Posted 5:35 PM by Gene

I have mentioned Babbitt before as it's my favorite novel. It is dated in many ways, as when Sinclair Lewis ascribes some vague evil to the communions in the silent movie house, but that's part of its charm, and we learn what intangibles we've lost. But it also speaks more to us than we may want to admit.

It certainly speaks to me. I don't like discussing my personal life but I've lived in a cocoon and can't escape. Though Babbitt was the last word in conventional -- he was especially conventional in his religion, attending church as everyone else did; he'd have appreciated today's mega-"churches" -- he was not quite the prototype of the Organization Man people think. No, he was Walter Mitty before James Thurber coined the name. We forget the book really deals with a sensitive man's midlife crisis: Consumed by a sudden dissatisfaction with his bourgeois ways Babbitt tries becoming a Lothario in the spirit of the Twenties, but he can't drink with pleasure, and he is much too self-conscious but to see others' faults, and it fails him. He sulks back to his miserably conventional life and his dumpy wife and not-too-bright children.

And speaking of the Second Coming, he had a brief devotion to baseball. This is where Babbitt has such value; we get to see life on another planet called America. ZELIG and the greedmeisters posit a day of baseball purity to mask their foulness, but the sport was very difficult to follow in its supposed golden age; there were no night games (and no blacks), and no television or even radio -- you had to be at the game, an inconvenience at best for working people, or follow it "live" at a local newspaper. Or to quote from the salient spot:

Baseball, he determined, would be an excellent hobby. "No sense a man's working his fool head off. I'm going out to the Game three times a week. Besides, fellow ought to support the home team."

He did go and support the team, and enhance the glory of Zenith, by yelling "Attaboy!" and "Rotten!" He performed the rite scrupulously. He wore a cotton handkerchief about his collar; he became sweaty; he opened his mouth in a wide loose grin; and drank lemon soda out of a bottle. He went to the Game three times a week, for one week. Then he compromised on watching the Advocate-Times bulletin-board. He stood in the thickest and steamiest of the crowd, and as the boy up on the lofty platform recorded the achievements of Big Bill Bostwick, the pitcher, Babbitt remarked to complete strangers, "Pretty nice! Good work!" and hastened back to the office.

He honestly believed that he loved baseball. It is true that he hadn't, in twenty-five years, himself played any baseball except back-lot catch with Ted--very gentle, and strictly limited to ten minutes. But the game was a custom of his clan, and it gave outlet for the homicidal and sides-taking instincts which Babbitt called "patriotism" and "love of sport."

Notwithstanding the ham-handed commentary at the end we can see that for many sports are something less than a full-time devotion, and for a reason.

And Babbitt can still speak to us because it survived Babbitt. Despite his less-than-success in business Harry S Truman was his good side; Dubya (whose first name is also George) would have reclined comfortably in Babbitt's many lazy prejudices and platitudes. And we have recent evidence it may yet be vaguely alive. Recently PILLHEAD's favorite intellectual wrote a telling review of a novel from the "thriller" novelist Robert Ferrigno set in the America of 2040, where half the country is an Islamic republic and the other half fitfully Christian. While this seems unthinkable given how easily we can demoralize ourselves it is not impossible. Or as this Substitute Host puts it,

Meanwhile, the [Bible] Belt is less a bastion of republican virtue than an impoverished swamp of garish sentimentality whose national shrines are Waco and Graceland.

An impoverished swamp of garish sentimentality -- definitely the successor to Babbitts. (It does seem strange that PILLHEAD and his fellow yappers could not come to the rescue, but that's another novel.)

Sinclair Lewis wrote a book called It Can't Happen Here. He was thinking of other isms. Given our weakness for stinky political fads and the tenacity of our enemies, it can.