Defending America in an age of hustlers, heists, and unnecessary wars: an afterword.

• Author: McDougall, Walter A.
• Position: A Walter McDougall Symposium - Viewpoint essay

"When did your eyes open?" The very day I turned my attention to these final thoughts a book review of that title appeared in my campus mailbox. I long ago stopped chalking such timely tips up to chance. Like my brother who says, "There are no coincidences," and my Anglican bishop who says, "All is grace," I believe inspiration answers cues. The book under review was a biography of Andrei Sakharov and the question was baneful to Soviet dissidents because it forced them to recall the illusion, ambition, compromise, and blindness that had entrapped them before they dared challenge the propaganda and power structure of the Communist system. So, too, has this assignment for Humanitas obliged me to ask when and why I began to bristle under the rigid codes of belief and behavior imposed by American politics, academics, and culture.

When did your eyes open? From a young age I have always been attracted to those I call "truth tellers." Satirical comic books such as MAD Magazine and Uncle Scrooge, and television shows such as Sgt. Bilko and Maverick, taught me in the 1950s about the yawning gaps between pretense and reality--and penchant for hustling--in American life. My eldest brother encouraged me to sniff out hypocrisy and double standards (his constant complaint was "there's no justice"). The pathetic Chicago Cubs inspired me to pronounce a "law of maximum heartbreak." My parents, a brilliant patent attorney and a frustrated actress, shared phenomenal verbal gifts and taught by example about the poses and masks everyone dons in public. My pious grandparents taught me honesty but also the perils of trust ("fool me once shame on you; fool me twice shame on me"). As a young adult I began to select a personal pantheon of truth tellers, such as that self-described gargoyle Malcolm Muggeridge who mused that "only clowns and mystics ever speak the truth." Muggeridge had arrived in Paris in August 1944 to find the just liberated city in wild celebration. So he spent his first evening in a boozy nightclub until, around midnight, his mood changed. A shabby comedian with a frowning bald head "was intoning a soliloquy about all the terrible things that had happened to him since the Germans came to Paris. Et maintenant, he concluded, with an expression of infinite woe, through which he struggled to break into a wry smile--Et maintenant, nous sommes liberes."

Liberated from what? Nazism, but not the human condition. Liberated for what? National shame, remorse, reprisals, broken lives, civil strife, and a new thralldom to materialism either of the capitalist or communist sort. Indeed, it is in deliverance, not defeat, that our eyes really open to truth for only then do our own vanities stand as naked as those of our adversaries. Case in point: the decadence of American...