Stuart Faxon

Toward a civic religion

A Nov. 24, 2003 cartoon in The New Yorker, by someone whose signature reads as “Sipress,” shows three generations walking on a city sidewalk: a father, an adult son, and a small child. The old man is saying, “Everything was better back when everything was worse,”

That cartoonist may be a genius.

I’ve dedicated my life to working with words and ideas and the people they come from. It’s a privilege. Yet it’s also like being in show business: Both require high proficiency and tenacity, yet all one’s efforts can still fail financially because of overwhelming institutional factors.

Today, journalism is less about ideas and more about show business, and has failed in its mission to explain America to itself. Part of journalism’s function is retelling. A good reporter figures if he can explain something to himself after he’s researched it or had it explained to him, he then has the ideas, and already possesses the tools, with which to tell others.

Here in later life I’m trying to explain America to myself. While it may be this way for all who are closer to the grave than the cradle, l find America’s contemporary behavior odd and unsettling.

I see a brilliant secular Constitution that a religious people cannot live up to. More citizens today than ever cannot read the language in which the Constitution was written. Many who can, cannot sufficiently comprehend its ideas.

I see apathy and hedonism ascendant (assuming a hedonist is not also apathetic), and uninformed opinions among the active. I see anti-intellectualism taken for granted, and prejudices such as ageism and genderism unaddressed, while we diddle anachronistically over race and faith, and spend more hours at our hedonism than at anything else.

I see traditional religion down, at least in terms of church attendance. I see superstition up, along with conspiracy theory. I see presidential debates dominated by phony issues, exaggerated by a debased press, which in turn is owned by a mere half-dozen corporate conglomerates, often with interlocking directorships.

I see parents afraid of their children, or simply ignoring them. I see the greatest recreational drug market in the world. I see the greatest information technology ever, but used mainly for distribution of sex, fake celebrity, rumor, and lies—and advertising, if that is not redundant.

I see debasement in the arts; government schools that warehouse more than teach and are occasionally dangerous; barbarism in sports; a phony government retirement system; an immoral tax system; federal and state election districts legally gerrymandered to protect incumbents, pander to ethnicity, or both; and irrational amounts of money made and spent on the meaningless.

I see a social class system based not on birthright—a system from which we fled—but one based solely on money, which is a lowest common denominator, not a goal.

So goes our American experiment, the world’s first attempt to form a nation from many peoples and beliefs. It’s certainly been more success than failure, and a benefit to the world, no matter how many Marxists, other leftists, and religious zanies call us imperialists.

Still, our leaders are not leaders, but politicians; not the best citizens we choose from among us, but an elite class of legal-professional office-seekers, drifting to any state and doing anything else necessary to court the interests essential to drinking their pay from the public trough.

Overpopulation, terrorism, illegal immigration, cultural decline, semi-literacy, family structure breakdown, apathy, and ignorance—no one theory explains it all, but it’s a bad combination.

With all this, I’m still not pessimist. I realize what percentage of this information represents media distortion. This is a great country. Imagine! Well, don’t imagine because it’s fact: We’re the only nation that has ever written concern about citizens’ “happiness” right into one of our founding documents. We are an unprecedented experiment in human history! Yet, look how much we are about that lowest common denominator, and how little we are about our potential.

Perhaps it’s inevitable. I don't know enough anthropology, psychology, law, or science. I’m a journalist. That means I know a little about a lot of things, and a lot about nothing. I read magazines from left and right, and history. I watch a lot of network TV, including Fox and PBS.

Most talk radio is full of Johnny-one--note reactionaries. Liberal Democrats have become knee-jerk, retrograde propagandists reminiscent of old Joe Goebbels, though not as expert as he. NPR is good, as long as one keeps their agenda in mind. BBC is great, as long as one lasts through the football and cricket babble.

I got cable TV only last year, and the CSPANS are just great. If you want a gander at the American Far Left, check out the fuzzy audio on Access Tucson as they play the Free Speech TV network out of Boulder (Channel 74 on Comcast).

Most newspapers have become too stupid or obvious to read. Standard pay TV is a wider selection of the mediocrity that the mega-networks place between their incessant ads. Most movies are for highschoolers. Modern music is for underdeveloped minds. Video games, like professional sports, prove how little one has to do, how much time one can waste, how much one enjoys violence, or all three.

I did come across something that makes some sense of this American cartoon. It was from The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don't Think For Themselves, by Curtis White, in the form of an essay titled, The New Censorship, published in the August 2003 Harper’s magazine and taken from the book published by HarperSanFrancisco.

This New Censorship is counter-intuitive, White says. It does not operate by keeping things secret. “Are our leaders liars and criminals?” he asks. “Is the government run by wealthy corporations and political elites? Are we all being slowly poisoned? The answer is yes to all, and there's hardly a soul on these shores who does not know it.”

That's not completely, as more Americans than ever are politically immature and cannot say whom their government really is. Still, the current situation is one of positive revelry in it. If I’m an evildoer, I'll be right in your face about it, because I know you don't care. Repeat the lie enough, and it becomes truth.

White goes on, “Oil policy created in backrooms with lobbyists from Enron and Exxon Mobile. Naked pandering to the electricity industry in rolling back clean-air mandates. Accounting firms such as Arthur Andersen buying even ‘watchdog’ senators such as Christopher Dodd ... All of these details are utterly public, reported in newspapers, TV newscasts, and books, yet it’s perfectly safe for this stuff to be known. The genius of the New Censorship is that it works through the obscenity of absolute openness. Iraq-gate wasn’t a secret. The real secret is that it wasn’t a secret, and certainly wasn't a scandal. It was business as usual.”

This must be why I watch 60 Minutes and no longer expect correction of anything they report, including government wastes of our money such as the desalination plant at Yuma, pointless helium storage at Amarillo, or maintenance of huge warehouses of useless Navy clothing in Northern Virginia. If Nixon and Kissinger had today's climate when they secretly bombed Cambodia, they could have done it in the open.

White continues, “The betrayal of public trust is a daily story manipulated by the media within the confines of ‘scandal,’ when in fact its all part of the daily routine and everyone knows it. The media make pornography of the collective guilt of our politicians and business leaders. They make a yummy fetish of betrayed trust. Then we consume it, mostly passively, because it is indistinguishable from our ‘entertainment,’ and because we suspect in some dim way that, bad as it surely is, it is working in our interests in the long run.

“What genius to have a system that allows you to behave badly, be exposed for it, and then have the sin recouped by the system as a sellable commodity! I mean, you have to admire the sheer, recuperative balls of it!”

It would be genius, albeit corrupt, if anyone had designed this setup, but no one did. Our Framers were geniuses of the Enlightenment, but even they could not envision the complexities of a nation this large and diverse. So call it American Evolution—not a theory, but a new reality. White offers the only explanation I can understand that contrasts the nation in which I was born, with the one in which I live.

I admit my part. I voted twice for Dubya, the first Republican I ever voted for, and he rewarded me by royally screwing up. Mine was a typical lesser-of-two-evils choice. I thought Al Gore and John Kerry were big phony blowhards. Arrogant, humorless Kerry keeps reproving this to the nation, but Massachusetts keeps re-electing him. Gore continues to talk to people as if they were children.

We hardly ever elect extremely smart people to the presidency, so those people most often don’t run. Then when we coincidentally elected a high-IQ guy like Bill Clinton, we got a moral derelict. But apparently enough people were getting rich on stock market speculation—or thought they were—so very few cared. I knew Dubya's disadvantages—spine without smarts—and was willing to accept that as better leadership. I became part of Curtis White's America.

The largest concepts behind our societal malfunction are overpopulation, apathy, and groupthink—government and corporate, which are often indistinguishable. In most cases, no individual is held responsible for anything.

Some say government inex-tricably bound up with corporations' money amounts to a kind of fascism, or even defines it. But apparently I'm expected to sit back and enjoy, the Great American Spectacle as fully indicative of our freedoms, confident that our unique American genius will work it all out for the best.

Sure, people are flawed and society isn't perfectible. Utopianism is for Marxists and other silly, deluded people. But it still seems to me we’re heading backward. If more Americans could adopt Americanism as a kind of civic religion, as the perceptive historian Paul Johnson sees it, we’d honor our Constitution and this grand experiment, and improve it.

Apparently it’s far harder for us to have faith in ourselves as a nation, than it is for us to ritually place faith in dozens of forms of the supernatural, buttressed by millennia of myth, legend, and propaganda. Atheist novelist Salman Rushdie makes the case that it is our big, evolved brains and powerful imaginations that require us, unlike the other animals, to make these interior worlds. Yet we are called homo sapiens, the rational animal.

This doesn't explain my thought processes, or those of my fellow Tucson atheists, but at least the USA can be proven to exist. It has proven mostly successful since our 1776 Revolution, and since Dec. 15, 1971, when the Constitution with its Bill of Rights were declared to be in force. We should be able to believe in that, and in ourselves.

Revised 1/29/2008

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