America's Upbeat Mood

By KURT ANDERSEN

COVER STORY

Once again, people feel good about their lives and their country

"I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy... It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. .. The confidence that we have always had as a people is not simply some romantic dream or a proverb in a dusty book that we read just on the Fourth of July . . . Confidence has defined our course . . . We know the strength of America. We are strong. We can regain our unity. We can regain our confidence . . . Let us commit ourselves together to a rebirth of the American spirit."

When he gave his so-called malaise speech on television five years ago, Jimmy Carter wanted to inspire. But many Americans felt the President was blaming them for his failures of leadership. The hortatory language was a little bewildering too. A crisis of confidence? The heart and soul of our national will? A rebirth of the American spirit? A great many citizens had already come to think of the President as a bit of an oddball, attuned more to metaphysics than to politics. After that impassioned, fretful analysis of the country's bad mood in the summer of 1979, his reputation never really recovered.

But it is clear now that Jimmy Carter was on to something real and powerful. Americans did feel defensive and dispirited about their nation: cynical about its faded grandeur, alarmed by what felt like the beginnings of economic chaos and despairing of prospects for improvement. The notion of even a quiet national contentment and pride seemed quaint, implausible, slightly foolish.

Not any more. Put on the Willie Nelson record. Turn up Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring. Woody Guthrie will do fine too, and even John Philip Sousa is permissible. The Zeitgeist has turned zesty. The U.S. is at peace, and between rising employment and fading inflation, the economy is aglow. Americans are feeling more sanguine and comfortable about their country than they have felt in two decades. A rebirth of the American spirit, as Carter dearly hoped five summers ago? It sure feels like it. Even the walkouts called against General Motors last weekend were reluctant and selective (see ECONOMY & BUSINESS). "People seem to be enjoying themselves more," says Mel Hagen, 35, an auto worker from Keego Harbor, Mich., a working-class town outside Detroit. "Things aren't as tight as they once were." Homosexual Activist Harry Britt, a member of the San Francisco board of supervisors, also senses a change. Says he: "I haven't found anybody who doesn't feel good about being an American right now." The new mood has become a central element in the presidential campaign. Ronald Reagan has tried to capture the flag by stressing the nation's economic recovery and his huge military buildup. Most Reagan campaign events are masterpieces in Yankee Doodle pandering. The Democrats made a point of waving Old Glory at their convention in San Francisco. "There is not one party that is patriotic and one that is not," insists Walter Mondale.

The ebullient surge did not happen overnight, but in fits and starts from the mid-1970s onward. After Viet Nam and Watergate, America seemed to have lost much of its confidence and moral energy. The nation's mood, as measured for TIME by the polling firm Yankelovich, Skelly & White, reached a low point in 1975. During the Bicentennial celebrations, all sorts of Americans were surprised to find themselves feeling a frisson of harmless patriotic pleasure. Between June and September 1976, the surveys showed a 10% jump in the "state of the nation index," the fastest rise recorded by Yankelovich before or since. Carter's improbable, romantic victory sent spirits higher still, to a level not reached again until this year. But after his first year, the mood started to sour, declining further after the American embassy staff was imprisoned in Tehran.

Days after the hostages were freed, a New York Times editorial marveled that they had "returned to a different country than the one they knew only 14 months ago." Declared the Times: "Now the pride and patriotism that many people tried to unfurl during the Bicentennial have erupted without embarrassment. It's not as though there were no more divisions in the country ... But on every side, there has suddenly appeared a need to express national unity, to demonstrate an unashamed patriotism." From the outset, Reagan benefited from this yearning: the hostages left Iran on his Inauguration Day.

In 1981, after a pair of Navy F-14s blasted two Libyan jets over the Gulf of Sidra, the jolt of home-team pride was strong, and the taking of tiny Grenada last year prompted more V-G-day celebrating than seemed strictly appropriate. Jesse Jackson's presidential candidacy, despite the antagonisms it sometimes stirred, was a salutary symbol of black progress. The Democrats' historic nomination of a woman for Vice President added to the political selfesteem. The high spirits surrounding the Olympic Games struck some observers as jingoistic and ungracious. But with American athletes winning nearly everything in sight, the country was able to see itself as it liked: wholesome, powerful, a touch rowdy. Americans could celebrate as they had not done in a long time.

In The Confidence Gap: Business, Labor, and Government in the Public Mind, published just last year, Stanford University Sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset and Political Analyst William Schneider examined reams of survey research and concluded that an American malaise, a loss of faith in social institutions, was continuing unabated. Now, however, Lipset's view of the national climate has changed strikingly. "I think it will take some years for Americans to have digested the disappointment they felt over Viet Nam and Watergate," he says, "but I think we are witnessing a fundamental shift toward more positive attitudes about American institutions." Two-thirds of the respondents in a TIME-Yankelovich survey last month felt that things were going "very well" or "fairly well" in the U.S. It was the most upbeat reading since the Carter honeymoon in 1977.

For many people, the improvement is a quiet, half-conscious affair. For many others, patriotism seems the natural, handy outlet for America's jaunty spirits and prosperous circumstances. Like any other kind of love, it is an emotional catchall for all sorts of hankerings and other sentiments. "Whenever I go to Dodger Stadium, I feel very patriotic, so proud to be an American," explains Susanne Anderson, 36, a Las Vegas casino bartender. "Nowhere but in America can thousands of working-class people go on their days off and drink beer and wave pennants and watch a baseball game." Nowhere but in America--and Japan and South Korea and the Dominican Republic and Cuba, and so what? Let her feel patriotic when she watches the Dodgers play ball. The Olympic torch had nothing to do with patriotism either; indeed, it is a symbol of supranationalism. But as the torch zigzagged among them from east to west this summer, people waved flags, cried and sang America the Beautiful.

Once ignited, a sense of optimism (like pessimism) can be self-fulfilling: the U.S. has cheered up partly because enough Americans willed such a change. It is the power of positive thinking writ large. "Magic takes over from reason at such times," wrote Author Gail Sheehy last month in a paean to the new mood. Christopher Reed, writing more acidly about the Olympics for Britain's weekly Spectator, found Americans "feeling proud about their pride." Is the bonhomie real, or is the country engaged in massive autosuggestion? When it comes to a subject as ineffable as the mood of America, sharp distinctions between public perception and palpable reality are not possible, and may be moot. "Sometimes I have to wonder whether the facts are really there," says Harvard University Theologian Harvey Cox, "or whether this is simply a note of wishful thinking. But the very fact that we would like things to be better is what's important."

Not everyone is caught up in the buoyant mood, of course. Social Historian Christopher Lasch dismisses the phenomenon as gassy and unreal. "There seems to be a concerted effort in the media," Lasch says, "to present this view of a vast improvement in the public morale. But I doubt that it's much more than an emerging consensus in the media." Farmer Ron Nelson of Columbus, Kans., harbors a similar skepticism. "I have a wait-and-see attitude," he says. "It's easy to see flag waving during the Olympics, with all those medals and all. Patriotism was promoted during the Olympics. But do we have it because we feel it or because they tell us to feel it?" Hodding Carter III, State Department spokesman in the Carter Administration, believes that there is indeed a new swagger in the American walk but is not sure he approves. "Patriotism is back," he wrote last month in the Wall Street Journal, "as everyone seems fond of saying these days, and more power to it--I think. Depending on how you define it, patriotism can be a healthy love of country or something quite different and disturbing."

For many blacks and poor people, all the sunny talk seems irrelevant, almost mocking. According to the Yankelovich survey for TIME in August, 71% of whites said they felt that things in the U.S. were going well; non-whites were evenly divided on the question. Furthermore, nonwhites in the survey (58% to 38%) agreed with the statement that "the country is in deep and serious trouble," while whites just as strongly (33% to 60%) disagreed. According to the poll, cheerfulness about the country is directly related to income level. Father Charles B. Woodrich presides over Denver's largest ghetto parish, and operates a breadline for 500 people a day. Declares Woodrich: "Nobody says things are better. If we're in an upbeat situation, I think it's a mystical experience that cannot be defined." In Pontiac, Mich., black Bookkeeper Mary Williams, 55, lives in a neat, integrated neighborhood. She is not poor, but neither is she glad about the state of the nation. A New York Times survey last fall found that only 35% of blacks said they were "very patriotic," compared with 56% of whites. In Fairmont, W. Va., Olympic Gymnast Mary Lou Retton's home town, people are brimming with pride, of course. Yet unemployment is running at 10%, and as Mayor Gregory Hinton says, "Patriotism does not feed the family."

With his uncanny knack for conveying a sense of some simpler, lovelier, bygone American age, Reagan has encouraged the notion that happy days are here again. "Reagan is our past speaking to us," says Political Historian Garry Wills, "and we want to remember with him." Furthermore, as Britain's weekly Economist noted, "Republicans have no hangups about patriotism." The conservative President in particular has always been fluent and profuse with the imagery and language of conventional, Decoration Day patriotism. Says Frank Quam, a farm-management teacher in Stewartville, Minn.: "Reagan is of that nature, the flag waving, and people like that." The Democrats, for their part, have a very tricky path to navigate. In a holdover from the supercharged politics of the Viet Nam War, many Democrats have been ill at ease with flag waving and the military trappings of national pride. Moreover, while Mondale must appeal to public worries about the monstrous deficit and the Reagan Administration's foreign policy stumbling, he cannot afford to seem a grim, party-pooping pessimist.

In an interview on an NBC news program last week, Mondale was pressed to cite one positive accomplishment by the current Administration. He could come up with no particulars, until, finally, he admitted, "I think that Reagan's tendency to give an optimistic feeling about the country is good." Mondale grants Reagan more credit for whipping up American optimism than do many analysts. Declares a White House adviser: "It's less a case of Reagan's having caused the mood than it is a matter of his reinforcing it." In describing Reagan's accomplishment, observers seem drawn to oceanic metaphors. "Ronald Reagan is riding a crest," suggests Duke University Vice Chancellor Joel Fleishman, "the crest of a phenomenon he did not wholly create, but which he exploits." Neoconservative Editor Norman Podhoretz agrees: "It's a wave that's been building, and Reagan has been appealing to it. It's a matter of the man meeting the moment."

Whether bringing Lenny Skutnik, the Air Florida crash hero, to his State of the Union address at the Capitol or making time for a photo session with Retton and the other Olympic medalists, Reagan manages to come off like a kindly Uncle Sam. Even when his rhetoric turns maudlin and manipulative, he seems sincere, for the President believes the patriotic pieties simply and intensely. He gives himself goose bumps. In a speech at the American Legion convention two weeks ago, Reagan went right to the heart of the matter. "What a change from only a few years ago, when patriotism seemed so out of style," he said. "I'm not sure anyone really knows how the new patriotism came on so quickly, or when and how it actually began . . . Well, wherever the new patriotism came from, there can be no gainsaying its arrival." Then in his remarkable pastiche of a peroration, he quoted country-and-western song lyrics ("Cuz the flag still stands for freedom, and they can't take that away"), recalled the Grenada invasion, the Olympics and his D-day anniversary visit to Normandy and told an anecdote about how the dying Ulysses S. Grant saluted a battle-scarred Union veteran ("as Grant's wife and the doctor wept").

In Reagan's campaign advertising, the theme of renewed national confidence is sounded more subtly and soothingly. "Americans are like any people," suggests Sociologist Lipset. "When they go to the doctor, no matter what is wrong with them, they want the doctor to tell them they're O.K." Last week the Reagan campaign bought 30 minutes of prime time on ABC, CBS, NBC and three large cable networks (total bill: $750,000) to air what may be the slickest, most ambitious political ad ever made. The centerpiece of the commercial was the 18-minute film used to introduce Reagan at the Republican Convention; the remainder consisted of highlights from his speech and footage of the delirious reception he received from the delegates. The film was studded with staged vignettes of American life: a smiling old couple, a wedding, a sunrise, a house under construction. Over one, an announcer says, "America's back." Explains Phil Dusenberry, a Madison Avenue creative director and Reagan advertising strategist: "That is what we have done in the past with Pepsi, to elicit a sense of feeling. It is a sense of optimism, a sense of patriotism."

Earlier this month, Geraldine Ferraro spoke contemptuously of Reagan's "selfconscious patriotism that's made on Madison Avenue." But the Democrats also are scrambling to embrace the potent symbolism of red-white-and-blue traditionalism. As Ferraro and Mondale paraded down Manhattan's Fifth Avenue on Labor Day morning, a brass band walked near by, playing Sousa marches. At the Democratic Convention in July, the San Francisco Girls and Boys Chorus sang America the Beautiful, This Land Is Your Land, while the delegate horde turned the convention floor into a blur of red, white and blue. Convention Guest Mark Green, co-author of There He Goes Again: Ronald Reagan's Reign of Error, confessed to an awkward moment: "At first I didn't want to wave a flag. But on the last night of the convention I was waving two of them." The party was demonstrating to itself and to the public that Democrats were no longer embarrassed by corny displays of national zeal. "I think that the Democratic Convention showed that we don't own the flag," said White House Pollster Richard Wirthlin during the G.O.P.'s gathering in Dallas. "I felt one of the most successful things was their ability to [evoke] traditional values, and that included not only patriotism, but family, neighborhood, the value of hard work--campaign themes we've used with a vengeance."

The Democrats have a grudging but intense awareness of the nation's new mood and its political importance. "This is a country that wants to believe in itself," says Mondale Pollster Peter Hart. "We know Americans are more confident about things, that we're headed in the right direction, more than any time since 1972. We know that exists." Thus, he explains, "what we're trying to say is 'Elect us because we can conquer the challenges ahead.' This is not a negative message. It's saying, 'Here's what we can do.' "

But with his natural reserve and sometimes phlegmatic manner, Mondale seems ill equipped to drive the inspirational message home Democratic Strategist Robert Strauss says that his man's empathy is not transmitted well on TV. "When you get past the show-biz part of it and talk about family values and American values," Strauss says, "Mondale doesn't have to take a back seat to anyone. But he doesn't handle the tear in the eye anywhere near as well. It's like everything else. It depends on how you do it." New York Governor Mario Cuomo showed in his keynote speech to the convention that the Democrats can convey an uplifting vision of America: his notion is nation as family, in contrast to every-man-for-himself G.O.P. individualism.

Not only has Mondale been unable to posit a specifically Democratic optimism, but the electorate, given its current mood, seems willing to forgive Reagan's past policy failures. "People forget what transpired during the first two years of his Administration," says Georgia Democratic Chairman Bert Lance. "People went through great economic trauma. But it's like an earache: when it's hurting, that's all you've got on your mind, getting rid of it, but when you get relief you start to think about other things."

"Patriotism," said Dr. Johnson just as the American Revolution was beginning, "is the last refuge of a scoundrel." At about the same time, Dr. Pangloss was giving optimism a bad name too. "In this best of all possible worlds," said the Voltaire character, "all is for the best." But those impulses, patriotism and optimism, are prominent and connected in the American psyche. The idea of manifest destiny carried both to a bellicose extreme; Franklin Roosevelt, when he insisted that the nation had nothing to fear but fear itself, expressed the linkage beautifully. Patriotic trappings took on particular importance in a vast, heterogeneous nation with hardly any history to bind its citizens, and the pioneeer spirit is necessarily hopeful.

Outpourings of nationalist cheer have occurred before. Many historians, from Henry Adams to Arthur Schlesinger, have postulated that the U.S. undergoes regular historical cycles 20 to 30 years long, periods of great social combustion alternating with quiescence, change followed by consolidation. After the War of 1812 and its embargoes, the frontier opened up, the economy took off, American fractiousness subsided, and the extraordinary era of good feelings commenced, lasting for more than a decade. The 1920s coincided with a less constructive but perhaps giddier national mood that found expression in the election of two laissez-faire Presidents. On the eve of the 1920 election, H.L. Mencken came out in favor of Warren Harding, "an honest reactionary" who pledged a return to normalcy. Harding's successor, Calvin Coolidge, won in 1924 on a platform of tax and budget cutting. Coolidge's "chief feat during five years and seven months in office was to sleep more than any other President," Mencken wrote later.

"The itch to run things did not afflict him; he was content to let them run themselves .. . So the normalcy that everyone longed for began to come back in his time, and if he deserved no credit for bringing it in, he at least deserved credit for not upsetting it." The late 1950s and early '60s, between the wars in Korea and Viet Nam, may be the most recent analagous period. McCarthyist fury had faded. The U.S. was prosperous. Wrote Historian Samuel Eliot Morison: "[Eisenhower] took over the presidency at a time of malaise and hysteria; he left it with the country's morale restored."

That contentment lasted no more than a decade. The '60s rather quickly became unsettled--politically, culturally, morally, every which way. The war in Viet Nam dug deep divisions in society and permanent ly changed the terms of American patriotism. A national self-doubt, for all its cleansing effects, became chronic and corrosive. "From 1965 on, our levels of confidence in America took a precipitous drop," says Sociologist Lipset of the body of survey data. "Every time a new President was elected there would be a blip up. But basically, it was a decline that was precipitous."

As disagreement over the war grew more ferocious, partisans on both sides thoroughly politicized patriotism: antiwar sentiment tended to slip easily into a vulgar anti-Americanism, and "Americanism" meanwhile became synonymous with intolerance of dissent. National pride was not easy. "Sure, there were achievements in the field of civil rights," says California Assemblyman Tom Hayden, a co-founder of Students for a Democratic Society. "But significant numbers of Americans could not feel proud about an Army that began to occupy Viet Nam, burn villages and send back veterans hooked on drugs. There was more than a decade during which it was hard to identify positively with what this country had become." Just when U.S. troops finally left Viet Nam, Watergate cracked open. A numb, stony cynicism took over, and even to many apolitical Americans, patriotic sentiment had come to seem anachronistic and nasty. The country was tired and deflated.

By many reckonings, the U.S. has now simply embarked on an overdue stint of R. and R. Political Philosopher Benjamin Barber of Rutgers University says, "A nation needs to rest. Watergate, Viet Nam--they took a toll on the American spirit, and you can't begrudge its time of rest." The respite offers a chance to reflect on the considerable achievements of the civil rights, environmental and feminist movements, among other things. "It's arguable that we have been through the most radical redefinition of the role of the individual in our society," says Middlebury College President Olin Robison. "When we get through this, we pull up short and say, 'Look, there's a lot that's right about our society.' " The replenished American spirit, as it pokes to the surface, tends to have a patriotic look. Yet even Hayden, the erstwhile radical, believes that is O.K. "I think that when you peel away all the hype," he says, "there is still a natural, cultural need to feel good about one's country."

Though that latent urge never died, it grew robust only at the convergence of several trends and events. One crucial prerequisite: the country at last seems to be contemplating and unsnarling the residual complexities of the Viet Nam War. In Washington, the earth-and-black-granite monument to those who died in the war, which is not quite two years old, draws 12,000 visitors a day. Viet Nam Veteran Jack Wheeler, 39, a driving force behind it, is pleased. "More of the visitors are people my age who didn't go," says Wheeler, author of Touched with Fire: The Future of the Viet Nam Generation. "And there are a lot of women. What that signals is a desire to think about Country with a capital C. It shows a willingness to remember."

The high-strung baby boomers have mostly passed 30 and are trotting toward 40: they have chosen careers, settled down, married, stabilized. Families and mortgages act as ballast. Furthermore, such a fresh, burgeoning stake in the future naturally fosters hope for the future. In political terms, a concern for the next century can turn right or left, toward economic conservatism, for instance, or toward a special determination to avoid nuclear war. Or up, into sheer ambition. Says Yippie turned Yuppie Jerry Rubin: "People are very patriotic. I'm much more pro-American than I have ever been in my life. It's not that people are optimistic about foreign policy or Government, but about their own power and achievement."

Silicon Valley is the Yuppie stronghold, and the computer boom has contributed significantly to the renewed faith in American ingenuity and, more broadly, in the American dream of boundless opportunity. The country's economic future, when viewed through a silvery high-tech scrim, does indeed look exciting. Moreover, the 21st century seems to be mingling with the 19th: entrepreneurism, led by the high-tech vanguard, has been imbued with a quasipatriotic urgency.

Indeed, the economic recovery, more than any other factor, accounts for America's soaring spirits. True, the federal deficit is huge and worrisome. But since the spring of 1983, the G.N.P. has been expanding faster than it did in the previous ten years, and the inflation rate, 4.2%, is down to the comfortable levels often or 15 years ago. Since the recession bottomed out in November 1982, disposable income has risen by $1,500 a person and nearly 7 million new jobs have opened up. (By contrast, Western Europe, which has a comparable working-age population, lost 3 million jobs in the past decade.) "To be honest with you, everything depends on the economy," says Mo Ansari, part owner of Mr. Mike's Breakfast Restaurant in Keego Harbor. "They like to work," he says, gesturing toward his patrons, "and there's a big smile on their face when they do. I'm happy to see it, because I don't like being around depressed people." Four years ago, Ansari came to Keego Harbor from Iran. The rollicking economy has made the U.S. more attractive than ever as a destination for immigrants: 2.5 million have come legally over the past five years, 20% more than arrived during the previous five years. It ought to hearten Americans that so many people around the world still hunger avidly to become Americans.

The U.S. has moved beyond the sense of powerlessness instilled by the Viet Nam debacle and inflamed again by the Iranian hostage taking. Even Americans who disapproved of the Grenada invasion were not horrified very deeply or for very long. "Some people may feel good about invading Grenada," says Hayden. "Personally, I think that's a farce combined with tragedy. By contrast, there's nothing wrong and everything right with celebrating missions into space. And I'm proud about Los Angeles' sponsoring a positive, uplifting Olympics in a city which had been perceived as being incapable of an achievement of that sort."

Of course, straightforward Stars and Stripes evidence is plentiful too. The armed forces are easily filling their recruitment quotas. The re-enlistment rate is 71%, the highest since World War II. The Army National Guard has met its authorized strength for the past three years. Applications for admission to the three service academies rose by 59% between 1980 and 1984. Old Glory is having a heyday too. The Art Flag Co. of Manhattan, a major national distributor, reports a sales increase of 30% this year. During the Olympics, a Los Angeles County inventor was awarded a patent for his electric flag-waving machine. Ridiculous, maybe, but there is also the sublime. In San Francisco last July 2, as a pair of middle-aged bohemians left the Flag Shop with their purchase, a more orthodox customer arrived. "I'm surprised you'd sell a flag to the likes of them," the man said to Owner Jim Ferrigan, who was riled. "Hey, buddy," he told the man, "the flag belongs to everyone."

For Americans who came of age during the Viet Nam War, the patriotic impulse is tempered by their generational experience. "If patriotism is love of country, the land and communities, we'll buy that," says David McCauley, head of the Vermont American Friends Service Committee. "If it is just flag waving and adventurism in foreign policy, we won't." Jack Wheeler believes the disputes of the past 20 years permanently affected his peers' sense of citizenship. "The Viet Nam generation was an idealistic bunch of people," he told TIME Washington Correspondent Jay Branegan. "This idealism is fertile ground for a healthy patriotism." By healthy, Wheeler means cooler and more thoughtful. Says he: "I feel once burned, I'm not going to be twice burned. Even though our patriotism is evident, it isn't fully flowered. It's still tentative. The baby boomers, says Wheeler, who is a Republican, "have a sense that life isn't as simple as in the old days. They can't slip into simplistic, chauvinistic patriotism. Theirs is a generous and mature patriotism, [not] thin and shrill." Ron Hayes, a Minnesota farm-management teacher, is seven years older than Wheeler, and just over the generational line. "When they play The Star-Spangled Banner" Hayes says, "I can still feel a chill up my spine. But I doubt if my kids are like that." Maybe, maybe not, but his two sons are in the service. Moreover, unselfconscious patriotic feeling seems rampant among teenagers.

A pointed Americanism is seeping into the cultural stream too. Right after the Los Angeles Games, ABC broadcast the premier episode of Call to Glory, a new series, set in the early 1960s, about Air Force fighter pilots. Says a network insider: "The campaign to promote this program was all based on connecting the patriotism the network felt would be generated during the Olympics with that of this new series." The show was the highest-rated program the week it aired. Red Dawn, a crude fantasy about armed resistance to a Soviet takeover of the U.S., is an enormous box office success. MGM began filming it three months after the downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007.

The fascination with country is not all martial, however. A Sally Field movie due out this week, Places in the Heart, is a highly sentimental, richly American story: a Texas widow during the Depression takes up cotton farming to keep her homestead and family together. Blue Highways, the bestselling account of a 13,000-mile trip down back roads, made a reassuring case that the American fabric still looks like a charming country quilt. American architecture has been pursuing a rather whimsical rediscovery of its home-grown past: flimsy roadside commercial buildings are regarded as significant folk design, for instance, and turn-of-the-century housing styles are now being absorbed into the postmodernist aesthetic. When Conservative Columnist George Will calls Rock-'n'-Roller Bruce Springsteen (Born in the U.S.A.) an exemplar of bedrock American values, as he did in a column last week, who will deny that the country has become infatuated with itself?

The spirit may fizz away. It may leave little of substance. Or it could congeal into something meaner: smug, complacent, intolerant, jingoistic. Lipset suggests that if serious economic problems hit the country during the next couple of years, Americans will become bitterer than ever, and sink to new depths of national despair. Says he: "Americans will feel had, no matter what party is running the White House at the time." Or the country might become self-satisfied and flaccid. "Optimism does not mean that we should not be cognizant of the real problems that we face," says Orthodox Rabbi Stanley Wagner, president of the Rocky Mountain Rabbinical Council. "The cheerful mood can easily be converted into hedonism, which in turn can trigger a destruction of the moral fiber of American life." The conversion of the burgeoning self-esteem into a new selfishness may already have begun. Among students of the preppie Landon School in Bethesda, Md., the mood is all about money. Says Headmaster Malcolm Coates: "I'd like to see a little more curiosity and discontent."

Generally, periods of self-indulgence have given way to eras of greater idealism. Harvard's Samuel Huntington, for one, is convinced the standard cycle will unfold. Says he: "Just as in the 1960s, this patriotic wave will in turn lead to a concern about change, whether political, economic or social." So far, however, the current spirit, patriotic and otherwise, shows little sign of being harnessed purposefully. Says Sam Brown, who was director of ACTION, the federal volunteer agency that operates the Peace Corps and VISTA, during the Carter Administration: "With all this sense of feeling good about ourselves, I haven't seen a growth of generous spirit toward the least privileged among us, and that has the risk of turning into an 'Everything's O.K., we don't have to worry about anybody else' kind of attitude." Editor Charles Peters of the Washington Monthly, guru of the neoliberals, sees an optimism with a patriotic tint, and waits for something more. "They're not going out and joining the Peace Corps today," he says. "Are people willing to vote for national service? That's the real test. If they aren't, then it's all just talk. The warm glow of it all may just come from sitting in front of the tube with everyone else, watching the flag."

The glow will be wasted if it remains only that. There are enormous social tasks begging to be addressed. The country's bridges and highways are literally falling apart, while the infrastructures of many of the grimy older cities have sunk into profound disrepair. The urban underclass, people in or slipping toward a permanent netherworld of poverty and alienation, numbers in the millions. Penal policy for the most part remains a wholesale, unimaginative dead end: criminals are either jammed into prisons or allowed a free-and-easy probation. But the public seems to find serious discussions of social problems passe, even annoying.

American allies in Europe, already envious of the U.S. economic recovery, were put off by the nationalist excesses they watched live from Los Angeles. The happy-go-lucky glee has permitted Europeans to indulge in their stereotype of Americans as big, overenergetic rubes. Last month France's weekly Le Nouvel Observateur ran a cover story titled The American Explosion. "As far as chauvinism is concerned," wrote former Deputy Culture Minister Franchise Giroud, in one particularly biting article, "the Americans are gold-medal winners in every category." Yet Giroud is tolerant in person. Says she: "We've gone very far in our derision of traditional values, and now we're coming back to them. I don't think the phenomenon in the U.S. is dangerous. It's just that, as usual, it's more visible." More than one British newspaper has offered some sober, sympathetic advice against too much gloating. "The gap that divides [the Soviet Union and Western Europe] from the United States is beginning to grow," warned an editorial in the conservative and pro-American Sunday Telegraph, "with Uncle Sam starting to look like the odd man out: isolated by too much wealth and success... In its present justifiably ebullient state of mind, the United States tends to be equally impatient of criticism from friend or foe."

To Americans busy enjoying themselves, however, the cautions from every quarter tend to sound like a parent warning a rambunctious child not to have too much fun: "Be careful! Somebody's going to get hurt!" The caveats are valid enough, but they ought not to spoil this rare frolicsome mood. The U.S. feels reasonably content and secure, sure-footed and loose. People just might be gathering their strength to endure the country's next surge of social ferment, to cope with new and unimagined crises. Or they might simply be relaxing a little. "We may only be on a national fling," says Middlebury President Robison. "One can go on a fun outing, enjoy it, be refreshed by it, without its having any earthshaking meaning. That's not necessarily all that bad. It is like a summer romance." If the romance deepens, so much the better.

--By Kurt Andersen. Reported by Joelle Attinger/ Boston, William Blaylock/Los Angeles and Elizabeth Taylor/ New York, with other bureaus

With reporting by Joelle Attinger, William Blaylock, Elizabeth Taylor