serum114

Why America's Problem Is Cultural, Not Political
by Stephen Gabow

Here are some questions that ask the same thing in different ways. How can McCain/Palin even stand a chance in this election, given the state of the country? Why hasn't "conservative" become a dirty word, given the results of the last 8 (or is it 30) years of conservative rule? How come the Republicans get away with lies, dirty tricks, thievery and gross hypocrisy, over and over again? Why are congressional Democrats so spineless, so deferential around Republicans?

I think the answer is that conservatives and Republicans are more attuned to the American people and to the roots of American culture. I cringe to say this, but somehow deep in our values, hopes and dreams we are primed to be conservative. And the Democrats, being politicians, can sense it; they know it in their heart of hearts.

To begin with, America has been soaked in poisonous homegrown racism for three hundred years. It affects every American child. Yet even aside from that elephant-in-the-room, we have to fight our native culture to maintain a leftist perspective.

Citizens of other countries can draw on their own revered cultural icons to promote rebellion or revolution, or the notion of a social community. In 2004 Canadians voted for "The Greatest Canadian." Tommy Douglas, a socialist and reformer known as Canada's 'father of Medicare,' won the honor. The English have Robert Owen, the French have Emile Zola, the Germans Karl Marx, among many others.

What about the USA, home of revolutionary democracy? Who do we have? Franklin Roosevelt? Joe Hill and Eugene Debs? Martin Luther King? The freedom riders? Elizabeth Staunton and Susan B. Anthony? Mario Savio? Malcolm X? John Brown? Tom Paine? Emma Goldman? With the exception of King and FDR we remember these people only vaguely, if at all. Our founding father heroes have been stripped of their revolutionary content, to emerge in our times as staunch Christian conservatives. Whether Thomas Jefferson was actually an agnostic social revolutionary is not the point; he is perceived as something else.

We love stories about poor boys making it big. Who of us has not dreamt of being a millionaire? We admire and love Bill Gates and Henry Ford by making their lives into stories of good men working hard and earning their wealth and freedom, and by excising anything negative from their stories. Our high school students know that Henry Ford built the first mass-produced automobiles, and that he offered a living wage to his workers. We don't recall, though, that Ford advocated for Hitler and published anti-Semitic crap in his Dearborn Independent.

On TV and radio we are deluged by endless get-rich-quick commercials; one salesman after another hawking his easier, faster way to make "life-changing" money. Or we peek into millionaire mansions, the "cribs" of the rich and famous, the garages full of Ferraris and Rollses. Or we watch the parade of new luxury products. Is greed really good, we wonder? Haven't too many Americans come to believe that making money in itself is a goal worthy of a lifetime's pursuit? In Thailand they talk of "suspiciously wealthy" individuals--people so rich one should be suspicious of how they got it. We have no similar concept.

Who can count the American heroes dispensing justice from their fists or from the barrel of a gun? From John Wayne to Charles Bronson, Dirty Harry to Rambo and the young Vito Corleone, we thrill to our heroes walking tall, carrying a big stick (but preferably a gun, which is much more practical) to right the wrongs of society. They do it pretty much alone. No social action to achieve social justice here.

Rambo invades Vietnam to free American prisoners. Bronson's character fights and kills the evil inner city gangs. They both avoid the incompetent government and corrupt police force. A despicable judicial bureaucracy wrongly stops Dirty Harry from dispensing real justice.

Here we have a righteous vigilante who fights for freedom, and also, of course, his beloved family. The young Michael Corleone does what is necessary to "protect his family." We want to forget he is a gangster and murderer. We want to forget Bronson's character is killing, because he is right to fight evil in any way he can.

In all this there is a strong flavor of the virtuous ends justifying the means. If you have to lie, cheat and kill to achieve the Kingdom of God on earth (the true America), so be it. Sound familiar?

When Rambo blows up a hundred Vietnamese to rescue American prisoners, we know he's only killing bad guys. Bronson's character kills and the bad guys' blood runs in the streets. No innocent victims here!

We can't cheer Rambo in the real world, but we can swear our undying love for our soldiers, somehow forgetting that their messy job involves killing innocents. And when our fighters come up with slogans straight from Rambo, like "killing is our business, and business is good," we shrug.

Americans don't vote for eggheads. I remember Adlai Stevenson running against Eisenhower. Stevenson didn't stand a chance, not least because he was pegged as too intellectual to be President. We prefer our leaders to be plain spoken, practical men who don't think or read too much. A cowboy, maybe. It is hard to think of an American icon, fictional or real, who is an intellectual. Who comes closest? Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain?

I bet John Wayne would be a strong supporter of the Bush administration. He would cheer us on to "victory" in Iraq and Afghanistan. We'd have to respect the opinion of such an American hero. But then we forget that John Wayne was born Marion Morrison, and it is documented that he was a draft dodger during World War II.

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The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.
Hunter S. Thompson

"The bad news is, the aliens have landed. The good news is, they eat Mormons and piss gasoline!"
Utah Phillips

michelemichele

It may be that the Toronto Star site was overrun by CP* trolls three weeks back: I became too disgusted to bother posting there again until a couple of days ago.

The mindset described in this article is becoming more pervasive here, and I'm seeing a lot more bigotry towards French Canadians as well as racism towards natives and immigrants from the ME and Asia. I used to think it's because of the last eight years, but I really don't know anymore. Canada isn't the gentler country I thought it was.

* CP = conservative party

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SPRINGFIELD

I don't know. I do think it's gentler. I have said countless times on this board that the root of most of America's problems is it's ultra-violent culture. This article talked about John Wayne and "Godfather" type violence, but that's nothing compared to video games like "hitman" and "Grand theft Auto". Or compared to lyrics rapped by 50 cent and Lil Wayne. Or screamed by Slayer or Children of Bodom. What about movies like SAW, or Cloverfield? Our culture is steeped in gore and violence. And people are having a hard time seperating reality from fantasy.

michelemichele

(((pondering)))

(15 minutes later)

Family conference: if Obama was running up here, Harper would lose big time (HUGE)

But...

Mother: "If he was a native Indian, he'd have a lot more trouble...underneath the surface, 'polite Canada'". (I typed that out as she was yapping). My niece, Emily, agrees with her.

RE violence -

Rape stats are higher up here, but that may be because rape is reported more often.

In any case, apparently, we fight a lot.

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BleedingPinky

I haven´t been back in the States for a few years. But I hear what this article is dealing with. Especially with all my relatives living in a rural area down south. Too big a land, too spaced homes, too far away from other countries/cultures/news.
Yeah sure, the world wide web is there for opening your eyes, , but the reality is the newspapers, television, walking the streets of a city.
Face it. Most folks live in suburbs, out in the country, have a radious of at the most a hundred miles of socializing, in both the U.S.A. (and I would suspect Canada as well).
I guess there was a time where it all depended on exactly that: What was going on in your own environment. Nope. That ended with the Cold War. Time to wake up guys.

serum114

It is a cultural problem. Unfortunately most freinds and family are conservative knuckleheads that seem to live in fear of the unknown. And of course fear is the mind killer. When the movie Brokeback Mountain came out I remember alot of righties concerned about what John Wayne or Clint Eastwood would think of it. I'm thinking Eastwood would probably apreciate since he did work with that director on another movie. And John Wayne who cares he was a drunken nazi.

__________________

The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.
Hunter S. Thompson

"The bad news is, the aliens have landed. The good news is, they eat Mormons and piss gasoline!"
Utah Phillips

Heretic

No, these are all the symptoms not the causes of our cultural violence. Many conservatives keep trying to blame all the things you listed, but in fact they're the effects of that culture. The same is true of old westerns. People tried to say they deranged the culture toward violence, but in fact only represented what was there beforehand.

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"In space no one can hear you scream. in D.C. it won't matter..." -Clinton Resurrection: The Alien Queen lives!

Rigged

I think this article makes a mediocre point. Still one that deserves to be explored. I think that culture is really a code word in stupidizees for socialization and conditioning which is really a cognitive science.

For example, I will pose a question, what potent influences on sustaining one's belief in say, an "afterlife?" Most people would answer, Church. What does that really mean though? It means that we are conditioned, brainwashed, and socialized by conscious efforts of our parents, peers, and teachers. Their intentional efforts and examples produce a dichotomy of moral belief structures. The two most prevalent in the US, known as culture these are:

1. traditional, conservative, patriarchal and;

2. liberal, expressionist, socialist, nurturant.

There is nothing inherently wrong with being under either one. Cause we most likely, are. Even if we are unconscious of its influence on us. Both groups have their own languages, traditions, moral codes, belief structures about how family life, work, money, and government's relationship with individuals.

The reason why people will continue to vote for Republicans, like McCain or why they seem to be "blind" to the obvious walking contridictions like Sara Palin is that is how they have been conditioned to think. I think it is true that early development is where you are going to learn your set of moral priorities. For example, a child growing up in a more non-traditional home would probably rate empathy as a good moral value. Therefore, liberals are more likely to support social programs that help those less fortunate. Where a paternalistic structure espouses something like moral purity. So a retributive criminal justice system makes sense to them. Evil must be punished, its a disease, and so on.

Which is why in my opinion the concept of character is so important to Americans. That we are looking for the candidates to mirror the values we care about most. We all have values, and moral structures. Culture is simply an outward expression of that taken with other factors overtime.

Lets talk about the issues, well character is an issue because it says a great deal about how their thought processes, how they reference and make decisions about external issues. Conservatives live in a constant state of attack, they are always feeling someone is at war with their values. Liberals, imo don't seem to perceive the progression of society and culture in the same light--inclusion of minorities are immoral to conservatives. Gay marriage? Immoral. Abortion? Immoral. They don't know why, it just is.

So our two sides are incompatible and we get that lovely culture war soundbite.

The US doesn't have a political culture, it is a morality war. Hope they don't win.

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Vicariously I

I don't know why nobody told you
how to unfold your love
I don't know how someone controlled you
they bought and sold you

The biggest problem we have is a lack of inspiration. We have no direction because the government and corporations want us focused on material shit. And it is this shit that we don't need that is blinding us from seeing the truth about our country and our lives. We are so busy working toward some unknown future that most of us don't have time for anything else, including politics.

It's much easier to believe what your parents and or friends think then to try and figure it all out on your own. Add the pride that is built into our minds in school and you have a group of young adults who now feel superior to the rest of the world despite not having EARNED anything.

The reality is we are not very different from other empires that have fallen in the past. Arrogance blinds us, apathy disconnects us and our lack of knowledge makes us vulnerable to those who would manipulate us for there own gain. Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. We need inspiration, we need to remember that there is more to life then material shit and death.

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"It's hard to face reality when you're busy living in the American Dream."

Vicariously I

Malkavian

But... but i do like the material shit.

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Woof!