Feeling Proud Again: Olympic Organizer Peter Ueberroth

The flame came fluttering out of the darkness, into an early morning light. Americans in bathrobes would sometimes stand by the sides of the two-lane roads, and as a runner carried the Olympic torch toward them, they would signal thumbs up and break the country silence with a soft, startling cheer. Their faces would glow with a complex light–a patriotism both palpable and chastened, a kind of reawakened warmth, something fetched from a long way back.

For Americans, the moment was powerfully emblematic. Why were they cheering? What were they cheering? When television news played scenes of the torch’s progress across the landscape, something in the soul of the audience cheered as well. A kind of emotional reflex. Something both sentimental and profound welled up. What did people see in the scene?

They saw an American carrying a torch, running across America. But also, it may be, they saw an American running out of a long Spenglerian gloom: heading west for California, toward the light. Running away from recession, Americans might almost subconsciously have imagined, away from Jimmy Carter’s “malaise,” away from gas shortages and hostage crises and a sense of American impotence and failure and limitation and passivity, away from dishonored Presidents and a lost war. Away from what had become an American inferiority complex. Away from descendant history. Running away from the past, into the future. Or away from the bad past anyway, the recent, misbegotten past, and into a better past, all mythy and sweetly vigorous, into that America where the future was full of endless possibility. Into an America where, as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “The only sin is limitation.”

The roadside scene was a little dramatization of the American theme of 1984: an extravagance of renewed national self-confidence and pride. By a collusion of timing and chemistry and artful television technique and happy economics, the nation fell into a spirit of coalescence and optimistic self-assertion not seen for a generation. Some thought the mood was merely a self-indulgent vacation from the real world, even an orgy of narcissism on a national scale. At times the rhetoric of “feeling good about America” bordered on the autoerotic. But the new atmosphere was alive with a great energy. The land was acrawl with entrepreneurs and Emersonian yuppies sounding the official cheer of 1984: “Go for it!” The belief was reborn that Americans can do–well, anything.

If the mood sometimes had its shadowed side, a touch of self-righteousness and meanness, a hint of the old nativist punitive zeal, it also showed great shine. America made a pageant of itself, erupting in a procession of spectacles of sudden self-celebration, all red, white and blue: the political conventions a turbulent sea of Old Glories, the campaign (the Reagan campaign, anyway) a triumphal masterpiece of the politics of mood. Walter Mondale ran a depressive, cautionary race, preaching selflessness and self-denial, his speeches like the parable of the Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf (the savage, devouring deficit). But the American public was not in the mood and buried him under a landslide. It was perfectly fitting that the roadside scene was turned into a television commercial–calling up patriotic spirits in the process of selling some beer. The new American mood was, if anything, eminently commercial. Whether one described it as enlightened self-interest or shrewd crassness, the old American talent for making a buck was alive and well. And after a hard passage through the deepest recession since the ’30s, Americans were not cavalier about the gift.

The new patriotism and commercial energy of the nation conjoined in July and August during an extraordinary event: the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. There was a kind of magic about the Games, a brilliance of performance and setting, as if not only the athletes but the place itself and the weather, blue and golden, all rose to the occasion. Sometimes the crowds were gloatingly pro-American as the nation’s athletes collected an overachieving 83 gold medals. There was a certain smugly triumphal mood in the stands that replicated the atmosphere of a Reagan campaign rally. At both events, young Americans broke into an overbearing victory chant: “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” But the Games also frequently achieved something close to perfection: athletes utterly inhabiting the instant of the act–driving chariots of fire.

SOVIETS AND SMOG

The Games had an even more remarkable dimension: they worked, and worked almost flawlessly. That is not the way they were supposed to go. The Soviets and more than a dozen Communist countries stayed away, suggesting that the Games would end in terrorism and ruin. Some said that the Los Angeles smog would choke the runners, that the extra traffic would bring the freeways to a fuming standstill, that the Soviet boycott would turn the Games into a * financial disaster and render them athletically meaningless. But nothing of the kind occurred.

The Los Angeles Olympics became a spectacular dramatization of a renascent American entrepreneurial energy and optimism. The driving force behind them was Peter Victor Ueberroth. For his supreme skill in making the Games work, and work brilliantly, Ueberroth is TIME’s Man of the Year.

Ueberroth, 47, masterminded a triumph that involved four-fifths of the nations of the globe. The bottom line, in terms of both money and morale, was more than impressive. Traditionally, the Olympics have lost money. In 1976 Montreal was left with a $1 billion debt, and Canadian taxpayers are still paying off the loss. This year, for the first time, the Games received almost no government funds and ended up with an unimaginable surplus of $215 million –and the sum could reach $250 million by June. To do this, Ueberroth mustered a force of 72,000, about half of them volunteers. Despite the Soviet boycott, the Games became one of the greatest athletic spectacles in history.

Some 2.5 billion people, more than half the earth’s population, watched the Los Angeles Games. Not since Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon has America had such an opportunity to lift its best face to the world. Ueberroth arranged the showing. He took over the stage of the global village, the earth intricately interconnected, and he spectacularly presented the U.S. upon it. If such success represented a political manipulation of the Games, blame not American leaders but the irrepressible high spirits of Ueberroth’s free enterprise.

Ueberroth was, among other things, preternaturally lucky. Almost everyone who thought about it had made a private bet with himself that no matter how tight the security, the odds were that a fanatic with a bomb in a gym bag would take down half a stadium one afternoon. When, the night before the opening, a man drove a car down the sidewalk in the Westwood section of Los Angeles, killing one person and injuring some 50 others, Americans muttered, “Oh, God! Here we go.” But then the Games went off as peacefully as an Edwardian field day.

The boycott, as it turned out, brightened the mood of the Games, if not necessarily the quality of the competition. The success of the Games was Ueberroth’s, and America’s, unanswerable reply to the Soviets. The Games drew a vivid implicit contrast between American and Soviet styles–the American Games all light and air and flashing motion (the essence of freedom dramatized), while the Soviets sulked in their totalitarian dusk.

Before Los Angeles, commentators predicted the death of the Olympics as a form: too political, too nationalistic. The Los Angeles crowds were often rudely nationalistic. But the Games transcended that partisanship. Part of the charm of an Olympics is that we are for those days represented by bright, eager, muscular youth, intensely alive. They become us, they embody us. Their acts become ours. From this identification flows a sense of pride and possibility and renewal.

Ueberroth presided over the Games in a spirit that reflected much of a new American style. He and his team, including LAOOC Executive Vice President Harry Usher and Hollywood Producer David Wolper, worked with imagination and brutal self-interest. In negotiations, they relentlessly pleaded poverty. A lot of the people who worked as volunteers were left in the aftermath wondering why they did not share in the profits. Some got bonuses. Most did not. Ueberroth received a $475,000 bonus, which, considering his accomplishment, was well earned. He gave the money to charity.

Ueberroth’s team devised an aggressive financial plan for the Games and stuck to it. It rejected the idea of large-scale new construction; that had been the downfall of past Olympic planners. Ueberroth and Wolper extracted nearly three times more money from television ($225 million) than had ever been bid before. Coaxing and bullying, the committee got 30 American corporations to pay record fees of more than $150 million for the rights to sponsor the Games. When President Reagan proposed coming early to Los Angeles to meet with the U.S. athletes, Ueberroth said no. Too political, he thought.

THE EMOTIONAL VIBRATION

It was Ueberroth’s idea to run the Olympic torch across the nation, through hundreds of cities, by night and day. The idea provoked considerable derision. But it was a public relations masterstroke, a pageant in harmony with an emotional need vibrating at that moment in the American character. Ueberroth felt the vibration. The torch, slowly making its zigzag way across the land, became one of the unforgettable images of 1984.

It was a year of imagery. It was a year of ceremonies, of formal remembrances. Some of the rites played a kind of sacramental role in the nation’s imagination, conferring a healing reassurance. In June the President flew to France to walk the beaches on the 40th anniversary of the Normandy invasion. The world remembered the American role as a part of the force that, at great sacrifice, crushed the Nazi armies.

On Memorial Day, the President installed an Unknown Soldier from the Viet Nam War in Arlington National Cemetery, beside the Unknowns from World War I, World War II and the Korean War. In November the stark black granite slashes that form the Viet Nam Memorial near the edge of the Mall in Washington got a more traditional companion piece: a statue of three American soldiers holding their weapons in various attitudes of exhaustion. The memorial is now the most visited monument in the capital. These ceremonies at last served to convey legitimacy on those who fought the war, if not upon the war itself, and thereby accomplished a healing that helped enable Americans to feel good about themselves again.

There were other symptoms and ceremonies of healing. The Fourth of July was the most spectacular celebration since the Bicentennial. The Statue of Liberty, swaddled in scaffolding, began a $30 million, two-year overall refurbishment, which has come to be regarded, sometimes almost subliminally, as a symbol of a larger national renovation.

Ronald Reagan, who has done much to embody the new American self-confidence, took his November landslide as a mandate, a massive validation of his work. Reagan won in part because Walter Mondale, whatever the merits of his case, was utterly out of sync with the electorate. Mondale, by 17 years the younger candidate, sounded like the past talking–the old politics of the New Deal and Great Society. It was not that Americans disapproved of the goals (justice, compassion for the poor); many simply felt that the old Democratic ways of reaching those goals no longer worked.

But in Reagan’s America (and, it may be, in Ueberroth’s), there has been a fundamental shift in values. From the beginning, American sentiment has been in tension between the values of freedom and equality. Under Franklin Roosevelt, and for several generations afterward, the official American inclination has been toward equality. In Reagan’s America, the value of freedom has reasserted itself, sometimes at the expense of the gentler instincts. The Olympics expressed the preference perfectly: the freedom to win –athletics as Darwinian theater.

Reagan accomplished his landslide partly because of his masterly exploitation of the American mood. He both contributed to the sense of optimism and purpose and profited from it. In a way, he also benefited from two developments in the Democratic Party: the candidacies of Jesse Jackson and Geraldine Ferraro. If Americans have recovered some sense of their own virtue in the world as a nation, it is to some extent because they felt proud of themselves for accepting the idea that a woman and a black can run for the highest offices in the land. Jackson’s race for the Democratic nomination, the first serious campaign by a black American, brought countless new voters into the political process, even if their hopes did end in at least partial disillusion. His address to the Democratic Convention last summer, an astonishing display of his rhetorical resources, was one of the memorable speeches of the late 20th century.

With her style and presence, Geraldine Ferraro was by far the liveliest of the four nominees. Intense, good-humored, always listening (a rare trait in a politician), she surprised Americans with her fast-mouthed New Yorker’s style. Still, although Ferraro was a first-class campaigner, it was not she but Walter Mondale who made the decision to put her on a national ticket.

A CONCILIATORY NOTE

The year saw a slight improvement in the abysmal relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. In a January speech, Reagan sounded a new–for him –conciliatory note. But the Soviet leadership, immobilized by the illness of Yuri Andropov, did not register the change. When Konstantin Chernenko first took over the Soviet leadership, he followed Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko’s hard line against the U.S. But in June the Soviets spoke of resuming arms talks in Vienna. Then Gromyko agreed to meet with Reagan in Washington, at the height of the presidential campaign. The Soviets can read public opinion polls, and realized that they would have to deal with Ronald Reagan for four more years.

In the turbulent Middle East, the U.S. at last withdrew its Marines from Lebanon. The U.S. in effect allowed Syria to become master of Lebanon, but the Syrians were not much more effective than anyone else in bringing peace to Lebanon’s warring factions. Meanwhile, the Israeli population grew more and more weary with their occupation of southern Lebanon. With their economy in a tailspin (400% inflation then, more than 800% now), the Israelis delivered a mixed, and not very helpful, election verdict. Lacking a clear winner, the two rival blocs, Likud and Labor, set up an unusual arrangement in which the office of Prime Minister would change after 25 months. Shimon Peres, taking the first turn, adopted a clearly warmer tone than former Prime Minister Menachem Begin had toward the U.S.

Central America produced some relatively good news. El Salvador’s President Jose Napoleon Duarte won an election that was viewed from the outset as difficult even to hold, let alone conduct fairly. He perhaps endangered his own life by making a peace offering to the guerrillas. The direction of events was murkier in Nicaragua. The U.S. stirred up a storm among Congressmen and the nation’s allies when it came out that the CIA had directed the mining of Nicaraguan harbors in order to discourage Soviet and Cuban arms shipments. Reagan encountered further trouble over U.S. funding of the contra forces battling the Sandinista regime. The main opposition parties did not participate in the country’s November elections, leaving the legitimacy of the Sandinistas in question.

China’s Deng Xiaoping, TIME’s Man of the Year in 1978, boldly delivered on his promises to open the Chinese economy and bring the world’s most populous nation into the political and economic mainstream. The reforms that had allowed a small degree of capitalism and entrepreneurship in the countryside were slowly extended to the cities. In its new and frank acceptance of economic incentives, China took another historic turn away from Marx and Lenin and toward, in a sense, Peter Ueberroth.

TO BELIEVE IN YOUTH

If Ueberroth is an impresario embodying the renewed American spirit, that elan has taken up residence most notably among the generation of Americans called yuppies, the young urban professionals (aged roughly from the mid-20s to the late 30s) who are supplying much of the bright entrepreneurial energy driving the American economy. In the late ’70s, Japan’s imitative wizardry and its mysterious cultural-economic consensus were the international model to copy. Today the model, the source of envy around the world, is the freewheeling private initiative of the U.S. Much of the improvisational magic, especially in the booming high-tech industries, comes from the yuppies.

A French advertising executive, Jacques Seguela, describes the phenomenon of the new America with a certain dogmatic Gallic eloquence: “The country that originally invented the consumer society is now inventing the communications society. Why has this been possible in America and not elsewhere? Because the U.S. is the only country where youth is credible. Individuals plunged into their professional lives in their 20s and are winners at 25 or 30. In France and elsewhere in Europe, that is impossible. You cannot go to a banker and say, ‘I have a project involving imagination or new technology,’ and ask for money if you are not 40 or 50 years old. That is the power of America: to believe everywhere and every time in youth.”

The young urban professionals are coming into their own. They are part of the famous baby-boom generation that is destined to be a cultural force at every stage of its life. The boomers gave the ’60s much of its character, and now are doing the same thing in the ’80s. In the meantime, of course, they have changed. Says Gordon Rayfield, 34, a New Yorker who is a foreign-affairs analyst for a multinational firm: “In the ’60s, we felt like this wasn’t our country. It was taken over by bad people. Now we realize that it’s our country too.” In the ’80s, the yuppies are starting to take over. They will become the ruling elite of America, a prospect that now gives them spirit, that makes many of them optimistic and hard driving. Reagan took the yuppie vote from Mondale by 67% to 32%.

The breed can be smug and shallow. The younger yuppies tend to look at education and the future in terms of the dollar: the “trade school” approach to learning. The idea of winning buzzes always in their minds. It is at them that Michelob Light aims its ad with the slogan: “Who said you can’t have it all?” The yuppies are Ueberroth’s natural constituency.

There are fascinating generational differences at work in the new American mood. One of them, says Pollster Daniel Yankelovich, involves the attitude toward work. In the older generation of Americans, says Yankelovich, “you weren’t supposed to enjoy your job. Your reward was supposed to come later. In the ’60s, work was pitted against leisure, work was the trap your parents were in.” Yuppies expect their work to be rewarding, challenging, creative. “There is no moral virtue today attributed to self-denial,” says Yankelovich. “Mondale was the personification of the social ethic of self- denial. He is the 1950s. For many of these young people, he came across as a nagging parent: ‘You have to get a job, you have to pay taxes.’ But Reagan’s message is, ‘The world’s your oyster. Go out and get what you want.’ “

The ethics and attitudes of the yuppies are central to the new American mood. Clearly there is some relationship between doing well personally and feeling good about one’s country. But that is not all there is to it: plenty of wealthy Americans were deeply depressed about their country during the Viet Nam War or the Iranian hostage crisis. At the same time, Americans just scraping by have sometimes felt truculently “good about America” at moments when the upper middle class was despairing. Today many Americans are in deep economic distress, and it is difficult for them to join in the feeling that the U.S. has suddenly become a coast-to-coast celebration.

But as every army officer knows, morale is crucial. The U.S. learned that the hard way in Viet Nam, where collapsing spirits at home subverted confidence in the field. Civilizations can flourish or perish according to their cultural morale. What the yuppies, in concert with a man like Ueberroth, have to offer is a new energy wedded to the belief that problems are solvable.

Many in the West, especially among the intellectual elites, had begun to absorb a deep conviction, laminated in the soul, that the problems of the world were intractable, that the future lying ahead was an ever darkening road. Worldwide famines and dire overpopulation loomed, people murdering for bowls of rice. Global pollution. The death of the rivers and oceans. The earth itself became the raft of the Medusa.

Now there is more disposition to believe that problems can be solved. Goethe once said, “America, you have it better.” The new American spirit agrees. The American renewal is a reassertion of man as shaper of the world rather than–the ’70s model–as victim or passive partner.

The Reagan idea, congenial to people such as Ueberroth and the yuppies, reverts to an American model in which the individual was free to move relatively untrammeled across the landscape. It is a model especially useful now, at a moment when the country needs entrepreneurial imagination, new forms, new ideas, new combinations. During the ’60s, the baby boomers substantially lost their respect for the authority of the older generation (“Don’t trust anyone over 30,” said the arrogant children), and the fact gives them a certain creative freedom now. Many of them are working, after all, in high-tech fields that are new territory. Experience is not of much use there. The past does not help. In their ambitious embrace of the future, the yuppies are very American in the traditional way. They proclaim again the unique American sense of pioneering. Jefferson said the old world of Europe was disease and decay; the future lay in the new. Henry Ford uttered a succinct American formula: “History is more or less bunk.”

A “national mood” is a mosaic of subjectivities. It is certainly not unanimous. Ask an Arizona copper miner out of work three years if he is feeling buoyant about America. Ask a Nebraska farmer who has just lost his land to a bank foreclosure. Ask Tony, a Hispanic veteran in a city-run shelter in Harlem. Part of his intestine is missing, left in Viet Nam. “I know they don’t owe me nothing,” he says. “But I have the feeling they do. When the Kennedys were around, it was a whole different country.”

“Everyone is worried about his job,” says Verdo Ligon, the business agent for a woodcutters’ local union in Roseburg, Ore. “The lumber industry may go down in its entirety. People are out there trying to feed their families.” In Oakland, the Rev. Willie J. Smith runs the Pilgrim Rest in a mostly black neighborhood. Says he: “The Administration counted on the trickle-down effect. They said, ‘Let’s give ’em the Hollywood approach.’ But the people don’t get turned on by whether or not they are going to have enough money to buy the Mercedes-Benzes they see on television. They want enough to buy grits to feed their children.”

The mentality behind the American renewal owes something to a habit of extremism, or at least exaggeration, that seems bred into some of the baby boomers. In the ’60s, the U.S. seemed to many of them the worst place in the world: “Amerika.” Now it seems to many, or at least to their younger siblings, the best place in the world.

Is there a real and permanent change in American attitudes? Perhaps. Many Americans have been left out of the economic recovery; on the other hand, it would be utopian, or typically American, to think that all could be included. The measure that Yankelovich trusts is the poll on confidence in American institutions. At the time of John Kennedy’s assassination, about two-thirds of those polled said they trusted that Government was run for the benefit of all the people. But as the nation lurched through the Viet Nam years, through Watergate and double-digit interest rates and inflation and the hostage crisis, the national confidence in Government sank until it reached only a little more than 20% in the last year of the Carter Administration. Since Reagan took office, the figure has been rising steadily. It now stands at ! between 40% and 45%, not an overwhelming endorsement of the Government, but surer. In his latest survey, Yankelovich found that as of December, 73% of Americans believed that “things in the country are going very or fairly well.” When Ronald Reagan was inaugurated in January 1981, the figure stood at 26%.

THE DEFEATISM IS GONE

What has overtaken the nation, it seems, is a mood of more realistic optimism than the country felt at the start of the Kennedy years. Americans have put themselves through a great deal in the past 20 years, but they have also learned from the experience.

Americans learned, Yankelovich suggests, that they cannot solve every problem by throwing money at it, that they cannot bend the world to their will merely by sending out the fleet. But, says Yankelovich, “the defeatism is gone. There is a reassertion of the familiar kinds of American optimism and can-do spirit–in many ways more realistic than in the ’60s.”

Even the military is back–and honored. “Be all that you can be,” says the Army. Some recruiting ads show young Americans tending killer technology, running their tanks as if they were video games, taking unashamed pride in the work they do. Applications to West Point rose from 9,180 in 1979 to 13,400 this year. The U.S. Naval Academy reports a comparable increase, and so do college ROTC programs.

The new enthusiasm reflects not only the fading of the memory of Viet Nam but the attention that the Reagan Administration has given to the defense budget. Military pay scales have increased 38% since 1980. “Before 1980,” says Navy Commander Kendell Pease, “there were articles about enlisted men on food stamps. Now that’s turned around.”

The invasion of Grenada brought a surge of new enlistments in ROTC programs. The quality of military recruits is improving substantially. The motives for entering the service are not just economic now (the Army as a last resort for jobless youth). They are also patriotic. In his letter of application to West Point, a high school student from Florida wrote, “I will relish having the chance to serve my country in a position in which I can exert a positive influence.”

The young may be absorbing the new atmospherics from movies and TV. Five years ago, the nation watched a crop of elegiac Viet Nam movies such as Coming Home and The Deer Hunter. At the end of The Deer Hunter, when the hero has returned home, the crowd in a dingy bar in a Pennsylvania steel town sings God Bless America, but sings it so thinly and tentatively that the hymn becomes not an affirmation of the nation but a wistful dirge, the memory of something that the war destroyed. Today, the tones of patriotism in entertainment are loud and clear and sometimes tinny with the sound of jingo.

Television has Call to Glory, a sort of military soap about a fighter pilot and his family in the Kennedy era. The Right Stuff was not enough to give Senator John Glenn the Democratic nomination, but it was a fine glorification of the early days of the American space program.

One fascinating exercise was called Red Dawn. In the guise of a sort of right-wing adolescent version of For Whom the Bell Tolls, it is an allegory designed subtly to reverse the moral onus of the Viet Nam War. The U.S. is invaded by Communist forces (Cubans and Nicaraguans in the service of the Soviets), and the teen-age American heroes and heroines take to the Colorado hills to form a guerrilla band. The Americans become the Viet Cong, the little guys, the underdogs fighting for their own land. The Soviets become the oppressive great power (the Americans in Viet Nam), the occupiers with superior forces and sinister helicopter gunships. Thus the guilt belongs with the Soviets, and an odd kind of subliminal absolution descends upon the American viewing audience.

The potential power of mood, of attitude, is immense. “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm,” Emerson wrote. But Americans sometimes consider matters of mood to be unmanly, or fraudulent, or self-deceptive. “It’s almost like the old ghost dances that the Indians used to go through in hopes that they could bring back what they had lost,” says Carol Stack, professor of public policy at Duke University. “People today are performing their own version of the ghost dance, only it’s not called a ghost dance any more. It’s called being patriotic.” Americans tend to deny that their own moods matter. Still, it is collective psychology–collec tive mood–that drives the economy up and down, and not the other way around.

“America is back,” Reagan liked to tell his campaign audiences. It is true, up to a point. In many ways, the nation is psychologically back. It inhabits itself again, more or less comfortably. One of the most encouraging aspects of the current self-confidence is that it signals an acceptance of great changes. “Healthy societies, like individuals, need periods of rest and < consolidation after periods of strenuous activism and crisis,” says Jeffrey Alexander, a sociologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Many of our social critics are selling the American people short with this notion that the upbeat mood is some kind of pseudo-event engineered by Reagan and the money he spent on commercials.”

Several times in this century, war, crisis, social change and activism have been followed by reactionary backlash, and then by a period of consolidation and relative calm and prosperity. If this historical pattern means anything, the current mood is not a repudiation of social progress, but rather a signal that certain important social battles have been won and now, in a moment of calm, are being digested. “This relative calm has little to do with Reagan’s conservatism,” says Alexander. “Rather, it reflects the institutionalizing of many of the things he has been against for years.”

The nation goes imperfectly on. Teen-agers commit suicide, for reasons that baffle. The homeless sleep in our doorways or on warm-air grates. The monster deficit, which some say is the equivalent of nuclear doom, presides over the vestibule. America has been on a spending binge for years, and the arithmetic is ominous.

Nevertheless, Americans need time to imagine themselves and their possibilities again. Philippe Lefournier, executive editor of the French financial fortnightly L’Expansion, returned from a recent trip to the U.S. with this summary: “A capital boom that is proportionately as immense as it was when the railroads were laid across the West in the 19th century. A capacity for discovery and innovation in technology that is leaving Japan in the dust. A wellspring of visceral dynamism so enduring that it somehow goes beyond the psychological. The U.S. is a new country. It’s the new New World.”