Red White and Blue Blather

In my first civics class (1940) at Holy Rosary Academy (Bay City, MI) my eighth grade teacher, Sister Charles Borromeo, pounded into my thick skull that in a democracy an honest citizen must always consider the opinions of his political opponents. She explained that civilized discussion was at the center of an effective democracy.

That is why at graduate school (Western Reserve) I palled around with Ray Ginger, who had already written his dissertation—his published biography of Eugene Victor Debs, The Bending Cross. Debs is one of my favorite Americans whose guiding philosophy has become mine: “Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization.” Not just because he organized the rail workers into a strong and effective union, an institution we are fast dumping into the fiscally globalizing sea, as we race to see how many billionaires we can create on the backs of the poorest Americans. (Alice Walton is using part of her 18 billion dollar Walmart (part time work, no health insurance) fortune to buy Eakins’ “Gross Clinic” out from under us Phillies.

And Woodrow Wilson put Debs in jail for having the temerity to oppose World War I (after WW had promised not to involve us during the 1916 election!) And WW was thrilled by the racist flick, “Birth of a Nation”. It’s when I first learned that even American Presidents can, er, err on grand scale (Ahem, no use beating around that Bush.)

And it’s why when I began teaching high school in East Lansing in 1952 I read William Buckley’s “God and Man at Yale” as well as Russell Kirk’s “The Conservative Mind” (Kirk actually taught across the street at Michigan State, and I had the memorable joy of watching his great mind at work in conversation demolishing my liberalism.) Buckley and Kirk kept my Marxist fantasies in check, and gradually led me to abandon them. This biographical precis is by way of explaining why I keep on reading Michael Smerconish, The Big Squawker on the Big Talker. And believe me, it sometimes tests the virtues Sister Borromeo tried to instill in me. He is so often so High on Himself, it often makes me nervous.

But not his most recent blurb on how he was honored by being asked to welcome a troop of New Americans at their Naturalization Ceremony.. My jaw bounced off my computer keyboard as he unleashed as eloquent a defense of the First Amendment as I can ever remember hearing. Until, alas, he closed his carried away peroration with these words--“we Americans are citizens of the greatest country ever created, at its most advanced stage of development.” (Philadelphia Daily News, Internet.)

Michael, at 44, have you not yet heard of the good old Greek word “hubris”? That cometh before the Fall. I’ve found in Europe that such feckless red white and blue blather strikes the uneducated as stupid and the educated as silly. It is both. The only exceptional aspect of the American doctrine of Exceptionalism is that it is exceptionally ridiculous.

Contrary to what the Puritan divine John Winthrop uttered in the seventeenth century about our being “A City on the Hill” (and that the current President amuses the greater world with his glib assurances that He as a Decider is a Dei-decider), to say we have been chosen by God is blasphemous.Let the Evangelical put that in their pipe dreams and smoke it. God is too busy sorrowing over what a mess we continue to make of his greatest Creation (a Being with Reason) to be settling wars and granting Bush and US special favors.

The more I study the Doctrine of American Exceptionalism, the more I’m certain it’s even worse than whistling in the dark: It’s what our guilty Superegos tries to tell our Ids when we see how often our Real history (slavery and Indian genocide to begin with) contrasts with our Fourth of July oratorical bunkum. But try to tell the United States of Amnesia what their real history has been!

Greatest Nation in History? Half of us don’t even vote. Millions have become addicted since World War II to that terrible procession of mind blinders—pot, cocain, crack, heroin, meth. A school system that is a playpen compared to what the Scandinavian societies are doing, and a bifurcated flop divided between a barely literate citizenry and the Nobel generating elite universities. A violence entrenched mob of gun happy hoods and misfits. Shoot outs in School!

Come on, Michael. What you should tell New Citizens is not red white and blue blarney. You remind them how lucky we are to have so many opportunities unlike many other nations, and how often we’ve still blown it, being human. And try to wean a tele-tantalized tribe back to the likes of Walt Whitman,and John Updike, and Aaron Copland, and Frank Lloyd Wright, and Josephine Baker, and Duke Ellington, and Henry Ford (when he wasn’t being a thugish racist), and Andrew Carnegie, and Bill and Linda Gates Arrogant Pride really does come before the Fall. And Americans need to be shown our greatest examples not fed a lot of upbeat malarkey.

When I first started teaching at Penn in 1957, my Carnegie Postdoctoral Fellowship was to create a course on “The Mass Society” in the Am Civ Department that would show US how to encourage the best and fight the worst in the new industrial society. When I presented my modest proposals for improving things like housing and television to the 1960 Daedalus Magazine conference in the Poconos, the New York eggheads laughingly thought it was feckless to try to improve mass man and woman.

Indeed, the conference ended literally with Randall Jarrell waggling his beard at me and intoning, these final words, “You’re the man of the Future, Mr. Hazard, and I’m glad I’m not going to be there!” I’m sad to say (because I loved teaching his poetry) that he committed suicide shortly thereafter.

It’s when I lost my faith that the American Intellectuals could or would lead us to a more Promising Land. If you Blowhards of the Air Waves would think more before you Squawk, indeed follow Sir Charles Borromeo’s sound advice, you could make up for the trahaison des clercs that befuddles America more and more.

Fairfax Cone, a leading advertising executive during the recession of 1957, told his peers at a national conference not to worry about the recession because “America is still the All Time Hit on Humanity’s Hit Parade”. Top of the Pops. Not going to Iraq and Ruin. Don’t decline into that Mad Magazine nonthinker, Michael. “What! Me worry!”