Philly-opietism

Dr. Johnson was wrong: patriotism is not the last refuge of scoundrels. Filiopietism (excessive veneration of ancestors or tradition) is. And Philly-opietism is the worse local variant I’ve been exposed to in my seventy odd years. Admittedly, it’s better than the terminal despair that characterizes my hometown Detroit’s psychic malaise. But the second rater mentality that makes Phillies cringe before, say, New Yorkers or Angelenos derives from heretical offspins of the so-called American Dream.

(Most Americans don’t realize that the concept began in the 30’s Depression, as a kind of whistle past the cemetery mentality. See David Marsden’s anthology on the subject for details.)

But the AD is just the latest version of the City on the Hill paradigm our Puritan Preachers wished on us. Think on it. They actually believed that God had saved the “New World” for the religious riff raff of Europe so they could make a New Contract for righteousness with the Almighty. As if he didn’t have enough on His Docket. In the eighteenth century, thanks to the purgative effects of the Enlightenment, codified in Jefferson’s “decent respect for the opinions of mankind” temporarily disciplined the absurdly theological assumptions that God had a special contract with the “invading Americans”.

Tom Paine mocked sunshine patriots and urged this new man, the American (in Hector de Crevecouer’s formulation), was something unique in human history. No imperium here, we promised, as we built one “The City on the Hill”, after the decent Jeffersonian interim, became Manifest Destiny. (Heh, even TJ bought the Louisiana Purchase and sent his operatives Lewis and Clark all the way to Oregon to check our next moves out.

Except that this sleek Fourth of July rhetoric kept US from considering the moral implications of our two evil contracts with the Devil, our original sins: black slavery and red apartheid. We talked a good game, but our behavior belied our myths. And it was only with true patriots, Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, W.E.B DuBois, Jane Addams, Eugene Victor Debs, FDR, Martin Luther King, Jr., JFK, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, that the credibility gap between what Americans professed to believe and how they actually behaved slowly but surely narrowed.

Meanwhile, the public school system after World War I, began to belie the visionaries from Horace Mann to John Dewey: they became auxiliaries to the growingly commercialized media that consumption was all. I first taught at a very good public high school in the 1950’s, E.Lansing MI High. It kept its high median because the parents were either Michigan State professors or GM executives.

So I know mass ed can be great, and not too often is, as in Nicholas Kristoff’s inspiring essay (NYT, 12/24/2006) on how the Westlake, Washington public school kids adopted a school in Cambodia that is achieving wonders in protecting young girls there from the slavery of the brothel. But it inspiring precisely because it is so atypical. Most high schools are caught in the terrible vice/vise of sports commercialization so freshly reported by Robert Lipsyte. He analyzes, for example, the Texas Friday Night football psychosis that promotes the jock culture that prepares promising athletes for even grosser exploitation in our colleges and universities.

This life style just assumes that it is normal to be obsessed with sports journalism. Where will AI go? Will that mouthy wide receiver TO save us, or go over to the enemy. Can’t the Phillies ever win the World Series. Such fatuous diversions pervade American consciousness, making voting majorities sit at the feet of fatuous radio ranters.

The result is an electorate that can be led around by the nose by such flyweights as George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. In the first six years of his reign, W. scorned Green politics, even though he knew about it and acted sensibly on it when he was governor of Texas.

We now know that the Saudi fly boys who crashed into the World Trade Center were flagged by alert local FBI officers, but the boodle driven politics (my division is more important than yours) kept intelligence leaders unaware of a very obvious threat. Overcompensating for their failures, the Bush administration started to become more and more imperial, exemplified by Cheney’s secret meetings with oil execs.

When our historians finally get access to this excess of secrecy, dollars to donuts, the neocons were plotting to secure Middle Eastern oil under the fake red, white and blue aegis of overthrowing a tyrant. We have been playing footsie so long with tyrants in the twentieth century that it’s implausible that we suddenly were converted to spreading democracy in the Muddled East.

Most Americans have not read Stephen Kinser’s book on our long history of imperialistic adventures, beginning of course with the Mexican War, peaking again with the sly takeover of Hawaii (multi-ocean navies need coaling stations), the horrible massacre of Filipinos after they had overthrown their first oppressors, the Spaniards.

William Howard Taft purred that we had to take care of “our little brown brothers”, Christianizing them—when they had been Spanish Catholics for three centuries! Only a handful of Americans are well-educated enough in their own history to know about these outrageous betrayals of our putative ideals. Mark Twain and William Dean Howells warned us, but then how many Americans read their serious writers. It got worse with the United Fruit Company virtually running the U.S.Marines to control Central America between the World Wars.

The rest of the world knows about this two-faced Americanism. And that’s why they doubt our honesty. Look at the hassle over Iran getting atomic weapons. It’s been an open secret that our best ally, Israel, has had them for decades. And that they took out Iraq’s first nuclear initiative with a preemptive strike. And we’re helping India with nuclear support, even though we sided with Pakistan for decades while India cozied up to the former Soviet Union.

And of course there are those revealing photos of a younger Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Sadam Hussein in the eighties on behalf of Ronald Reagan when our main enemy there was Iran. Most Americans think we’re the greatest nation in the history of the world (in Michael Smerconish’s recent formulation, at it most advanced state of development!). That is childish rhetoric. And it doesn’t even begin to check out with recent objective formulas for rating national success.

But the handwriting is on the wall. This quarter Toyota announced that it had become the second largest producer of automobiles, beating out Ford, stuck in a SUV ditch. And it predicts that it will beat out GM in 2007. This is doubly painful to a lower middle class Detroiter who worked his way through University and graduate school working in their factories.

What did it? Greens have warned for decades that we needed higher mileage standards from Detroit. Hubris kept Detroit from responding, an overweening pride that Bush encouraged after 9/11 by giving oil companies tax breaks and subsidies (and not even, it turns out, collecting offshore royalties that belong to the public). And cynically running up deficits by giving tax relief to the rich (the richer, the better) in order to break the bank of New Deal social reform. Reagan started that Milton Friedman cynicism. The NeoCons perfected the Karl Rovian ploys.

What has this got to do with Philly-opietism? I was afraid you’d never ask. The smacking of fiscal lips that accompanies Goldman Sachs dizzyingly high bonuses obscures the dysfunctional consumer system we’re driving into the ground. Henry Ford rode to the top of the auto heap on the insight that if you paid your workers more, they could buy more of what you’ve made. Philly, once an industrial power, is now honeycombed with defunct factories and falling apart neighborhoods. Worries about the Iggles and the Sixers and the Phillies is a prelude to reproletarianizing Philly.

All the greedy High Culture moves that are blatantly trying to swindle Dr. Barnes billions for more High Culture are Mainlining us into a Third World urban core surrounded by lush suburbs. Only Daniel Rubin had the moxie to complain that the real scandal of the Gross Crocodile Tears hustle was that a Medical Center was selling an overpriced canvas to a billionaire heiress who made her money by denying many of her workers of health coverage, even keeping many part time and quietly urging them to file with Medicaid with their sick children.

How can reputedly civilized cultural leaders acquiesce in such hypocrisy. They can because the Mainline has been avoiding the consequences of its brutal economics for centuries. I mean, Mainline of the Pennsylvania Railroad, was the way new tycoons and the acolytes avoided the industrial mess their moneymaking kept making.

I have had the good fortune of living in an ideal “Mainline like” neighborhood in the Far Northeast called Greenbelt Knoll built by a tough-minded idealist named Morris Milgrim in 1956.(We’re have just been certified “historical” for reaching our Golden Jubilee.) Morris pioneered racially integrate housing in our Neck of the Woods. People said it couldn’t be done.

Adjacent Pennypack Gardens has stayed mostly white, if not entirely, for an even longer time. Morris’ Jewish upbringing made him uncompromising in pursuit of the American Dream of equality. It wasn’t easy. But he was one tough customer, and he fought for what he believed in. We didn’t talk Iggles, Seventy Sixers, or Flyers around the clock.

And the same idealism motivated Dr. Barnes to give two hours a day of his eight hour shifts to on site factory art education. Think of it. Two hours a day at work to teach ordinary blue collars to reach for a greater leisure. His Merion collection is estimated to be worth thirty billions! Because he saw the real aesthetic value of art the PMA Mainliners snooted at as useless. They were wrong. He was right. Intelligent filiopietism means admiring the most mature traditions in your home town. Milgrim and Barnes were birds of a feather. We need more of their kind of nests to save us from our bad habits. Philly-opietism is one big bad habit. Kick it!