Misanthrope's Corner.(Brief Article)

The Washington Post obituary for columnist Richard Grenier stated that he died of a heart attack while watching the State of the Union address. I was saddened by the news because I liked Grenier's writing, but not at all surprised by the circumstances of his death.

I had an iffy moment myself when Bush referred to "the families I've hugged," but at least it was a line I could have some fun with once I got over the initial jolt. My closest brush with a blood-pressure "event" occurred when he warmed to another theme that circles around our national life like a persistent gnat and insinuates itself through our collective conscience like the fault line of a dropped stitch in a tapestry.

Every president from Jimmy Carter on has parlayed it, each one kicking the intensity up another notch like Emeril Lagasse hurling garlic into his pots. Carter didn't make a lot of speeches about it, choosing instead to hammer the point home by building houses for the poor until we all understood that he was a carpenter with the initials J. C. It was a tough act to follow, but Reagan enshrined Alexis de Tocqueville and told the touring Frenchman's story about the frontier barnraising so many times that he turned "volunteerism" into a buzzword. The elder Bush, propelled by the family tendency to goopiness, coined "a thousand points of light." Then came the Clintons, one creating AmeriCorps and the other talking up The Little Village That Could. Now we have Bush 43 demanding a little chunk of our lives -- not much, heck, you won't even miss it -- urging us to drop everything to go off somewhere and mentor somebody.

It sounded like nagging to me -- when the Bushes aren't being goopy, the family vocal cords tend to slip into the Xanthippe range -- but it struck the right note for the times. Americans have always enjoyed being known as the world's most generous people, but something more than generosity is involved when charities have to announce that they don't need any more money, and bloodbanks have to announce that they don't need any more blood, and would we please, please, stop donating. That had to hurt, so Bush's presumptuous demand that we sign up for altruistic lost weekends and two compassionate years before the mast must have given millions a new lease on the self-flagellating guilt that fuels the engines of America the Selfless.

Compulsive volunteerism is our new way of pretending to a unity we know we lack. Our old way depended on disasters. From Pearl Harbor to the Challenger explosion, we announced "It brought us together," and repeated it until we believed it, but it was rarely heard after Sept. 11. The terrorist attacks made us yearn for something more personal and immediate than the grand sweep of national unity, so we narrowed it down to "We're all New Yorkers now."

The denizens of volunteerism have a word for this sort of parochial yearning. They call it "community" -- just that, nothing more, never mind parts of speech; it's noun, verb, adjective, whatever you need it to ...