This month, The Atlantic Monthly celebrates a century and a half of noble existence with their 150th anniversary issue. 150 years! Yes, this is a magazine so old that, in its infancy, it published an article called “Ought Women to Learn the Alphabet?” Ha ha ha. It’s hard to be outraged by such quaint grammar.
The issue features dozens of essays from celebrity contributors about “The Future of the American Idea”. The essays range from John Updike’s foreboding literary parallelism (“The American idea, promulgated in a land of plenty, must prepare to sustain itself in a world of scarcity”) to Nancy Pelosi’s political ass-honking (“Young people are engaged in their own dialogue – talking about their hopes for a brighter future and for peace and prosperity”) to Eric Schlosser’s cynical liberalism (“The America I love bears little relation to the freak show now peddled by Hollywood and the cable-news networks”) to Frank Gehry’s cry for attention (“I wonder why great architecture isn’t considered an important shaper of the American Idea.”)
But I agree with regular Atlantic correspondent PJ O’Rourke, who, in the midst of a four-paged crazed riff on a 5,289-paged book of historical US statistics utters a simple truth: “America has a lot of things.” Yes! Yes! The future of the American Idea, like the past of the American Idea, and the present for that matter… involves a lot of things. One Idea, but billions upon billions of things.
