Clearly, you had to come up with something. Something to make everyone feel better, at no risk. Which meant: something with nothing to prove (in case you can’t), nothing to win (in case you don’t) and nothing to pay (in case you can’t afford it). A tall order, filled, for the moment, by your national obsession with this thing called “self-esteem.”
Embraced with an endearing gusto peculiar to the American people, selfesteem is all the rage, as I discovered on a recent visit. It is, among other things, a lucrative boom for books that tell how. Gloria Steinem-who used to say, laudably, that “the examined life is not worth living”-has now reneged and is busily selling her new book, “Revolution From Within: A Book of Self-Esteem.” It is a topic of conversation everywhere. At dinner, guests now speak of “self-esteem” with the same piety as they discuss fat grams and cholesterol counts (both very funny, if you happen to be British). And if you turn on television in the United States, you find Nancy Friday, the sigh-fi writer, confiding to millions that “it’s very difficult to have self-esteem if you don’t like your genitals.” (And that was before lunch.)
Indeed, if television is any barometer, self-esteem is approaching hurricane force. Not long ago, I saw seven women of well past 40 sit on Sally Jessy Raphael’s stage clad only in bikinis to describe how good they felt about their aged bodies. If these women actually had a dab of self-esteem, they would have put some clothes on in public; didn’t their children die of embarrassment? Nobody said so. This nonsense is selling wholesale.
The surprise, for me, was that I experienced all of this in New York. We all know about “New Age” Los Angeles - come on, L.A., just give us the movies and keep the change. But if the contagion has reached even my beloved sister city, hitherto home to 7 million joyously festering neuroses, we have to assume that the whole damn nation is at it. And you know what? Over here, we don’t like it. Not one bit.
Part of our disquiet, I shall admit, comes down to fundamental differences between our cultures. If your recent problems were to beset our nation, selfesteem would not be the issue, because we are too arrogant ever to have felt a lack of it. There is also a difference in social structure. A Briton assumes that one is dealt a single hand at birth and spends a lifetime playing it as best one can. It is an essential ingredient of the American Dream, however, that you can choose to be something different: from log cabin, peanut farm or B movie to president-and back again, it now appears. As immediate illustration, I must tell you how aghast we were when we switched on our television sets last month and found your president, all flatter - focus and beaming with self-esteem and national pride, appearing in a tourism commercial. Self-esteem? We found it tacky beyond belief.
Even in everyday interaction there are crucial differences between us, centered mainly in the fact that you people actually like to touch your feelings. That, as every True Brit knows, is a practice akin to touching your feet: possibly corny, probably smelly and on both counts best be avoided.
But none of these differences, by themselves, can explain the distaste and alarm with which we view your current mission to feel better about yourselves. This mission is actually dangerous. Your quest is the stuff of childhood. It is part of the growing process to explore the self and soul, to discover how to relate to others, to learn to love and to be loved, to gain in confidence what you lose in milk teeth and to dissolve into self-absorption while a firmer hand rocks your cradle. And it is the stuff of childhood precisely because it is not compatible with adult responsibility.
Gloria Steinem’s book has a chapter called: “It’s Never Too Late for a Happy Childhood.” friends she is wrong. When you are the most powerful nation in the world, it is too late to have a childhood of any description. And regardless of the recent blows to the collective American ego, you are still a people whose votes affect the world and whose leaders run it-which is why the rest of us need you to get it right in the most adult and the most responsible way possible. Without feeling good, if necessary.
Frankly, we do not wish you to become infused with self-esteem; we would feel more comfortable - not to mention a mite safer - if you opted for self-doubt, instead. Less God on your side; more weight on your back. You know what I’m saying? Just grow up.
