At 46, she had a premature senior moment the other day, referring to our “North Korean allies” on Fox TV. No big deal, but Sarah Palin has become so pervasive an image for where the country is heading that her little lapse reflects larger issues about the state of the American mind.
Government researchers report more than 45 million Americans, or 20 percent of adults, had some form of mental illness last year, with 11 million suffering from a serious condition. Surprisingly, the rate is highest for those aged 18 to 25 at 30 percent, and lowest for those 50 and older at 13.7.
Economic depression may naturally lead to psychological, but something more seems to be going on here. It is not just mental health measurements of the American mind that are troubling, but the diminishing quality of its contents.
David Brooks, in ruminating on the death of national magazines, observes that a generation ago the “self-improvement ethic” came under attack, the Emersonian idea of a “well-furnished mind.”
Men and women of character, salesman, farmer or housewife, he notes, used to “have a responsibility to be familiar with the best that has been thought and said” to spend some “leisure time sampling the great masterworks of culture” and “be conversant in philosophy, theology and the great political events of the wider world.”
This middle-brow culture fed a large publishing world in which I worked of magazines, book clubs, encyclopedia sales and shelves of popular volumes about the Great Books, Great Ideas, World History et al. All that didn’t make for great thinkers but did help create a reasonably well-informed electorate
In those days, columnists for mass women’s magazines were the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Mead and Clare Booth Luce. Not a Sarah Palin in the lot.
Now all that has been swept away by a new culture that, as Brooks notes, values hipness, not class as “self-esteem hurricanes blew across the landscape. You don’t have to read or listen to boring stuff to possess character. You are wonderful just the way you are.”
MORE.
(Holiday bonus: Great leftover turkey recipe here.)