According to a recent Parade magazine poll, 79 percent of Americans reported they’ve personally felt the impact of the “worst financial crisis since the Great Depression,” while 68 percent believe the American dream is still within their reach and 89 percent feel we can overcome the challenges facing us “as long as we come together to support one another.” That’s the paradoxical new reality at the heart of this stimulating peek at our current predicament from critic and novelist (Turn of the Century, Heyday), Kurt Andersen.

In barely seventy wry and briskly written pages, Andersen crystallizes the pleasant mass delusion that overtook America as the twentieth century merrily rolled into the twenty-first (ignoring that tiny, quaint shiver of Y2K anxiety). Feel free to squirm a little if you see something of your own reflection in the mirror he holds up to this vanished time:

“We watched the median household income steadily decline since the end of the twentieth century…but, but, but our houses and our 401(k)s were ballooning in value, right? Even (and sometimes especially) smart, proudly rational people engaged in magical thinking, acting as if the miraculous power of the Internet and its ‘new economy’ would somehow, miraculously, make everything copacetic again. We all clapped our hands and believed in fairies. We gorged on free lunches.”

As housing prices climbed and the stock market soared with them, we were assured by the cheerleaders that they could keep rising to the sky because, “This time it’s different.” Instead, we found ourselves like Wile E. Coyote, “suspended in midair just past the end of the cliff,” while, as Andersen sadly observes, “gravity reasserted itself and we plummeted.” And in the cold wind that’s blowing from the executive suite to the darkened stores at the mall we sense we’re facing a transformation more profound than any temporary turn of the economic wheel.

Unlike many commentators on our current crisis, Andersen doesn’t waste many of his well-chosen words lobbing rhetorical tomatoes at convenient villains, though he does dwell on the absurdity of corporate CEOs who matched outsized egos with pint sized performance while pocketing salaries hundreds of times those of their lowest paid employees. To his credit, he’s just as quick to call all of us out for our mutual infatuation with the “casino economy, substituting the gambling hall for the factory floor as our governing economic metaphor.” Whether it's our obsession with so-called reality shows or tabloid gossip (Andersen calls it our “juvenilization”) we can take our pick of the myriad ways we’ve lost touch with the virtues --- thrift, discipline, hard, honest work --- responsible for nurturing decades of American prosperity.

As suggested by his book’s optimistic subtitle, Andersen argues that the seeds of new opportunities --- a budding commitment to volunteerism to cite but one --- can be found at the core of this crisis. In that sense, his analysis is quintessentially American in its belief that painful lessons can lead to fundamental change: “This is the end of the world as we’ve known it,” he writes. “But it isn’t the end of the world.” Pointing to virtues like our openness to immigrants (an area in which the current political debate suggests he may be a bit naïve), our facility with technology, and our “amateur spirit,” reflecting a willingness to experiment, fail and try again, he identifies three of the fundamental strengths that can help form the bedrock of a new ethos.

But judging from the way Wall Street bonuses have quickly reclaimed their Everest-like heights, those who prospered in pre-bust America aren’t going to surrender their privileged status easily. Andersen describes their opposition as “implacable, for sure, but it isn’t invincible.” Still, it’s hard not to feel he’s underestimating the determined, powerful forces aligned against those who claim to see, if only dimly, the shape of a new world infused with values that will find us saying "enough," not "more, please."

The inescapable and unsettling conclusion that lingers over this insightful book, even in its most encouraging passages, is that we’re going to have to be very smart (and more than a little lucky) to right our listing economic, social and political ship and steer it clear of other economic and social icebergs that lie ahead. Are we up to the challenge? Kurt Andersen seems to think so. Let’s hope, for all our sakes, he’s right.

Copyright 2009 Harrisburg Magazine ( )