I’d never met such people, didn’t know the neighborhood, but apparently
it is their exemplary innocence and charm that the saviors of the republic these
days have in mind when they trace the cause of many of our sorrows back to the
deterioration of the once-upon-a-time triple-A-rated American family values.
The voices of alarm draw upon a surplus of statistics proving the theorem of
national decline—roughly half of all first marriages ending in divorce, 40
percent of America’s children being born to unwed mothers, the high-school
dropout rate in major u.S. cities standing at nearly 50 percent, 16. 4 million
children under the age of eighteen condemned to live in abject poverty.
The numbers have changed over the distance of the last sixty years, as
have the case studies and the poignant anecdotes, but no matter what the
trouble in the forefront of the news—the 1960s sexual revolution, the war in
Vietnam, the feminist and civil-rights movements, the 1980s culture war, the
steady loss of Christian conscience, villainy in Washington—the keepers of the
nation’s conscience somehow manage to shift
the fault from the game in which all present
find themselves held hostage to the flawed
behavior of the impediments—on the part of
spoiled children, tie-dyed and degenerate; on
the part of spendthrift wives shirking wifely
duties; on the part of the country’s political
and corporate overlords giving no thought to
posterity, content to sell out the public good for a mess of private pottage. The
economy stumbles into recession, the schools decay, the currency is debased,
the middle class implodes, the hope of the future is foreclosed, and why, pray
tell, is that? Not enough family values left in the minds of the free and the
hearts of the brave.
You hear a lot of dialog on the death of the
American family. Families aren’t dying. They’re
merging into big conglomerates.
—Erma Bombeck, 1978
the message doesn’t lack for historical antecedent. I listen to President obama in his weekly address preach the importance of being a parent, or to rick Santorum at an Iowa dinner say, “We can’t have limited
government without strong families,” and I’m come again to a roman forum
in the late first century bc to hear the emperor Augustus remind the available
young bachelors in the crowd of their marital obligations to the state. How
was rome to sustain its greatness unless it gave birth to successive generations
of manly citizens, thus making its mortality immortal? And where were those
successive generations to be found if the city’s young and unmarried optimates
squandered “all their virile energy on greasy slave girls and nasty Asiatic-greek
prostitutes”? or, even more “loathsome,” if they lived a life of sexual debauch that
led to no fruitful gain of enterprise, either of virtue or of mischief? Young men
“unwilling to perform any of their natural social duties” the emperor likens to
“beasts” and “brigands,” and as recounted by the poet robert graves (Rome, page
95), the speech could serve as a tea Party blog post denouncing gay marriage or
as an argument for sealing the nation’s borders against any immigration, legal
or illegal, on the grounds that 44 percent of children under eighteen belong to
a minority, forecasting within another thirty or forty years the spectacle of an
America no longer recognizable in Norman rockwell’s family paintings.
