America's Upbeat Mood

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this program was all based on connecting the patriotism the network felt would be generated during the Olympics with that of this new series." The show was the highest-rated program the week it aired. Red Dawn, a crude fantasy about armed resistance to a Soviet takeover of the U.S., is an enormous box office success. MGM began filming it three months after the downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007.

The fascination with country is not all martial, however. A Sally Field movie due out this week, Places in the Heart, is a highly sentimental, richly American story: a Texas widow during the Depression takes up cotton farming to keep her homestead and family together. Blue Highways, the bestselling account of a 13,000-mile trip down back roads, made a reassuring case that the American fabric still looks like a charming country quilt. American architecture has been pursuing a rather whimsical rediscovery of its home-grown past: flimsy roadside commercial buildings are regarded as significant folk design, for instance, and turn-of-the-century housing styles are now being absorbed into the postmodernist aesthetic. When Conservative Columnist George Will calls Rock-'n'-Roller Bruce Springsteen (Born in the U.S.A.) an exemplar of bedrock American values, as he did in a column last week, who will deny that the country has become infatuated with itself?

The spirit may fizz away. It may leave little of substance. Or it could congeal into something meaner: smug, complacent, intolerant, jingoistic. Lipset suggests that if serious economic problems hit the country during the next couple of years, Americans will become bitterer than ever, and sink to new depths of national despair. Says he: "Americans will feel had, no matter what party is running the White House at the time." Or the country might become self-satisfied and flaccid. "Optimism does not mean that we should not be cognizant of the real problems that we face," says Orthodox Rabbi Stanley Wagner, president of the Rocky Mountain Rabbinical Council. "The cheerful mood can easily be converted into hedonism, which in turn can trigger a destruction of the moral fiber of American life." The conversion of the burgeoning self-esteem into a new selfishness may already have begun. Among students of the preppie Landon School in Bethesda, Md., the mood is all about money. Says Headmaster Malcolm Coates: "I'd like to see a little more curiosity and discontent."

Generally, periods of self-indulgence have given way to eras of greater idealism. Harvard's Samuel Huntington, for one, is convinced the standard cycle will unfold. Says he: "Just as in the 1960s, this patriotic wave will in turn lead to a concern about change, whether political, economic or social." So far, however, the current spirit, patriotic and otherwise, shows little sign of being harnessed purposefully. Says Sam Brown, who was director of ACTION, the federal volunteer agency that operates the Peace Corps and VISTA, during the Carter Administration: "With all this sense of feeling good about ourselves, I haven't seen a growth of generous spirit toward the least privileged among us, and that has the risk of turning into an 'Everything's O.K., we don't have to worry about anybody else' kind of attitude." Editor Charles Peters of the Washington Monthly, guru of the