Charles Murray has made a splash with his new book, Coming
Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, a book not as
controversial as his previous blockbuster, 1994’s The Bell
Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life
(produced with co-author Richard Herrnstein), but one interesting
as a study of the social aspects of even rural life, such as in
Salmon, Idaho, where I live. Some of the social pathologies of
which Murray writes are also present in this small town in the
Rockies that in many ways recalls Norman Rockwell’s America.
Readers familiar with Murray’s work know that Coming Apart
concerns America’s rising white underclass, thus avoiding the howls
of racism from the left that greeted The Bell Curve. His
first book, Losing Ground (1984), a study of the social
ravages of welfare dependency, was also a political lightning
rod.
The Lemhi River runs behind my apartment complex here, and on a
recent Sunday afternoon I took a walk along the river. Coming back
on a dirt road I saw from a distance a small child leaning over the
railing of a second story terrace on one of the backside
apartments. This is not good, I thought.
I crossed through the sagebrush and onto the back lawn and was
soon standing beneath a little boy about a year old with towhead
blond hair. The day was warm and he wore nothing but a diaper. He
had a knobby, protruding belly button. He smiled down at me and
chattered away in baby talk. Something seemed to amuse him as he
gripped the railing with one tiny hand and pointed at nearby trees
with the other. He had climbed onto a chair against the railing and
had thus attained his precarious perch ten or twelve feet above me.
The beaming little face looked down at me and continued its
babbling.
“Hey, is anybody up there?” I called out, thinking to rouse the
apartment’s occupants.
Nothing. I considered going around to the front to knock on the
door, but wasn’t sure of the correct apartment number. On second
thought I decided it wouldn’t be smart to leave the kid, who was
still chattering away and swaying on the railing as if buffeted by
a breeze. I thought that if he fell I would try to catch him in my
arms.
“Is anybody up there?” Again, nothing.
In his book Murray posits that “America is coming apart at the
seams. Not ethnic seams, but those of class.” A number of single
mothers that live in my complex are typical of the people Murray is
writing about. Many are jobless, as are the men in their lives or
they’re absent. Murray writes: “Over the last half century marriage
has become the fault line dividing American classes.” America’s
well-educated elites who inhabit Murray’s liberal “SuperZips”
paradoxically — despite their voting patterns and political views
— practice traditional values, such as waiting to marry before
having children. On the other side of that fault line are those I
call “the pajama people,” after the currently popular mode of
slovenly female dress noted in public places nowadays (the tattooed
boyfriends retain the backward caps and drooping pants). These
folks require significant amounts of public assistance to survive;
from welfare checks to housing vouchers and food stamps. Murray:
“When the government intervenes to help, it enfeebles the
institutions through which people live satisfying lives.” To quote
the author from a Time magazine interview, they live in
“communities that require a welfare state.”
Current statistics tell us that 40 percent of children are now
born out-of-wedlock. This does not bode well for the future civic
and social health of America.
I focused on the kid, ready for him to tumble over the railing
at any moment. We shared smiling eye contact that would have been
pleasant in a different situation.
“Get off the chair,” I said, gently. “Get-off-the-chair.” He
smiled and chattered and pointed at the trees again.
“Get-off-the-chair,” I repeated, slowly, as if somehow the power
of suggestion would get through to him. And then again, more
loudly: “Is anybody up there?”
A young woman suddenly came out of the kitchen door and onto the
terrace. She looked nineteen or twenty and had long black hair. She
snatched the child off the railing , and began to carry him back
into the apartment, using his body to shield her face from me.
“I was trying to get your attention,” I said, sternly. “He could
have fallen.”
Without a word she slammed the kitchen door behind her.
Who are these people? I thought. And what sort of future does my
little anonymous friend have?
