You need to read this...an incredible analysis

WilliamPitt

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Tue Aug-30-05 02:32 PM
Original message

You need to read this...an incredible analysis

Got this in an email from a reader:

===

I'm a Canadian who grew up an IBM brat in Poughkeepsie NY and watched
the Vietnam war unfold from my living room, and, later, the TV sets
in the dorms at Vassar. I'm a novelist, a filmmaker, and an investigative reporter by trade, mostly with the CBC-TV's 'the fifth estate,' our public broadcaster's version of '60 Minutes.'

Your piece is as usual lucid and marked by real thought: thank you.

Here's a thought for you, as yet, I think, unraised in the freefire
zone that's what passes for American civic discourse these days.

What I see in America, on the religious right, is a paradox I've
never observed before, at least on a mass level, in the US.

For the first time I can recall in US history, a sizeable number of
otherwise rational people have divorced themselves from the American
dream---in a very specific way, but a conscious divorce nonetheless.

Millions of people now believe God, not themselves, is the prime
mover of will and event in their lives.

This strikes me as unprecedented, not least because the voices of the
centre and centre-left---you have no social democratic consensus in
the US as we know it in Canada or Europe---have little grounding to
identify the reasons for this.

As a lapsed Catholic from a very conservative Irish immigrant family,
I think what I see is what I see, if you know what I mean. The
irrational is in the ascendance, just as it was in the late 1920s in
both the US and, far more evilly, in Germany, having been well set
loose in Russia

The implications are huge: the rugged American individualist
philosophy of pragmatism and utilitarianism and the Horatio Alger
myth no longer seem to apply. The notion of social mobility itself
may well be in peril in this culture of 'inshallah'---'God wills it'.

The appetite for betterment, perversely, seems to be subsiding into a
kind of blind need to escape via consumerism clothed in
quasi-religious rhetoric...'ownership' being the latest euphemism as
people queue up for interest-only mortgages.

The lust for the material, always bred in the bone of American
consciousness, now, it seems to me, amplifies the argument that
American hypocrisy of all stripes---not just your ruling class's---is
cresting. What does America spend on pornography every year? Tens of
billions? More than on Hollywood's stuff?

That science is now in the crosshairs---both evolution and the
environment---the irrational will continue to rear its grotesque
head, just as you detail in your piece. What I view as 'Bible
worship' as opposed to outright worship of a deity means all print is
in peril.

But the engine of American history has always been business. That
world hasn't quite yet reached anything like a political tipping
point regarding Iraq or much else. I personally think the economic
reckoning is likely while Bush is still in the White House but the
timing won't make much difference.

Why? I think the American empire peaked around 1957 and that most of
what has passed for diplomacy and statesmanship---never mind the
proxy dirty little wars---has been an attempt to manage the decline.
Empirewise, it's always later than you think.

All that to say: I'm reminded of Eric Hoffer's caution from his book
'The True Believer.'

"To be effective, a doctrine must not be understood but has to
believed. We can absolutely certain only about things we do not
understand. A doctrine that is understood is shorn of its strength."