My everyday world is small; I’ll grant you that. But I am not so utterly self-absorbed with bungalow life and new ways of cooking potatoes not to be troubled by the state of the nation since the election. As Simon Schama writes, the politicos are now blathering on, quite meaninglessly, about healing. How does one heal the political equivalent of the San Andreas fault?
Schama posits that we now live in “The Divided States of America”, split between a Godly America and a Worldly America. According to him, things haven’t been this bad since the Civil War.
In my usual way of thwarting classification, this member of Worldly America went to church Sunday morning and I was surprised to read that the students of my son’s Lutheran school had held a mock election and Bush won 93% of the votes.
What is going on?
I have read various accounts of the reasons for Bush’s win—all well-reasoned accounts, but none of them have been completely satisfactory. Schama’s analysis is rhetorically powerful and very neat, but his sharp distinctions blur under close inspection; red/blue, conservative/liberal, Republican/Democrat—individual voters do not always fit into these tidy conceptual boxes (at least not if they’ve the stamina to think for themselves). Furthermore, his account, like almost all I’ve read, doesn’t go deep enough into the human condition to get to the heart of the matter.
I haven’t worked out my own answer yet, but the question, in all its complexity, won’t let me rest and nags at me relentlessly even as I read.
What is going on?
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If Pearl S. Buck were alive, I have the feeling she could tell me exactly what was going on.
I’ve been on a Pearl Buck kick for the latter half of this year. Her biography found its way into my hands back in July and since then, I’ve been reading some of her original work: The Good Earth, of course, and other novels of China, but also some of her powerful non-fiction. Just the day after the election, Of Men and Women, a remarkable collection of essays arrived on my porch. Published in 1941, Buck’s essays link the fate of women in the world with the dangerous trend towards fascism.
It’s a different America now, in 2004. Back then, Buck to search hard to find a female doctor.
But what she has to say about democracy, liberty and freedom is still relevant. Buck was trying to goad women into social and political action, to convince them of the need to fight for peace. (“Every war sets women back a generation.” "Men alone can never make an end to war.") She was trying to shake them out of their polished-fingernail complacency at having accepted the privileges of freedom but none of the responsiblities.
In Buck’s view the chief responsibility of freedom, to ensure that freedom continues, is to guard, with vigorous thought, courageous voice and selfless action, against the subtle creep of fascism. What Buck here says about women, tweaked with a few vocabulary substitutions, could apply to all fearful and/or complacent Americans today:
Fascism creeps in through the back doors. It is the weak, the unfulfilled, the disconteted who are the back doors and these are to be found too much among women. Anti-fascists busy themselves with commendable energy in discovering here and there in our midst a few Nazis and pro-Nazis; but they overlook the great source of danger in the masses of half-ignorant, half-idle, indolent and discontented American women. . . ready to pull the house down over all. These are the masses ready to run to the call of anyone clever enough to justify their futility and sentimentalize their sex.
When ordinary people avoid serious thought, with its responsibility for action, danger looms. As Buck recalls:
My heart turned cold the other day and the chill of the possible future fell across it when I heard a young American woman cry, ‘I’m so tired of trying to know—I only long to believe!’ It was the death cry of the young German women as they ran to put themselves under Nazi power.
There’s your faith-driven politics for you.
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What faith I have for this country still lies in the ordinary, responsible citizen and the system set up so long ago. It's always very tempting to equate democracy with individual liberty. . .
But democracy is not individual liberty. It is very nearly the opposite of that. There must be serious curtailment of individual liberty in a true democracy. Whole groups of people must submit themselves to the decisions of the majority. Every four years. . .such groups must resign themselves to an order directed by a person they do not want and controlled by policies they disapprove. They endure it because the have the hope and the machinery for change, and these are the great strengths of the democratic form of government. It provides for the revolutionary instincts of the human race. (italics added)
Revolutionary instincts, now more than ever, have an outlet, especially in the blogosphere: (see Web of Influence). Anna Marie Cox of Wonkette may write pithily that real revolution means that you actually have to leave the house. What she’s not taking into account is the way that the Internet has changed the nature of the house. Once isolated places of mind-numbing loneliness to many citizens, the home, via the computer, now offers new, high-speed avenues into what Pearl Buck calls “the engine rooms of society”.
Moreover, Cox seems to be forgetting there was a time when homes were the locus for revolutionary change, a place where patriots could come together and strategize and before heading out haphazardly, and that time is cyclical. Home is entering a new phase in its history, readily apparent to anyone paying attention.
I will concede to Cox that real revolution requires action. Buck herself admits that “so long as a person can say what he thinks and feels when he is impelled to express his ideas and emotions, he will allow himself to postpone action. To speak, to criticize has been a safety valve.”
But it seems to me that the first actions required are still those of thinking, disseminating ideas, strategizing and coming together—actions which have exploded just in the past week.
Pearl Buck would be most pleased, I think, by Andrew Sullivan’s point that the blogosphere consists mainly of ordinary men and women—ordinary citizens engaging in serious thought and accepting the responsibilities of democracy; ordinary citizens demanding moral accountability of their leaders and guarding against the creep of fascism. Ordinary people working to know the truth, not just giving themselves over to learned helplessness or the self-indulgent longing to believe.
Would she have been a blog triumphalist? I think so.
12:28:00 PM 
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