In The Land of Barry and the Pilots

By LANCE MORROW

Two patients lie in the emergency room, beset by mysterious pains. When the ) doctor arrives, one patient asks, "What's wrong with me?" The other patient, who is an addict, pleads only, "Can you give me something for the pain?" The two questions come from different universes.

The U.S. has got into the habit of responding to its crises by lurching into emergency rooms and pleading for the painkiller first. Some important part of the American mind has gone over into a territory of denial and evasion.

Once the avoidance begins to work, the patient cares less about the diagnosis. Fear loses its power to instruct. Urgency vanishes before magic. The country glides into a toxic subjectivity. The eyes glaze a little, and clouds close over the glimpse of death. The problem will vanish, the earth will get well. The mind billows off to locate better memories, if it can (old glories, myths of its own innocence, old muscles, resources long since squandered, wars won when the nation was young and saved the world, when its virtue shone and sped by on tail fins). Americans con themselves with nostalgias. Was it during the 1980s under Ronald Reagan, the child of an alcoholic, that the addiction to this dreaming got out of hand?

But the pain-killer wears off, the patient wakes. It is not morning in America anymore but a somewhat frayed and bloodshot season. American politics (shortsighted, vicious, stupid) plunges on. The government cannot pay its bills and goes on putting up the great-grandchildren as collateral. Congress and the President perform a dance of breathtaking fecklessness over the federal budget.

This is the shape-shifting landscape of addict and alcoholic. The two terms mean in essence the same thing: a powerless dependence upon one drug or another, whether the chemical is legal or illegal. Here boundaries blur and melt. "Responsible" adults -- fathers, mothers, bankers, Senators, solid citizens -- become dangerous aliens. Their cars fly across the median in the middle of the night. The high began as a creamy indulgence and ends as a squalid necessity, a fix. The soul begins to die. It passes over into realms of the surreal and savage, into moral blackout and passivity.

The rot in private minds eats away at public responsibility. Judges in separate courtrooms the other day pronounced sentence on Marion Barry, the mayor of Washington (six months for possession of cocaine, the drug that is tearing his city apart) and on three Northwest Airlines pilots who, while drunk one morning last spring, flew a Boeing 727 with 91 passengers aboard from Fargo, N. Dak., to Minneapolis. Mayor Barry, still running the addict's street con, portrayed himself as the victim of racial prejudice and, worse, as a man who has recovered from his problem and mended his ways.

The mentality of addiction, of alcoholism, prevails in zones of American life even when no drugs are involved. Americans are addicted to television, a true enslavement, a dreary mania. When diversion is all, real life vanishes. Americans are addicted to the consumption of energy, to profligate plastics and convenience power in all its fuming, humming expressions -- cars, motorboats, air conditioners, home appliances. They are addicted to credit and debt, to mobility, to high speed. The American addictions tend to have this in common: a hope of painlessness.

But to live painlessly is to live powerlessly as well. Addictions, chemical and otherwise, rob people of their abilities. The attention grows dull and scattershot. Curiosity dims. A motif of escape prevails -- not adventurous escape, but a fade into drifting blankness or, conversely, into the sort of agitated irrelevance that rackets around, say, in political campaigns whose biggest issue is flag burning.

A people does not have to be literally drunk or drugged to be self-deluding, grandiose, self-destructive, improvident and allergic to reality. A perverse style takes up residence in the mind, a sort of civic dybbuk. Things go out of control (the mayor; the captain in the cockpit; the national debt; the savings and loans, once prim as small-town librarians, that went as crazy as the gaudiest binger).

Every society has its obsessive traits. To name them is to trivialize them, of course, to neutralize folly in cliche. Germans are addicted to order and scatology, the French to an empty elegance of language, the Italians to cynicism, the Irish to language and self-pity, the Slavs to romantic depression.

Fundamentalist Islam, addicted to its ruthless clarity under God, condemns the Great Satan of the West, with its vices, its drugs and pornography, its demolished families and disastrous morals. Perhaps there is at work in the world some law of compensation enforcing the principle that greater material blessings, as in the West, bring on commensurate miseries (cirrhosis and gout and custody fights and homelessness).

In his diaries Jean Cocteau wrote, "Stupidity is always amazing, no matter how used to it you become." Addictions are usually amazing as well, and as mysterious as stupidity. The obsessive persists in the folly over and over again, always believing that this time the result will be different. In some sinister way, ignorance is becoming an American addiction -- part of a quest for painless life. Americans have come to shoot ignorance like dope. Ignorance is, after all, one of the most powerful anesthetics. Obliviousness pulses now with a willful, aggressive glow -- a sort of active impatience, a passion to escape knowing.

Why this American addiction to the painless? The idea of the nation's Manifest Destiny, of its ascendant virtue and inevitable success, was driven in the past by the professed ethic of hard work and sacrifice. But somewhere the hardworking part of the formula got lost.

Did the American Dream all along mean nothing more than the quest for painlessness? It is tragic if the dream has become a delusion, a mirage that, as the doctor would say, is part of the sickness.