As longtime readers know, I occasionally express the hope that someday this blog's name will become obsolete, that it won't be so late in the day, that we'll have a fine stretch of sunlight hours before us. Alas, that still eludes us.
It's been years since I could work up anything more than wistfulness on Independence Day. The plain fact is that our nation, as an idea, a geographical place, a collection of people, is badly defiled, perhaps hopelessly so.
Crap about how we've never enjoyed such convenience, comfort, leisure, technological advancement and options for how to live misses the point, which is that America has been getting steadily spiritually sicker for decades.
The turmoil of the present year - the pandemic, the economic collapse, the race-hustling which has been given an opportunity to permeate our society with renewed vigor by some instances of police misbehavior, the nihilistic hatred for our history expressed by the toppling of monuments, the riots, the spike in violent crime, the cesspool that social media has become - can obscure the fact that the rot began setting in years ago.
Exactly when? That's kind of a parlor-game question. A case could be made for pointing to the progressive era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the ideas of Thorstein Veblen, Richard T. Ely, Herbert Croly, Woodrow Wilson, and John Dewey took hold. The common thrust of their thought was that, in an age of industrialization and urbanization, America could no longer rely solely on its founding documents and the ideas that animated them, that the federal government needed to enlist a cadre of experts in matters such as education, health care, transportation and finance to fine-tune the operation of the country. Legislation would merely flesh out the details of the experts' central plans.
A case can also be made for the rise of the New Left in academia. When William Appleman Williams came up with the idea of moral equivalence, that the US sphere of influence and the Soviet empire were basically indistinguishable and that it mattered not which one prevailed on the world stage, it set in motion the impetus that caused the US to lose its resolve in Vietnam, leading to the pathetic scene in April 1975 of the helicopter taking off from the roof of the US embassy in Saigon, people desperately clinging to its runners. It led to the cowardice with which the administration of Columbia University responded to the campus takeover by radicals in the spring of 1968. Now such takeovers are so commonplace as to be yawn-inducing. Indeed, it spurred a whole new way of looking at the entire arc of our history. Howard Zinn's poisonous tome A People's History of the United States began insinuation itself into high school and college classrooms in 1980, paving the way for the similar insinuation by the New York Times' 1619 Project a couple of years ago.
Perhaps the pivotal point was the launch of the movements that insisted that nature's design for human sexuality could be ignored. That, in due course, led to laws that will exact fines and imprisonment for not calling a man a woman if he insists that that's what he is.
So this didn't start with the Green New Deal or the transformation of the Republican Party into a cult of personality built around the most unfit person to ever hold the office of US president.
My point is that it doesn't get any better from one year to the next.
No, I'll eat some hot dogs. That's a tradition at our house. Really good hot dogs, with a casing that snaps when you bite into them, dressed properly, with diced red onion, course-grain mustard and a quality relish. I read the Declaration of Independence to my wife this morning, another tradition around here. We played Stars and Stripes Forever by the United States Marine Band. We're about to go for an invigorating bike ride.
But as far as a feeling welling up inside of me goes, it's one of nostalgia at best.
It is very late in the day in post-America. Sorry for the stark assessment, but sugar-coating the matter would be a disservice to you.
No comments:
Post a Comment