Aram Bakshian on The Forgotten Americans

The Forgotten Americans By Frank Armbruster with contributions by Doris Yokelson Arlington, 454 pp., $9.95 Real majorities, new majorities, emerging majorities, and that amorphous mass commonly dubbed “Middle America” have all attracted more than their share of comment over the past few years. Much of it has been uninformed or misinformed, as the data in Frank Armbruster’s The Forgotten Americans make clear. Why has the picture of the average American so often been blurred or distorted? Because, Mr. Armbruster suggests, the picture has usually been drawn by alien, unfriendly hands— media men and cultural leaders who either have no ties with the basic American experience, or whose roots have long since atrophied in a numbing solution of New York-Washington-Boston otherworldliness.

The incestuous nature of so much of our social commentary, inspired by liberal academics, articulated by a few scholarly, sophisticated “small” magazines, publicized by journals like the New York Times and Washington Post, and finally mashed into popular pap by a gaggle of sixty-second sermonizers on their nightly network rounds—all this interplay among a comparatively small number of elitists—has led to a distorted concept of America, a somber vision of aimlessness, despair, pettiness, and corruption. It is most comparable, perhaps, to a group therapy session in reverse, in which large numbers of healthy “patients” are strapped into chairs by slightly unhinged “specialists” bent on imposing their own value system and prejudices, and destroying the patients’ confidence and self-respect. All this, of course, with the best and most sincere of motives.

AB

About the Author

Aram Bakshian Jr.

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The Forgotten Americans By Frank Armbruster with contributions by Doris Yokelson Arlington, 454 pp., $9.95 Real majorities, new majorities, emerging majorities, and that amorphous mass commonly dubbed “Middle America” have all attracted more than their share of comment over the past few years. Much of it has been uninformed or misinformed, as the data in Frank Armbruster’s The Forgotten Americans make clear. Why has the picture of the average American so often been blurred or distorted? Because, Mr. Armbruster suggests, the picture has usually been drawn by alien, unfriendly hands— media men and cultural leaders who either have no ties with the basic American experience, or whose roots have long since atrophied in a numbing solution of New York-Washington-Boston otherworldliness.

The incestuous nature of so much of our social commentary, inspired by liberal academics, articulated by a few scholarly, sophisticated “small” magazines, publicized by journals like the New York Times and Washington Post, and finally mashed into popular pap by a gaggle of sixty-second sermonizers on their nightly network rounds—all this interplay among a comparatively small number of elitists—has led to a distorted concept of America, a somber vision of aimlessness, despair, pettiness, and corruption. It is most comparable, perhaps, to a group therapy session in reverse, in which large numbers of healthy “patients” are strapped into chairs by slightly unhinged “specialists” bent on imposing their own value system and prejudices, and destroying the patients’ confidence and self-respect. All this, of course, with the best and most sincere of motives.