by Don Hynes
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| Vantage Point | Culture and Politics by Don Hynes |
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"No man is prejudiced in favor of a thing, knowing it to be wrong.
He is attached to it on the belief of its being right; and when he sees it is not so,
the prejudice will be gone." - Tom Paine
February 13, 2005 A good friend forwarded the following excerpt from an article in February Harper's. It cuts to the chase with a perfect metaphor for the cheap carny trick that is at the center of our political culture (three throws for a buck, each prize worth a quarter). The terrifying news for the unwilling participants in our sideshow is that the fun house pop guns are real and they are the sitting ducks that become statistics at best and talking points for our national validity at worst. "The wisdom of the right consists of knowing how to take its (moral) absolutes just far enough, which is to say never so far as to relinquish the prerogatives of wealth and power. This achievement amounts to an ethical sleight of hand. You work the trick by shifting the domain of moral absolutes to those areas of life where they least apply. You treat the gray areas of human existence as though they were black and white, the better to disguise one's self-interested smudging of black and white to gray. You erect castles of rectitude on the frontiers of morality in the hopes that the murder and rapine taking place in the town squares can go on undisturbed. You accept the death of a six-year-old child by aerial bombardment or economic sanctions and defend the life of a six-week-old fetus. Think of it as taking the high road in Lilliput." Garret Keizer, "Life Everlasing: The religious right and the right to die" This horrid cover up of the real consequences of our national self obsession with the tawdry flim flam that passes for reasoning is nowhere as evident as the current condition in Iraq. Here in "Iraq trapped in a terrible vice between ruthless insurgents and unloved occupiers" Rory McCarthy, the Guardian's Baghdad correspondent after a two year stint on the ground, talks about conditions in Iraq. A great writer and playwright died last week. Arthur Miller married an American icon whose personal torment was a forerunner to the culture wars of today, and who wrote about our obsession with materialism in a way both timeless and immediate. Here's a link to "A Line to Walk On," a wonderful piece by Miller about the wisdom of a common man, something missing from the cheap bagmen who haunt our national punditry. *** |
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