Being a romantic with a melancholy tendency I am offside with both the high modernists with their transcendental principles and the utilitarians for reducing life to egoistic utility. I see them as having a set of high principles with which they club you with. Violence lurks beneath their shiny, polished surfaces.
But I also deeply distrust a key cultural tradition of the US. It is not the squalor, violence, and ignorance you see everywhere; nor the European charge that American culture is mere pop entertainment and so is empty and full of junk.
What I distrust is the Christian tradition with its underlying commitment to salvific principles. This cultural bulwark of Christian belief (Protestant)---- the inarticulate Christian faith of common people in the Anglo-American world. This tacit common knowledge is very black and white, militantly Christian, is fundamentalist and seems to always drift to the right.
What I hear it say is this:
'Either you get religion and fight the devil to the death, or you lazily saunter down the road with him to the gulag that some call utopia. The devil used to be communists. Now it is Islamic terrorists. It is a fight to the death. You are either with us or against us.'
I shudder at the hysterical self-righteousness that is thrown at you whilst it paints a dark, terrible world ruled by the devil. It is all based around a ritual of repentance in which you are required to fall to your knees and profess their guilt for your evilness.
I distrust it because I fear it. Does that make me anti-American? Does that make my mindset one of 'America is evil and it's enemies are good?'
That implies that I think lin terms of the rigid dualities of the fundamentalist Christian.
When faced with all that thunder and damnation I turn away. I become lighthearted. I talk about sex and romance and my desire to be well fed and comfortable. I say I like to spend the day smelling the herbs and roses, looking at autumn leaves fall to the ground and watching the sunlight bounce off raindrops. I point out that my moral code comes from Elvis---Don't be Cruel---and I say that the animals should be freed.
Just a postmodern ironist folks. Thats all I am. Lets talk about Matrix Reloaded. Or watch Law and Order on the Canadian-owned commercial television.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at June 27, 2003 03:56 PM | TrackBackI'm interested in the way the US right worships text. If only the Bible (usually meaning the inaccurate King James version) was followed. If only the US constitution (usually meaning the inaccurate readings put about by the Federalist Society) was followed.
I am not sure whether I get more peeved at being called anti-American or by more conventional friends on the Left who bag me for being too pro-American. America's there, with lots of faults and lots of virtues, like every other nation on the planet.. Why does the judgment have to be all-or-nothing?
Posted by: Alan on June 27, 2003 05:54 PM"I'm interested in the way the US right worships text."
Here again is the Protestantism. Sola scriptura. It's all there and plain to see: or at least plain to those right-thinking and right-leaning folk who plainly belong to the elect.
Posted by: Invisible Adjunct on June 28, 2003 12:32 PMI was thinking more along the lines of Protestanism as embodied understanding bodily tacit knowhow, a tacit everyday moral knowledge that is lived as custom and habit.
It is what Bush appeals to in all his speeches and it goes down well--strikes a big cord---with his domestic constitutency. From where I sit it looks to be pretty bedrock stuff of US conservatism.
I am not sure how this deep moral personal knowledge relates to the worship of the text.
Posted by: Gary Sauer-Thompson on June 29, 2003 10:29 AMBush's appeals to the bible seem able to support departures from conservative principles (prudence is tossed out the window in the interests of smiting all and sundry and transforming the economy into the sort of mercantilist imperium that would have appalled Smith or Marshall) and departures from scripture itself (his and Ashcroft's 'bible-based economics' misses the bits about eyes of needles and the merchants' tables, for instance - and isn't there a commandment about killing people?). The brand has nothing to do with the content, really.
Posted by: Rob Schaap on June 29, 2003 02:36 PMI'd call it an unthinking worship of text, as the attitudes you describe fail to take into account the contexts in which the texts were created and applied. Myself, I'd prefer an intelligent _respect_ for text, that acknowledges limits as well as mandates.
And I wouldn't call dislike of these sorts of with-us-or-agin-us attitudes "anti-American" -- I'm an American, and I find them profoundly disturbing.
Posted by: Rana on June 30, 2003 08:19 AMRana,
yeah I know this critical distance its not an anti-Americanism.
But this black and white duality of the right wing hacks who spin for a living is the way the debate is handled in Australia. Its a replay in Australia of either you are with us or against us.
The aim is to silence criticism. Dissent is not welcome.
Posted by: Gary Sauer-Thompson on June 30, 2003 11:26 AM