Viral Spring #18: If I Had a Hammer

-- By Tom Phillips
                            
Thirty-one years ago this spring, I was in Tiananmen Square amid a huge peaceful protest -- the largest the world has ever seen, the center of a nationwide movement for democracy in China.  As the protests built across every major city in China, the mood was euphoric; it seemed impossible for the ruling communist party to ignore the pent-up demands for personal and political freedom.

Americans are feeling the same euphoria today, as young people -- black, brown and white together -- turn out en masse in peaceful protests against racism and police brutality, and a president who embodies these abuses by denying them. With his poll numbers falling and ex-aides blasting him in public, it looks like a rout to some. "The Trump Regime is Beginning to Topple," headlined the Atlantic a few days ago.  

                                            

                               If I had a hammer, I'd hammer in the morning

                               I'd hammer in the evening, all over this land..  

Believing in Truth

-- By Tom Phillips 

Rudy Giuliani: "Truth isn't truth"

It’s happening more and more these days – people say things that just a few years ago would have been considered insane.  At a recent party, a young female stranger – a graduate student – asked me, “What do you think about the post-truth moment?”  My flustered answer: “I’m against it.” 

On the street and even in church, on hearing that I used to write for CBS News, people have cheerfully piped up: “Oh, fake news!”  Absolutely not, I tell them.  I never knowingly wrote a word of fake news.  Oh, they reply, but you’re retired.  How about the people writing now?   

I am a member of two establishments -- the press and the church -- that depend for their existence on the idea of truth.  Both are under siege by a new wave of old politics that values visions over facts, slogans over reason, personality over truthfulness.  The press is in danger of being discredited, the church of being co-opted.  And so far, the press is holding up better, more resistant and resilient.

Pinker's Paradise

-- By Tom Phillips

Steven Pinker 

Harvard professor Steven Pinker is out with another of his weighty books about how the world is getting better all the time. This one's called "Enlightenment Now."  Readers should appreciate his contrarianism; his mass of statistics about the world's rising prosperity, improving health, reduced violence and increasing personal satisfaction is a welcome antidote to studies that show humans growing more lonely, pessimistic and frightened.

There's a fly in the cream, though. While Pinker's global stats generally show that happiness rises along with income, here in the United States, the pursuit of happiness has ground to a halt.  In recent decades, Pinker reports, American men have gotten no happier, while women have actually grown less happy. This could simply reflect the stagnation in middle-class incomes since the 1970s.  But happiness is not an isolated phenomenon -- it reflects much broader societal trends.

Mandela's Moment

-- By Tom Phillips

In 1990, when the South African government released Nelson Mandela from prison, the whole country was eager to see the man who had led the African National Congress and the anti-apartheid movement from behind bars for nearly 28 years.  But no one knew what he looked like.  Black South Africans wore T-shirts with a picture of Mandela when he was a young boxing champion, with a full face and cannonball shoulders.  

When he finally appeared a few days later at a packed soccer stadium in Soweto, he was a slim, white-haired man in a suit and tie, moving calmly through the crowds, with the bearing and manner of a king.  I was there with CBS News, and this is what I saw.