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Thursday, July 28, 2005
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In the Heart Of the Headland UD has an old friend, a professor, who’s thinking of giving up his American citizenship, moving permanently to Montreal, and becoming a Canadian when he retires from his university. His disgust with “what this country’s become” is intense, abiding, deepening every day. The lack of universal health care, the invasion of Iraq, the power of fundamentalist religion -- the basic overtaking of the country by yahoos, as he sees it -- has distressed him to the point of utter rejection. I respect this man’s willingness to take his convictions to their conclusion, in the same way that I respect American Jews who, convinced that the Jewish people won’t survive outside of Israel, change their citizenship. Henry James became a British citizen shortly before his death in 1915, when it became clear to him that his loyalty all of his adult life had been to his adopted country. There’s nothing wrong, in UD’s book, with loving another country more than America and wanting to live there and be loyal to it. The problem for the Democrats - a problem especially acute in that virtually Republican-free laboratory of liberal Democrats which is the American university - comes from significant numbers of them who share my friend’s disgust with the country but do little with that disgust other than respond in visceral and self-destructive ways to events here. The party is wisely attempting to distance itself from this strong and alienating strain within itself, as Will Marshall notes: The problem for Democrats is that an important part of their base -- upscale white liberals -- seems torn about the meaning of patriotism… The right answer to GOP jingoism, …cannot be left-wing anti-Americanism. Of course, progressives can criticize their country and still be patriotic. Indeed, one of the highest forms of patriotism is being honest about your country's flaws and taking responsibility for fixing them. But it is what's in your heart that counts. Are your objections rooted in a warm and generous affection for your country, or in a curdled contempt for it? Too many Americans aren't sure if the left is emotionally on America's side. And that's a big problem for Democrats. Note Marshall’s reiterated stress on the heart. You can’t fake love of your country, and Republicans don’t have to, because that’s what’s in their heart. Their problem is that many of them are overfond. The liberal elite I’ve grown up among, the elite I know, scorns emotion in general. Any emotion. They’re into what Richard Rorty calls “dry knowingness.” Irony’s fine. Deconstruction of someone else’s rhetoric is peachy, and Air America-style contempt well and good. But straightforward emotions are for the simple-minded and naive. “Many people who become academics,” concludes James Elkins, author of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings (2001), “fail to feel anything very strongly... Virtually all academics are in the tearless camp.” Based on his surveys of art historians and other academics in the humanities, Elkins remarks that “the majority of such people...actually distrust strong emotions,” which are seen as “old-fashioned, romantic, and unfitted to modern art,” not to mention “private, irrelevant, incommunicable, misguided, and ignorant,” and “not well defined or widely documented ...unprofessional, embarrassing, ‘feminine,’ unreliable, incoherent, and largely inexplicable.” Underlying this emotion-phobia, as the sociologist Karl Mannheim suggested decades ago, is “the great historical process of disillusionment, in which every concrete meaning of things as well as myths and beliefs are slowly cast aside.” Intense aesthetic emotion, like intense patriotic emotion, is simply one of the casualties of a larger “destruction of all spiritual elements, the utopian as well as the ideological” in modern life, a condition Mannheim calls “matter of factness”. Mannheim regards the ascendancy of matter of factness as a catastrophe, “the decay of the human will” to comprehend and improve the world. The website Daily Kos responds to Marshall’s essay in this way: “It's truly disappointing that this is the crap Hillary has signed on to. More of the failed corporatist bullshit that has cost our party so dearly the last decade and a half.” Marshall is a corporatist. To understand more about corporatism, let us visit again with Professor Donald Lazere. UD has already written about Lazere. She has already suggested that the rallying cry for Democrats who want to get somewhere should be Anyone But Lazere. Yet some evil genius keeps putting him forward as the voice of progressive academic Democrats. Here he is recently in Inside Higher Education : The range of American political discourse is pathetically limited to often-superficial differences and trivial debates between two equally corrupt parties that are captive to corporate America and the military-industrial complex. …Why are conservatives so terrified at the notion of socialist views being expressed in these realms that they have poured hundreds of millions of dollars in the past thirty years into overwhelming them? Why do they hysterically depict corporate-servant Democrats like Clinton and Kerry as radical socialists? And why do they smear democratic socialists by distorting their beliefs and equating them with their deadly enemy, Communism — when such red-baiting would be recognized as nonsensical anywhere else in the world? What’s truly bizarre about the most progressive Democrats today is how ancient they sound. The parties are equally corrupt! They’re captive to the military-industrial complex! They’re running scared in fear of the power of socialism! And by golly, socialism is not Communism! These are the words of someone living in the late 1950’s. Add to this antiquity prominent spokespeople like Teddy Kennedy (why oh why was he trotted out during the Kerry compaign?) and Jane Fonda (months ago she was the wife of a hyper-corporatist who personally owns much of Argentina; now she’s someone who boasts of taking a cross-country trip on a bus fueled by vegetable oil) to this, and mix with a kneejerk union-maid worldview, and what you end up with is not progressive. |