Which Side Are You On?

    As we watch singers and actors taking sides in the presidential election, we may wonder what connects art and politics.
      I am not here thinking of the art that has always paid attention to certain kinds of public affairs -- songs of protest, for example, or novels that treat social injustice.  Rather I have in mind entertainers who trade on their celebrity to magnify mere partisan allegiance.
    This is not a major matter.  Just a straw in the wind. But straws do show which way the wind is blowing. Celebrity feeds and is fed by popular culture. Celebrity politics suggest an assumption that side-taking is safely consistent with cultural norms. And indeed it is.  In America nowadays, the question in the air is not, How can we best live together? but Which side are you on?
    The skirmish lines of our culture war often run through religious territory. At one extreme a faction of Christian conservatives pushes the rest of us to accept a dog's breakfast of religious doctrine and bully-boy politics. Their ardor for religious values includes an ironic disrespect for religious values -- other people's, that is. Failing by moral persuasion to induce other people to abandon their values, these self-appointed Christian soldiers resort to force. They want the government to mandate their chosen interpretation of Christian scripture through civil law. This is of course dangerous both to religion and to a principled rule of law.
    An attitude at the other extreme is not so sharply focused or militant. But it is consequential. It rises from a muddled extrapolation on principles of church/state separation.  The concept of freedom of religion has morphed into a cultural expectation of freedom from religion.  A lot of us feel we have a right to live beyond sight or sound of any manifestation of faith.
     The attitude reaches far beyond issues of nativity scenes on courthouse lawns. It reaches into private spheres. Ask a person of faith what kind of looks may be directed at a murmur of prayer over a restaurant meal.  Or consider common social etiquette:  Tell an off-color story at a dinner party and you may be judged merely daring or naughty. But venture a serious consideration of God and you may be charged with a truly significant breach of manners.
   And consider again the weathervane of celebrity.  Our popular culture is so ripe for anti-religious attitudes that to the pantheon of celebrity liberals and celebrity conservatives we have now added celebrity atheists.
    On either side of the religious skirmish line, groups of us scorn other people's beliefs.  On either side of political skirmish lines, groups of us disdain questions of balancing ends and means.
    The United States Congress will suffice as exhibit A.  Once known as the world's greatest deliberative body, it has lost capacity for true deliberation because it has lost respect for the very idea.  Moderates are seen as weaklings and treated accordingly.  Compromise is equated with failure. Congress wars over trifles and trifles with fundamentals.  The nation's business is conducted with the dignity of a soccer riot. The default on sworn duty is especially sharp in the House of Representatives, where a Republican faction is so besotted with ideology that it values nothing else.
    All of which brings us back to the weathervane of the presidential election.  Here there is no real contest of ideas, not much at all beyond gestures of contempt.  Both sides have favored epithet over substance. The Republican ticket has adulterated even this sorry mix with a campaign of audacious falsehood.
    And if disdain for the truth is shoddy,  Republican strategy contains another element that is downright alarming. The Romney/Ryan ticket plainly intends to reveal as little as possible about specifics of the policies they would take to Washington.
    Only two readings are possible here:
    -- The Republican candidates believe the American people have no right to know what they can expect from their government.
    -- The candidates know the people have that right but mean to scorn it in hopes of gliding to election on glossy platitudes.  They mean to gain the White House by tricking the electorate.
    The tenor of this campaign is a spectacular disgrace. We must hope that we are not soon again asked to endure the like of it.
    But the campaign is in part the work of party strategists and their hired-gun consultants.  Something else is at work in the tenor of our larger national discourse. There, the much-lamented failure of civility is only a symptom.  The root failure is one of tolerance.  We are surrendering to a notion that different values are illegitimate by virtue of being different.
    This is civic laziness. Or perhaps it is only civic weariness. Hard times take a toll.

Whoppers, Bedfellows and the Fate of the Nation

    I got a letter from my Uncle Barlow the other day. At least I think he's my uncle in some distant way. I've never been completely clear on that.  Every time I ask the people in my family who are old enough to know, they just chuckle or change the subject. He's a pretty good old gentleman, though, and he's fond of me, so he writes now and then to discuss what he calls the passing parade of life.  He has a particular kind of view of it from his home way out there in Barlow County.
    Here's what he had to say:
    "Dear Nephew,
    "Well, things are pretty slow hereabouts, if you don't count the fact that Scooter over at the cafe is in trouble again with his wife Ida. She's been after him to take her up to the city to hear the symphony.  Well, Scooter told Floyd over at the grain elevator and hardware store that he would just about as soon listen to a bull farting through a bugle.  Trouble was, Scooter didn't know that Ida was in the next aisle shopping for canning jars. She heard every word.
    "That was when Scooter made his second mistake.  He told Ida he was just making a little joke. Now, Ida is mighty fond of her point of view.  If she's real serious about something, she wants you to be, too, and she's ready to explain why. She jumped all over Scooter in the worst way. Been giving him down the country for more than a week. He's going around town looking droopy as a wet dog.
    "I got to thinking that Ida is a little like some of these politicians we've got going around nowadays.  I mean the ones that want all of us  to have personal opinions just like theirs, and who want laws to make it look like we did even if we don't. There was a bunch of that sort flocked together at that Republican National Convention down in Florida. You'd have thought some of them were handing down heavenly pronouncements, except for the fact that a fair amount of what they had to say wasn't really true.
    "I guess the hands-down leader in that department was this fellow Ryan who wants to be vice president.  Millie over at the library says he's the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree and stand on the stump to make a speech about conservation. You'd think he'd be pretty good with the whoppers  by now, seeing as how he's been telling them in a pretty regular way for several years. But darned if he didn't tell one interviewer that he had run one of those marathon races a whole lot faster than he actually did. It's a little thing, I guess, but it's mighty odd. I mean,  if you were setting out to lie in public, why would you choose a thing where other people were timing with  stopwatches and writing down results? Millie says Ryan acts like he's got livermush for brains.
    "Well, then, along came the Democrats with their own show, and I felt like I ought to watch it, too. They sure did put on a humdinger. I guess maybe a little more of what they said was actually true, although to make proper sense of some of the numbers they were throwing around, you kind of had to close one eye and squint at them sideways.  I have never understood why politicians need to get into tall tales when they want to criticize each other. The truth is usually bad enough.
    "I noticed some movie actors hanging around both the conventions.  And I guess that makes a certain kind of sense, seeing as how politicians and actors are in similar lines of work. But it can sure make for some strange sets of bedfellows. When the Republicans chose an actor they wanted to put up at the podium, they went with that Eastwood gent who got his big break making cut-rate westerns in Spain. I thought Republicans were touchy about that whole outsourcing business, but maybe not so much.
    "I favor the Democrat bunch this year. I have pretty much decided that.  They don't remind me of the Peabodys like the Republicans do.
    "When I was a boy, the Peabodys lived in a big house on the swell side of town. If the Peabody boys didn't want to be completely alone, they had to hang around with the rest of us from time to time. (Although they would never let girls into their tree house.)  But they always acted like they were doing us a favor with their company.  Every now and then you would catch one of them looking at you like you had cow flop on your shoes.
    "And none of the parents liked to go out to eat with old man Peabody. He always found a way to wiggle out of helping with the tip. He kind of acted like it was everybody else's obligation to help him hang onto as much money as he could.
    "The Peabodys were big churchgoers, which I guess is a fine thing for people to do if they want to. But the Peabodys acted like their church was the only proper one, and they could be mighty pushy about it. One time they tried to get the county board to pass a law closing the Bijou movie theater on Sunday, because their church didn't favor what they called worldly entertainment on the Sabbath.  Well, then old Ben Levine said if they were going to start passing Sabbath laws he might have some different notions to offer, and the whole thing got bogged down and finally just went away.
    "My daddy didn't like the Peabodys one bit, but mostly I just felt sorry for them.  They always seemed to be real troubled that everybody in Barlow County didn't think just the same way they did.
    "I have to go now. I'm going to drop over to the cafe and see if I can't cheer Scooter up a little bit.  His cooking goes straight to the dogs when he's on the outs with Ida, and some folks are starting to talk about taking their lunch trade to the Burger Boy out on the bypass.
    "I promise to write again real soon.
                                                                                                   " Sincerely,
                                                                                                    "Your Uncle Barlow"