Mr. Sammler’s City (Great Essay Review of Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet)

City Journal ^ | Spring 2008 | Myron Magnet

[mojito]

Fear was a New Yorker’s constant companion in the 1970s and ’80s. We lived behind doors with triple locks, some like engines of medieval ironmongery. We barred our ground-floor and fire-escape windows with steel grates that made us feel imprisoned. I was thankful for mine, though, when a hatchet turned up on my fire escape, origin unknown. Nearing our building entrances, we held our keys at the ready and looked over our shoulders, as police and street-smart lore advised; our hearts pounded as we tried to shove the heavy doors open and slam them shut before some mugger could push in behind us, standard mugging procedure. Only once was I too slow and lost my money. A neighbor, who worked at a midtown bank, lost his life.

So to read Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet when it came out in 1970 was like a jolt of electricity. Just when New York had begun to spin out of control—steadily worsening for over two decades until murders numbered over 2,200 a year, one every four hours—Bellow’s novel described the unraveling with brilliant precision and explained unflinchingly why it was happening. His account shocked readers: some thought it racist and reactionary; others feared it was true but too offensive for a decent person to say. In those days, I felt I should cover my copy with a plain brown wrapper on the subway to veil the obscenity of its political incorrectness.

The book was true, prophetically so.

[mojito]

A long essay, but well worthwhile.

[flowerplough]

“within living memory residents and companies were fleeing Gotham, that newsweeklies heralded the rotting of the Big Apple and movies like Taxi Driver and Midnight Cowboy plausibly depicted New York as a nightmare peopled by freaks. “

And some people feel New York has changed? Some people feel New York is no longer “a nightmare peopled by freaks”?

[jdsteel]

The book could have been much shorter if New Yorkers had concealed carry permits in the 70’s....or even today.

[daniel1212]

“To the elites, in fact, all the “victimless” disorder wasn’t just harmless but healthy: drugs were mind-expanding, madmen were marching to the beat of a different drummer, blasting boomboxes were the exuberant expression of what we hadn’t yet learned to call multiculturalism, and restraint was oppression. As Bellow understood, social disorder flowed from cultural change.

Of all the Puritan restraints, sexual restraint was Number One on the elites’ hit list. The opposite of a virtue, it was now deemed harmful, malignant. As the ascendant psychotherapeutic worldview had it, Sammler caustically notes, “the bad puritanical attitudes from the sick past . . . have damaged civilization so much.” In the 1960s, the elites wanted “the final triumph of the Enlightenment—Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, Adultery!”

Little has change, less has improved. http://peacebyjesus.witnesstoday.org/RevealingStatistics.html

see also http://conservapedia.com/Moral_decline