The splintering of America

KENNETT, Mo. -- Although its appearance has been predicted for years, even decades, today's American culture seems to be one devoted to a litany of false predictions and unfair accusations that have always been a part of mankind's inner nature, if not its outward manifestation.

What some observers predating even the Bible or the Quran raised as possibilities for the ultimate future of mankind have, in many ways, made predictions seem virtually as real as yesterday's headlines.

Yes, it's true, modern man seems unable to escape a society obsessed with therapies and filled with distrust of formal politics, skeptical of authority and prey to superstition, its political language increasingly corroded by fake pity and euphemism.

Like late-term Rome, but unlike our early colonial republic, today's America has witnessed a lowering moral standard of its leaders who once offered up their lives as a living memorial to the efficacy of democracy but which in recent decades has become more of a mirror of what our Founding Fathers warned us against: growing imperialism, the corruption and verbosity of our senators, a reliance on sacred geese (those feathered ancestors of our own pollsters and spin-doctors), and deified leaders controlled by everyone save their constituents.

Unlike Caligula, the president does not appoint his horse-consul: he puts him in charge of the environment or appoints him to the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, artists vacillate between a large self-indulgent expressiveness and a mainly impotent politicization, the contest between education and TV -- between argument and conviction by spectacle -- has been won by television, a medium now more debased than ever before.

Even our popular arts, once the wonder and delight of the world, have decayed, recalling for some of us the memory of a past time when our popular music was full of exaltation and pain and wit and appealed to grown-ups. We once had Duke Ellington and George Gershwin and Cole Porter and today we are down to illiterate spectacles of grunts and groans. All but five percent of today's music seems synthetic.

For the young, more and more entertainment sets educational standards and creates "truth" about the past. Millions of Americans, especially the young, imagine that the "truth" of the Kennedy assassination resides in Oliver Stone's "JFK," with its paranoid elevation of discredited public officials and perfectly absurd reasons for killing an American president.

Even when noncontroversial bits of history are involved, the facts are even wrong, whether the storyteller is seated in front of a TV camera or being filmed in Hollywood or described over the airwaves. Contrary to what the revisionists would have us believe, pseudo-history is imagination, and that's all it is.

We are living in an age in which the victims are too often the heroes, and while no thinking persons would condemn whole classes of individuals, we have witnessed the rise of cult therapies which teach that we are all the victims of our parents and their parents before them: that whatever our folly, venality or outright thuggishness, we are not to be blamed since we come from "dysfunctional families" -- troupes described by pseudoscientists that offer as solutions 12-step programs and claims (with absolutely no proof) that 96 percent of all American families are dysfunctional.

And if we don't believe this claptrap, we have repressed our memory and are in even more urgent need of some quack's latest book. Not to be aware of a miserable childhood is prima facie evidence that everyone had one and is thus a potential source of revenue for someone.

The cult of the abused Inner Child is alive and well in America today. It tells us that personal grievance transcends political utterance, and that the upward production curve of maudlin narcissism need not intersect with the descending spiral of cultural triviality.

Thus the pursuit of the Inner Child has taken over just at the moment when Americans ought to be figuring out where their Inner Adult is, and how that disregarded oldster got buried under the rubble of pop psychology and specious short-term gratification.

The all-pervasive claim to victimhood tops off America's long-cherished culture of therapeutics. To seem strong may only conceal a rickety scaffolding of denial, but to be vulnerable is to be invincible.

Complaint gives you power -- even when it's only the power of emotional bribery, or creating previously unnoticed levels of social guilt. Plead not guilty, and it's off with your head. The shifts this has produced may be seen everywhere, and their curious tendency is to make the right and left converge.

Consider the recent discussions of sexual issues, revolving more and more around victimization. Meanwhile, the new orthodox of feminism is abandoning the image of the independent, existentially responsible woman in favor of woman as helpless victim of male oppression.

In these and a dozen other ways we create an infantilized culture of complaint, in which Big Daddy is always to blame and the expansion of rights goes on without the other half of citizenship, which includes dedication to duties and obligations. The emphasis is on the subjective: how do we feel about things, rather than what we think or can know.

The problems of this inward-turning were sketched long ago by wise men who warned against cultural-destroying beliefs of victimhood and misconception. Interestingly, as early as 1835 in Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America," this observation was offered:

"When inequality of condition is the common law of society, the most marked inequalities do not strike the eye; when everything is nearly on the same level, the slightest are marked enough to hurt it. Hence the desire for equality always becomes more insatiable in proportion as equality is more complete."

I think what he was saying was that there never was an ideal society nor much agreement on its definition.

Jack Stapleton is the editor of Missouri News & Editorial Service.