culture wars tagged posts

Amidst the many soaring/pointed/Trump-eviscerating speeches that piled atop one another throughout last week’s Democratic National Convention, even the powerful call-out by the Muslim couple who had lost their soldier son in the Afghan War didn’t quite match the moment for me when a hulking African American minister with a congenital spinal condition limped out on stage in his clerical collar and in a sonorous voice intoned:

“Good evening my brothers and sisters. I come before you tonight as a preacher, the son of a preacher. A preacher immersed in the movement at five years old. I don’t come tonight representing any organization, but I come to talk about faith and morality. I’m a preacher and I’m a theologically conservative liberal evangelical biblicist...

We are so used to schtick, spin and PR in this world that we hardly want to believe anything anymore. Or believe in anyone.

“What’s your game, and what are you trying to sell?” is our default stance, aided and abetted by a media inordinately pleased with itself in finding contradiction upon contradiction in every human being and endeavor. And truth to tell, that job is easy, because we are all as shot-through with contradiction as clay pigeons on a rifle range. Always have been.

All of which begets jaundice and jadedness as our modern coins of the realm, and everything that would attempt to circumvent them by a measure of sincerity or goodwill we either ignore, shout down, or almost worst of all, treat with an “Isn’t that precious?” irony that becomes virtually indistinguishable from cynicism, the last refuge of the fallen idealist.

So within that tableau of dialogue-stoppers and despair, what are ...

Grounded as I am in coming-of-age during the tumult of the 1960s and ’70s, I tend to have a problematic relationship with patriotism and all its accoutrements—the flag, the pledge, the star-spangles, the moist-eyed emotion and breast-beating triumphalism.

In my college years, I learned to cast a skeptical eye on government pronouncements and white-washed histories. I discovered the relevance of sociology (Hmm…sociology, now there’s a thought!), psychology (Oh, what a neurotic-at-best mess we are!), and the role of basic brutality and genocide—there is simply no other way to say it—in subduing the American frontier. All under the cloak of “manifest destiny,” a handy and high-falutin’ term for “God wants us to own all this, so let’s go wipe out another Indian tribe.”

The revisionist look at American history taking place then was only exacerbated by the travesty of Vietnam, when the mode...