By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
A question has puzzled me in recent years: Where are the modern versions of the working-class men and women we used to see in the old Norman Rockwell covers for The Saturday Evening Post? I don’t find many clean-cut truck drivers in cloth caps looking in admiration at a family praying before their meal at the local diner, crew-cut auto mechanics with the American flag on the wall behind their workbench, genial painters dabbing meticulously to finish their work on a small-town gazebo, prim and proper file clerks taking night courses at the local college.
Rockwell’s working men and women were depictions of people you could easily picture as ushers at their church on Sunday, leaders of their town’s Boys and Girls Scouts, coaches in a Little League team, members of the American Legion or the Knights of Columbus, solid Middle Americans devoted to family, community, and country. I remember quite a few people from my boyhood years in Queens who were not far removed from the Rockwell characters.
But, I’m sorry: The blue-collar folks that I see these days are not like that; not in the main. More often than not, they are young men and women shaped by the counterculture, unkempt with bizarre tattoos and body piercings, ill-mannered, with lives in turmoil — broken marriages, illegitimate children, and drug dependencies of one sort or another — and who see nothing wrong about that.
Have I become an old curmudgeon? Maybe. But not because I am convinced that something sad has happened to younger blue-collar workers in this country. Data exist to confirm my observations. A recent syndicated column by Rich Lowry called our attention to a paper released by the National Academy of Sciences late last year, focusing on middle-aged white men in the United States.
Writes Lowry, “In the 20 years prior to 1998, their mortality rate fell about 2 percent a year, in keeping with the trend toward lower mortality in other advanced countries. Then the rates diverged. Rates kept declining in countries like France and Britain. They began increasing for middle-aged whites in the United States.”
What caused the divergence? “The slide in the wrong direction was driven by drug and alcohol poisoning, chronic liver diseases, and suicide. In 1999, middle-aged blacks had higher rates of poisoning than whites; by 2013, rates were higher for whites. Overall, mortality rates for middle-aged blacks and Hispanics have declined since 1999, as they have increased for whites.”
The problem is concentrated in the white working class: “The mortality rate for middle-aged whites with a high school degree or less has jumped since 1999; the rate for middle-aged whites with some college but not a degree stayed roughly flat; the rate for middle-aged whites with a college degree or more dropped. If there is such a thing as white privilege, no one has told less-educated whites.”
The suicide rate is especially alarming: “The most direct indicator of rising distress is that the suicide rate in the United States is at a roughly 30-year high, according to new figures from the National Center for Health Statistics. The rate increased for white middle-aged women by 80 percent from 1999-2014. The New York Times analyzed death certificates earlier this year,” discovering that “the cohort of whites aged 25-34 is the first to have higher death rates than the generation before it since the Vietnam War, and the trend is particularly pronounced among the less-educated. The rate of drug overdoses among young whites quintupled from 1999 to 2014.”
The explanation? Lowry concludes, “The white working class is dying from the effects of a long-running alienation from the mainstream of American life. As one researcher told the Times, ‘they are not in stable relationships, they don’t have jobs, they have children they can’t feed and clothe, and they have no support network.’ It is a formula for loneliness, stress, and despair.”
Lowry’s observations ring true. We are not in Norman Rockwell’s America any longer. To underscore his analysis he pointed to a Washington Post story of a woman in rural Oklahoma who died at the age of 54 of cirrhosis of the liver. She drank herself to death in despair over her life of “joblessness, of marital breakdown, of alcohol abuse, of repeated heartbreak.” At her funeral, the Post reporter observed “the plots of friends and relatives who had died at ages 46, 52, and 37.”
What Lowry sees is the same phenomenon that Charles Murray pointed to in his book Coming Apart. Murray used as an example Fishtown, a blue-collar neighborhood in Philadelphia “where women now routinely give birth out of wedlock, where less than a third of the children grow up in a household with both biological parents, where large numbers of the men are either unemployed or on disability, where drug use is rampant.”
One would think that the candidates in this year’s presidential election would be eager to propose remedies for this sad state of affairs. Some might contend that Donald Trump’s call for ending of the outsourcing of American jobs is meant to do that. There is something to that. If the demoralized young men and women that Lowry describes had to get up early each morning to report to a solid job at a local factory or mill, it would provide some structure to their lives.
But more is needed than that. We are looking at a moral crisis, not just the loss of jobs. We can’t “make American great again,” as Trump promises, without confronting that reality. You will lose your middle-class job if you lack the inner discipline to do that job well. And that will happen to the people Charles Murray and Rich Lowry describe. Norman Rockwell’s working men and women were shaped by the Christian pieties of small-town America. Remove those pieties and you get the sad characters on the television reality shows.
It is the world of drugs, sex, and rock and roll taking its toll. Heroin-addicted guitar players can go to expensive rehab clinics, and return to make a living. Hollywood leading ladies can hire nannies to take care of the children they bear out of wedlock, and still walk the red carpet. The working-class Oklahoma woman Lowry writes about, who drank herself to death, did not have those options.
Edmund Burke understood: “It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress