But enough ruminating. Forbes is a business magazine, and what counts is the bottom line.

Forbes Editor James W. Michaels points out that by most criteria, life has improved greatly since the good old days.

In 1921, for instance, the average work week was 60 hours and “the most common American household appliance was a woman, who worked a lot more than 60 hours in her home.” Toilet paper was a luxury, and only half the homes in America had toilets.

The magazine backs this perspective with a battery of colorful charts, some of which seem to choose their facts carefully to bolster the point.

One, for instance, shows that CEOs’ pay--which almost doubled, from about $500,000 in 1970 to $900,400 or so now--doesn’t compare in growth to pro baseball players’ salaries, which jumped from $100,000 to $900,000 over roughly the same period. And what about those poor doctors, who, on the same chart, putt along like a flat EKG at a mere $150,000?

Other charts, however, support the notion that things aren’t entirely peachy.

The poverty level, for instance, decreased through the 1960s but then leveled off. Homicides and the rate of incarceration have shot up, as has the number of lawyers per 100,000 population.

All in all, though, Forbes, which has been known to suffer from a cynical pro-business Pollyannaism, puts a happy face on it all: “We are suffering,” the editors assert, “the social equivalent of postpartum blues, a feeling exacerbated by a downbeat media. . . . In 2017, when we celebrate Forbes’ 100th anniversary, our standard of living will be infinitely richer, more varied than it is today.”

NEW ON NEWSSTANDS

* “To launch a new magazine in 1992 calls for a stiff drink and a fine cigar,” says Marvin R. Shanken, introducing his new Cigar Aficionado magazine.

Cigars are status symbols, and this magazine clearly hopes not only to encourage puffing, but to puff egos--or, as the editor puts it, “to awaken and explore many of the pleasures that drive successful men.”

The large-format quarterly is beautifully designed and photographed, and the writing is solid. Judging from the premiere issue--which, in addition to cigar stuff, includes articles on food, wine, travel, Ridley Scott’s new film “1492” and collecting Lalique crystal--it might also attract a few non-stogie buffs.

Maybe they’ll persuade the editors to lay off the poor persecuted cigar smoker routine, as exemplified in stories by the Los Angeles Times’ David Shaw and author Gay Talese.

Talese thinks that maybe the people--mainly women, he says--who don’t like being fumigated by his secondhand smoke are anti-male or have Freudian hang-ups.

Woe is he! His “paranoia” about the “neo-Puritanism” that discourages his public smoking “does not evaporate even when I take a final puff and toss the butt into the street. . . .”

Can we expect the next issue to include his views on the intolerant boors who would deprive him the joy of littering?

(Cigar Aficionado, $12.98 a year, P.O. Box 3028, Southeastern, Pa. 19398; (800) 622-2062)

* Who knows what Far Out is about?

The subtitle offers some hint: “The Unexplainable, the Unusual and the Unreal.” As do the contents: “Ghost Lights, Mystery Trains and Bog Monsters,” and “Behind Hangar 18 with Speed Metal’s Megadeath,” for example.

Executive Editor William L. Moore hints that the new quarterly is about UFOology with a semi-rational twist: “Perhaps it is best to maintain a skeptical posture toward accepting any collect calls from presumably benevolent Space Brothers, and seek knowledge of extraterrestrials through safer channels.”

And then there’s Co-Executive Editor Michael D’s interview with an aged Los Angeles space cadet, who communicates regularly with Val Thor, the Prince of Venus.

Whatever it is, the writing is lively and hip, and the graphics are crackerjack.

Maybe in this post-modern age, about doesn’t matter much.

(Far Out, $2.95 an issue, 9171 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 300, Beverly Hills, Calif. 90210)

* Events USA is a bimonthly travel magazine with a focus: It lists all the best festivals, fairs, barbecues and bashes upcoming in America that people might want to work into their itineraries.

At the front of the book, for instance, a “Big Picture” map lists events from the Hooters 500 NASCAR races in Hampton, Ga., to the Athabascan Fiddling Festival in Fairbanks, Alaska.

The features are fairly predictable. For instance, there’s a better chance that People magazine would miss the Fergie flap than Events USA would pass up the photo-ops at the Albuquerque Hot Air Balloon Fiesta.

But there are also surprises. How many readers knew, for example, that each year from October to December hundreds of bald eagles arrive at a river near Helena, Mont., to feast on salmon?

Tourist bureau influence is evident, but the magazine rises well above the sort of PR tackiness that might bog down such a publication. Attractive and easy to navigate, it does what it’s supposed to do.

(Events USA, $15 a year, P.O. Box 3000, Denville, N.J. 07834; (212) 684-2222)