An Introduction? Well, Duh!

As I noted in the last post, it is time for this blog to begin to publish social commentary. I have, over the course of several years, been working on a series of essays on social commentary, to constitute a collection tentatively titled, Drifting Ever Near the Rocks:  Essays on 21st Century America. I kind of got away from the essay-writing as I got serious about grad school. However, as the prospects for employment after the Ph.D. (or even being able to afford to continue in the Ph.D.) wane, I realize that I've got to do something to create some buzz for my work.

The place to begin is at the beginning. Ergo, the Introduction to Drifting Ever Near the Rocks:

The first decade-plus of the new millennium - call it the first three presidential terms - has been an unsettled, and unsettle time for the United States of America. The strange career of George W. Bush, who was willing to accept the evangelical Christian agenda for America; the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; continued unrest and open warfare in th eMiddle East; and an economy that stubbornly defies every attempt to guide, or stimulate it, have al lrendered the new century and the new millennium into a minefield of uncertainty. There are no clear guideposts as to which direction our society should go as it attempts to progress. Further, there is no clear justification for why the Republic should move in one direction, or another. It calls to mind the old Dan Fogelberg song:

It's never easy, and it's never clear
Who's to navigate and who's to steer.
So you flounder, drifting ever near
The rocks.*

The American ship of state, although it is in no serious danger of foundering any time soon, nonetheless is not firmly under control either of the political operatives who hold the levers of power, nor of the citizens who have granted those operatives the right to hold the levers of power, and who should demand accountability from their political agents.

Former Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, in his book, Like No Other Time, cogently expressed the challenge facing the democratic party after the midterm election in 2002. Daschle wrote,

How, in the wake of this loss, with the Senate now aligned with the Republican House and presidency, could we as Democrats pull together to help lead our nation through the gathering storm of forces propelling our nation toward crises of potentially unimaginable consequences?†

If I may wax bold enough to comment on Senator Daschle's conundrum, I will attempt, in the pages that follow, to define the "crises of unimaginable consequences" toward which our nation is still, a decade later, being propelled, and also attempt to provide a measurement of the forces propelling her thence.

I first applied this quote from Senator Daschle's book in 2007, before the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States. In 2012, I could just as easily have chosen Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's (R-KY) assurance, to a group of Republican voters after the 2010 midterm election, that the Republicans's chief goal for the next two years was to "make sure Barack Obama is a one-term president." McConnell's quote encapsulates the problem of a leaderless state with equal aptitude. The problem and the process of drift in the United States during this period has many symptoms, and will require multiple strategies to arrest, and to get the ship of state back on course, in safe water.

Our deeply polarized society, divided along sectarian, ethnic, regional, racial, sexual/moral, generational, and socioeconomic lines, is at risk of being sundered as each group struggles to obtain the biggest slice of the pie, and the most prominent seat at the table. If the country were made of Silly Putty™, this might not be such a bad thing - society could simply be remolded by each interest group into the configuration most pleasing to its constituents. Again, if the country were a balloon, it would simply expand, stretching obligingly to accommodate all comers.

Alas, we do not live in a plastic, nor an infinitely-expansible political space. Further, and more lamentable, we do not live in a society that tolerates any but a zero-sum game of public discourse. The price demanded from both ends of the political spectrum for their contribution to the public discourse is the abandonment of the opposite party's claim to participate in the social forum. That is, both liberal and conservative alike demand exclusive access to the public podium. Their unspoken motto is, "we want our place at the table, and we'll not be happy until you give up your place."

Note there, the use of "you" and "your." This is the invocation of the formless, generic "Other" that has been the villain of ideologues and demagogues for millennia. There always has to be a sinister "Other" available to vilify, and against whom to rally the people. The United States at the beginning of the 21st century is no different.

Americans are not, as a people, well disposed to allow other people to retain theirs while we take ours; we insist that someone give something up so that we can have more. Obviously (and understandably), those who are expecte to yield refust to surrender their values until those demanding the surrender first give up their own values.

The result is social stasis, a stagnation that can only serve to ossify (and, ultimately, to putrefy) society. Ponds go stagnant; streams never do. The warning and lesson for society should be plain. Yet, this stagnating stillness is so easily, so blithely papers over, one can only wonder if anyone actually realizes what is happening.

George W. Bush believed that the United States's fight against terrorism was an advancement of our society. "Freedom is on the march," his administration and its pundits proclaimed, while at home the hidden, unackowledtged wounds inflicted on the body politic continued to fester. As poison built up in the political system, no one dared call 9-1-1, because to do so would be to admit failure of their stewardship of the body politic.

Notwithstanding the technological wonder of the campaign waged in Iraq in the spring of 2003, the United States's taking-up of arms against an invisible for was the latter-day Phony War against terrorism. Our modern imperial Goliath will be no better able definitively to subdue a guerrilla enemy who hides in the trackless sands of its patron outlaw nations that that same Goliath was successful against the guerrillas in the trackless jungles of Vietnam forty-plus years ago.

By the simple expedients of waving the flag and talking tough and waging a well-choreographed public-relations campaign, the Bush Administration was able to make its supposed masters, the voters of the United States, sit up and salivate like obedient lapdogs. The satisfying thump of Marine One-and-a-Half landing on the deck of USS Abraham Lincoln for a premature declaration of "Mission Accomplished," echoes in the satisfied belch of a populace feasting on what it has been told it wants to consume, in terms of political accountability.

Behold the contemporary manifestation of the Roman panacea of bread and circuses! This is a form of civic Pavlovianism, whereby society ignores the fact that it is being hoodwinked while salivating as its leaders throw it the stimulus which makes it salivate in the first place.

The most potent symbol of our Republic is our flag, and no symbol has been as vilely prostituted, co-opted, denigrated, desecrated, and abused in the interest of its own defense in recent years as the Stars and Stripes. Thus, I have chosen to divide this collection of essays (at least the first part of it) according to the phrases of the Pledge of Allegiance.

I suppose I am going to anger some people, annoy others, maybe even elicit a few "Amens" (more or less heartfelt) from some. The only thing I am interested in is thought - if the reader will only think about what I have to say, then I will have achieved my object.

* "Hard to Say," words and music by Dan Fogelberg and Quincy Jones, vocals by Dan Fogelberg. New York:  PolyGram Records, 1982.

† Daschle, Tom, with Michael D'Orso, Like No Other Time:  The 107th Congress and the Two Years That Changed America Forever. (New York:  Crown Publishers, a member of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., 2003), 5.