There Will Not Be A Triumphant End To This Turning

[pbrower2a]

(06-07-2021, 07:20 PM)galaxy Wrote: revolution: country united against external enemy
depression/wwii: country united against internal enemy who is not a person or group of people/country united against external enemy

civil war: country divided against itself, intense identity politics/"culture war," people from the two sides feel like they no longer have anything in common
2008-202?: country divided against itself, intense identity politics/"culture war," people from the two sides feel like they no longer have anything in common

Again and again, race proves to be this nation's Achilles heel. Add a racial dimension to the crisis (such as...a black president and a resulting huge increase in political polarization in 2010, for example) and it's all over.

This Cold Civil War will end with resignation, not glory. We should all pray that 1/6/21 was the climax.

If this Crisis ends with COVID-19, then it ends with a whimper. Which side in the cultural Cold War prevails will depend upon who is in charge at the end. One side will be far more successful in economics, especially in meeting basic human needs that go beyond an animal level of survival. 

The "Cultural Marxists" as the Right calls them, are far more effective in offerings of convincing entertainment. Their opposite number, who offers traditions of economic hierarchy, white male domination, and right-wing religion, offers something so stale that one can accept it only if it precludes all else. 

If I am a politician and I have the choice between winning over equal numbers of ignoramuses or sophisticated, educated people, then with whom do I go if I have no ethical commitment? The latter. They are less likely to be convinced by a specious argument. Some people ask what such a slogan as "Make America Great Again" means. One frequent poster in recent weeks put the emphasis on what constitutes "America", and that seemed to mean people who act much like and believe much like he. To be sure all persons have some room for improvement in character and behavior, but that does not mean that people with a different heritage from mine need conform to mine if they are to be good 'Americans'. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments establish that some people who look very different from their recent masters are no less American than their former masters. 

I have a confessions to make. First, my musical tastes better suggest the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, or Wilhelmine Germany than they do "America". Need I become a country music fan to be truly American?  

There is no single "American" tradition.  

We are going to find what works and what doesn't. Pragmatic assessment of results will decide what succeeds and what fails. Maybe the valid hierarchy will be more intellectual than ethnic. J S Bach isn't for everyone.   

"Race" will be confusing. Interracial marriage and adoption may be less commonplace than it seems because it is often so striking where it is, but the children of 'mixed' families will have to define themselves. The one-drop rule that once defined privilege and subjection in law is becoming less workable even with respect ot whites and blacks. Example:



This well-known singer, Carly Simon, would qualify as "black" under the one-drop rule. Two of her grandparents were Ashkenazi Jews, one was a German gentile, and a fourth was a half-Spanish, half-black Cuban. Go figure -- or do you need to?

Some parts of America deal far better with ambiguity than do others.