(11-14-2021, 12:43 PM)AspieMillennial Wrote:(11-14-2021, 05:14 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: It is possible that Americans will separate into such places as "Klan Hollow" and "Commie Canyon", as extremists will mock the safe and unreachable communities of the other. Even so we have mass culture that can unite much of the young population and shape values. This said, there is Kiryas Joel, New York, a very exclusive community for reasons other than income and vocational status.
But this turning resembles the Civil War more than WW2.
Yes, it does. It is easy for the secularists, religious minorities, and the Left (there is little of any Secular Right; Liz Cheney seems to be an example, as her isolated position places her) on the one side to vilify the Right as unlearned, superstitious, anti-scientific, bigoted fanatics while the Christian-fundamentalist Right to deprecate the Other Side as godless promoters of an America as a Sodom and Gomorrah. As someone familiar with both worlds I can take my choice based on historical patterns that have held reliably true over several centuries. Religious fanaticism and ethnic bigotry kill. Economic exploitation and the denial of opportunity waste human ability in favor of privilege that does more to divide Humanity into predators and prey. Superstition thwarts progress. American politics became uncannily placid after Pearl Harbor.
OK, it is not necessary to be on the cultural avant-garde; I will accept twelve-tone music when I am told that some folk tune (classical musicians are wise, which Bartok and Shostakovich have done, to recognize folk traditions as a source of musical coherence when twelve-tone rows fail), but until then atonal music lacks the coherence needed for memorability. Some old norms fit the test of time. Does anyone think murder, theft, rape, fraudulent oaths, perjury, and abandonment of the vulnerable as good ideas? Law and order is usually a right-wing meme in the mistreatment of pariahs, but in its strictest sense it is a defense against chaos that endangers people who deserve protection. I came to give full support to LGBT rights after being gay-bashed. What makes my life safer serves my interests. The problem isn't that some fool thinks (as if that is the operative word) that I am a homosexual. I can be as wrong on that in assessing people as anyone. What is inexcusable is attacking people for homosexuality. I recognize much of the cultural divide in America as differences not so much between tradition and the avant-garde (few really get postmodernism, let alone like it) as it is between different traditions that can coexist peacefully because those traditions see each other as equally valid even if not theirs. Maybe if the tradition involved sacrificing children to some Harvest God or endorsed dishonesty in dealing with strangers I might have a problem.
The Civil War became so violent because people Americans took on polar opposites on a belief core to American identity. It is easy to understand why people who had no use for chattel slavery because they could never, at the least charitable interpretation, fit it into their economic life -- and people who could convince themselves that slavery, far from an abomination, was benevolence toward the slaves who could never handle freedom. Slave-owners did not consider themselves exploiters and abusers of their slaves but instead guides to a way that allowed the slaves to have food and shelter. Slave-owners frequently freed slaves who could no longer work -- so that they would starve to death or die of exposure in the winter. As you can recognize, people can rationalize practically any evil that serves their economic ends or allows them to feel good about themselves.
The Second World War was no less a struggle over slavery than was the American Civil War. Nazi Germany was one of the harshest systems of slavery that ever existed. The plantation owners at least saw slaves as valuable assets to not be worked to death or murdered for some trivial offense. Nazis used forced labor in murderous ways. The V-2 program ended up killing more forced laborers in Hitlerland than civilians or military in Allied territory. It required huge quantities of potatoes to be fermented into alcohol. Potatoes were a staple food in most of Europe, and this use of potatoes created a severe food shortage. German industrial workers were transformed into serfs on behalf of (mostly) large, politically-connected tycoons. The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was little better. The Japanese turned most of their young men into soldiers and sailors instead of agricultural laborers who grew the rice to feed the soldiers and the industrial workers. The Japanese thug empire solved the problem of food shortages by bleeding occupied countries from Manchukuo to Indonesia for food that usually had gone to the local populace. American and British capitalists may have been exploitative but not that exploitative. Murdering people for their religious beliefs or the religious beliefs of their grandparents (Nazi antisemitism was racism above all else) was a clear abomination to anyone whose beliefs derived from the Enlightenment.
The Enemy this time is an insidious virus. In the time between getting my first inoculation and my recent booster, hundreds of thousands of Americans have died of COVID-19. Whether one takes measures that greatly reduce the chance of contracting COVID-19 and severe consequences that can include pointless death largely reflects cultural values. COVID-19 has caused more deaths on some days than the Pearl Harbor attack or 9-11. America got angry after both, and rightly so.
I am already contemplating my "Pearl Harbor" rhetoric against COVID-19. I can forgive the Japanese people who have redeemed themselves as 'generally harmless' -- so generally harmless that I would feel safer in Tokyo than in any American city. COVID-19 is not going to surrender, and it has no attractive culture worthy of preservation and promotion.
I can think of no profanity strong enough to express my hatred of the SARS-2 virus that causes COVID-19. Neither can I find one for the bubonic plague or the Holocaust.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.