How sturdy are we anyway?
by digby
This piece by Vinson Cunningham in the New Yorker asks the right question about the events of the past week:
[I]t made perfect sense for Meghan McCain to say that “we gather here to mourn the passing of American greatness. The real thing, not cheap rhetoric from men who will never come near the sacrifice he gave so willingly.”
It was, of course, a jab at Donald Trump: such jabs abounded at the service, and seemed, by the end, to be its entire aim. But here, the younger McCain had explained, better than anyone who spoke subsequently, exactly why it was right for admirers of her father to regard the sitting President with contempt. If McCain was, at least symbolically, Americanism’s high priest, Trump is now its chief heretic. And, if McCain’s farewell statement is to be treated as the final word, this is true: Trump doesn’t have any reflexive sense of fairness, or freedom, or the dignity of anyone, even himself. The sublime seems permanently beyond him. It’s true, too, that his rise to the Presidency represents a passing away: the memory of his ugliness and stupidity ought to keep an entire generation of politicians, if not more, from invoking high-flown ideals as a guarantee of decent civic behavior, or of government worth even perfunctory, let alone pious, regard.
But for all of the scorn heaped on Trump—whose name was never mentioned outright—there were questions left unanswered at the service. First: Is it really possible for a person to rise to power in a country with which he has absolutely nothing in common? Isn’t it more likely that Trump, whose most fervent devotees are white evangelicals and proponents of the fraudulent prosperity gospel, is just as archetypically American as McCain, embodying an alternative set of equally real national principles: anxious acquisitiveness, a distaste for deep thought, endless aggrandizement?
Then, too: Even if the American religion is good, and inclusive of certain eternal truths, if it can be thrown so quickly into crisis, turned so violently on itself, how sturdy was it, really?
A very good question. To me, these days, it appears that “American ideals” (never fully achieved of course) were pretty much bullshit cover for the shallow, self-serving, parochial, racism of a substantially larger number of my fellow Americans than I had imagined.
On the other hand, that antediluvian worldview has been with us from the beginning, waxing and waning depending on the circumstances. So maybe there’s some sturdiness after all. Either way, it looks like we’re going to find out.
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