The Bach Side © 2011, UrbisMedia
Another July 4 has gone into the books, the flags are rolled up, fireworks debris swept up, the cheers of “we’re No. 1,” roars of military flyovers and the hyperbolic political speeches are faded echoes of chauvinism. Now we can return to the reality of the greasy slide into history’s dust bin. We’re Americans; we think we’re God’s gift to the earth; we think we are history’s exception.
We are not. We have done great things, but we have not heeded Mark Antony’s words over Caesar’s corpse. Our misdeeds and arrogance will not only outlive our noble accomplishments, but also perhaps our greatest failing, pride, continues to drag us to the abyss. In history, as in sports and show business, you are only as good as your last great performance. America is a long way from its last great performance.
This is not about our current imperialistic adventures (that have excuse the pun, ”bombed”), although they are very much a contributor/outcome of our national malaise. This is about what we have come to in our intramural dance of delusion and self-destruction. This is about how the “dark side” of America, the fatal flaw of character that sailed over on the Mayflower, remains the ugly, haunting specter that adulterates our great noble ideal that we (apologies to feminism) “all men are created equal.”
Such is our great paradox. We were founded by refugees from religious oppression, who created new execution grounds for their ”witches.” We were established by people seeking freedom from the divine right of kings, but established ourselves as overlords of those we placed in servitude and those we expunged from their indigenous lands. Beware the lofty prose of our secular scriptures, which we might hold as “self-evident,” but are no more guaranteed that a politician’s stump speech promise.
Not that noble men and women have not sacrificed themselves to make the American dream reality: a half-million in the Civil War; FDR’s New Deal; Martin King’s marches and Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights Act. But the dark side never rests. Johnson recognized this when he acknowledged his Civil Rights Act of 1965 turned over the South to the Republicans. When it did it was not long that the “culture war” was declared. Since then the Republican Party has devolved into the party of the dark side.
The Republican Party, once nominally “the party of Lincoln,” has reached its present nadir through its association with the two most socially toxic elements of American (or any) society: racism and religiosity, the first a badly popularly misunderstood result of evolution; the second a fairytale concocted to assuage fear of the unknown. In consequence, a culture composed either, or especially a combination of racism and religiosity, will found its social structure on a bedrock of ignorance and superstition.
Which is what has become of the American Republican Party. When Johnson delivered Southern Democrats to Republicans, the “Southern strategy,” playing upon the barely dormant racism of the old Confederacy (and racists everywhere) was employed to political success by Ronald Reagan marked the first “Faustian” handshake with the dark side. As we know from the evolution/creation debate, religion is part of the package of racism, and soon the Republicans added a twisted and bowdlerized version of “Christianity” as a bulwark against liberal and progressive social changes, and the descent to the dark side was sealed. The election of Barack Obama brought forth the ugly racism of the political right thinly disguised as “birtherism.” References to “true Americanism” by the Tea Party and Republican politicians obliged to pass a Christian litmus test to hold office, compose a platform that all but officially stands in opposition to the rights and interests of racial minorities, women, gays, workers, immigrants and the sick and elderly.
The nearly forty year political dominance of Republicans has enabled the capitalist economic structure to coalesce around a half dozen cartels controlling energy, defense, insurance, media, pharmaceuticals, and agriculture, and to all but complete their purchase of government through Wall Street and its lobbyists.
Finance capital has financed and played the dark side of American politics to the point where a substantial part of the electorate is incapable of even calculating what social policy is in its own interests. Playing upon racial prejudice (Obama and immigrants) and religious fears (Muslims, evolutionists and atheists) America has arrived at the point where the controlling economic elite, their political acolytes in legislatures, and a base of political dimwits led by the politico-pastoral Palins, Bachmanns and Perrys, has managed to seal the deal by amassing wealth too big to countervail.
Yet there is a glimmer of hope (a now, admittedly, mush discredited term). The Republican “base,” now shifted by the rigidities of its dark allegiances so far to the extreme right that it is incapable of corrective room to maneuver is in danger of self-destruction. Committed to its prejudices and true believers in a political mythology that threatens the interests its own political base it has painted itself into an ideological corner.
This is not to say, however, that the party of the dark side is no longer politically dangerous. Indeed, it is when economic circumstances are at their most perilous, when the public fisc is ruins, investment stagnant or migrating abroad, when unemployment is sapping national strength, that the dark side has its best advantage—blaming the “other,” when fear of the “other” detonate the toxic brew of our inveterate bigotry and religiosity. We need only look to German and Japan only sixty years ago.
And the Dark Side has its best chance when it seems “desperate measures” are needed, when we are exhorted by its spokesmen to “return” to “revealed truths” and place our trust in those who address us from the religious-historical narrative, from fear. It has its best chance when the reasonable and rational among us and when our president does not show resolve and courage in confronting the darkness. The Dark Side does not come in friendship and conviviality, and they have told us as much. They have coined it a “culture war,” and war is about conquest, even extermination of the enemy. The Dark Side does not compromise.
Will our President learn soon enough that underneath every racist and religious zealot is a frightened bigot?
Always look on the bright side of life
Always look on the bright side of life
Some things in life are bad, they can really make you mad
Other things just make you swear and curse
When you’re chewing on life’s gristle, don’t grumble give a whistle
This will help things turn out for the best
Always look on the bright side of life
Always look on the right side of life
[Eric Idle, Monty Python, The Life of Brian]
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© 2011, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 7.19.2011)