"Never Look Away"
On the evening before the election I prepared psychologically by watching one of my favorite films addressing the core of American political conflict. Martin Scorsese's "The Gangs of New York" is an unsurpassed epic about our national spirit and it[base ']s origins. The movie begins with two enormous gangs, more like small armies, facing off across a field of snow. One gang is called 'The Natives,' and is made up mostly of those who were born on these shores. The other bunch is a conglomeration of immigrants and the poor, demanding the right to be treated as equal citizens. As the gangs face off their leaders first shout out the ritual rules of ancient combat, and then the two sides go at each other with pitched viciousness and extreme violence, until one of the leaders is mortally wounded. As the battle is called to a close the dying leader, called 'Priest' gives his last words of guidance to the young son at his side. He tells him to "Never look away."
More than a mere exhortation for future revenge, Priest's words express the vital will of the 'other,' who comes to this land wishing for a place at the table, only to find that they must fight for honor and recognition against those who came before. America has always been a country that both prides itself on diversity and falls into the worst depths of prejudice and bigotry. Scorsese[base ']s film ends with the ultimate climactic confrontation between gangs that is interrupted and rendered irrelevant by bigger historical forces. One is left with a sense that the American struggle for acceptance and identity continues and is ongoing.
An election these days resembles nothing so much as an old-fashioned gang fight. It could be worse. We could be having a civil war rather than what we refer to as a 'culture war.' After all, we are fighting for the future and to define who and what we are. Those who don[base ']t fight with total conviction will simply be forgotten. For the winners there is a moment of exaltation, and then the fight begins again.
Out of all of the angst ridden steam blowing on the left (my side) following this election, my favorite is a map of North America that labels the 'Red' states as "Jesusland" and all of the rest "The United States of Canada." The cartoon map certainly reflects a profound alienation felt by so many of my friends, who speak of migrating to other lands or even of seceding from the union. Those who view civilization[base ']s progress in terms of increasing tolerance and social equality see this election as a deep setback. Those who perceive evolution in terms of an unquestioned American triumphalism may feel they[base ']ve passed out of a valley of moral decay into a new world of total promise.
Previous to the vote both sides spoke, in the typically inflated rhetoric of the baby boom generation, about this election as "the most important in our lifetime." I wonder whether the cheerleaders of either side really took this for anything more than hyperbole. While conservatives ran a candidate who was not about to give ground to anyone, the other side ran a pair of wealthy Senators whose main qualification was their perceived ability not to offend those in the so-called 'middle.' You can[base ']t fight a revolution from the middle.
Perhaps it isn[base ']t quite a revolution that we want. Revolutions make people uncomfortable after all and my generation in America is the most comfortable in human history. We who were raised on the GI Bill after World War II and during the longest economic boom in U.S. history are sitting on top of the planetary economy. Why would we want to give that up? Sure, as a group we are noted for our idealism, and like spoiled children we always presumed that the world would change just to match our dreams. As youngsters who felt a special destiny after the shadow of our parent[base ']s war, we brought about a revolution in values, and now as born again Republicans we want to overturn not only that revolution, but everything that we object to in the wider world.
Neither Progressives nor Conservatives are going to find their victories in the middle. Conservatives realized this many years ago, while progressives keep trimming their message to appeal to some amorphous group resembling that phantom demographic Richard Nixon used to refer to as the "Silent Majority." In those days the left ridiculed that political mirage as a fantasy. Back then a very unpopular war was going on and there was less room for sitting on fences. You were either "on the bus or off the bus," "part of the solution or part of the problem." It was in those times that the left managed to bring down presidents. Nowadays it appears that most of the certainty and the effective passion that goes with it has migrated to the right.
We are told by the pollsters that this election was about religion. Indeed, it takes religion to win a revolution. In the sixties we on the left had all kinds of religion. The civil rights movement was fueled by the energy of black Southern Baptist church congregations and its most powerful leaders were holy men. The advent of drugs and television turned the youth of America into a wave force that presumed to storm the barriers of heaven itself. Many of us were absolutely convinced that we could break down the sexual and perceptual barriers of human society, eliminate war, and invent a new world order in the course of a single generation.
The left is now drowning in practicalities, led by clerks and bureaucrats, trapped into making adjustments while avoiding the necessity to take real risks. The true believers have abandoned us for the certainties provided by the Christian Right. For too many of us the failure to transform the world led us to embrace a culture of cynicism and ironic detachment. When the 'revolution' appeared to fail what was left to many of us was to make an obscene amount of money. For a time we justified this by placing our new hopes in rapid technological progress. After a while most of us ceased even to take this very seriously, until events shocked us wide awake.
Many people saw the fall of the Twin Towers in cultural terms as the death of irony. They saw that we could no longer afford detachment and decadence, and were faced once again with the search for a new sense of national purpose. The attack on our soil was like a beam of light, a revelation, compelling everyone to dig more deeply to find out what it means to be American.
These are times when simple answers have considerable appeal. Simple answers, delivered by those with a will to power, however, can lead to serious pitfalls in a complex world. This American election pitted those with decisive, plain spoken and certain solutions, against those who refuse to dismiss any problem as simple. The American people were made afraid, and had been conned into a struggle for which they[base ']ve already sacrificed so much that they can[base ']t bring themselves to turn away. To change course in the middle requires too much self doubt and questioning, when what we think we need is certainty and that favorite Dubya word: resolve.
America since Vietnam has groped for a new and brighter sense of itself. Once, through Depression and War, we knew who we were. Now our ultimate sense of purpose is muddied among the constant noise and obsessive commentary that explodes in the media sphere. We are trapped in a constant eruption of new technology that offers much more information and infinitely less communication than anything that[base ']s gone before. Culture appears to be a self-devouring machine, constantly overthrowing what is known for what is new. Americans have come to distrust a medium like television news that constantly bombards them with contradictory images, while they are drawn toward those who use media to evangelize for this or that agenda. Conservatives have calculated that what America wants is a mirror for the ideal, whether it reflects the [OE]reality based[base '] truth or is only a manufactured fantasy.
Faced with a world that stubbornly refuses to conform to the evangelical vision, Americans have chosen to deny the real world, only seeing things through a lens manipulated by their keepers. The inevitable result is a political map that looks like the one showing America as an isolated 'red state,' while virtually every other nation and people lives in an alien world that regards us with increasing loathing and dismay. Here is where those who would lead an enlightened America toward a positive future must take Priest[base ']s advice. First we must bring forth a positive vision that gives people more than complaining to look at. Muckraking, which we in the opposition do so well, is insufficient. We must discover the soul of who we are, and then offer that up as a positive vision of what is possible. Like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and Ghandi and the Dali Lama and every world leader that has given us their dreams, we must "never look away" from the goal. Only then will the people be willing to come along.
The issues are determination and trust. Times like these, when we face such disappointment, are the times we have to delve inside. This requires a certain faith in what we may find. The lesson we have to learn is that there is more to revolution than struggling against injustice. Analysis is not sufficient. To be effective we must discover a path to the promise that[base ']s always rising in our hearts. Real revolutions are always driven by great feelings of love, and real revolution is only possible when we touch that love in ourselves and then in the hearts of our enemies. Until that time, like the gangs of New York we will fight with one another, the same battles in the same endless war, only to be swept away by greater things as the world moves on.
10:42:15 PM 
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