The Books of My Life: The Godless Constitution

 

Sometimes when I am deep in my almost daily book reading I find myself getting into a kind of thematic groove. I have been in one of those thematic groves recently which is why, after reading Jill Lepore’s empirical take down of the twentieth century American Tea Party and its selective historical literacy (The White’s of Their Eyes) I decided to read another book in the same vein, Isaac Kramnick's and R. Laurence Moore’s The Godless Constitution: A Moral Defense of the Secular State (New York: Norton, edition with a new chapter, 2005). 

Like Lepore’s The White’s of Their Eyes Kramnick’s and Moore’s book is a mixture of empirical history and rational empirically grounded polemic. In The Godless Constitution Cornell professors Kramnick and Moore attempt to correct the historical misreadings of the US Constitution just as Lepore attempted to correct the historical misreadings of the right wing American Tea Party, if in a more conventional narrative way. Where Lepore attempted to correct misreadings of the US Revolution by the American right, Kramnick and Moore attempt to correct the historical misreadings by many on the intellectual and populist right, the latter generally mimicking what the former mouth with a little bit of help from their right wing friends in the demagogic and sensationalist red faced and fear mongering media, of the US Constitution.

Right wing mythhistory, like that which Lepore, Kramnick, and Moore attempt to correct, of course, has a long history as the parodic and satirical National Lampoon 1964 high school yearbook published in 1973 with its parodic and satirical excerpts of a high school history text points up, a long history that stretches back to the beginnings of the nation itself, actually even before there was a nation called the United States of America. So, it should be no surprise to people in the historical know, save for those wedded to an Enlightenment perception that education has or will put such mythic rabble into the rubbish bin of history once and for all, that mythhistory is still alive and well and living in intellectual secular right and intellectual religious right American minds today.

Kramnick and Moore do an excellent job of exploring the real as opposed to the mythhistorical origins of the US Constitution. They note right off the bat that the US Constitution does not mention god once and mentions religion only once in order to mandate that no religious test for office be mandated in the new United States in its original form. In its expanded form, of course, thanks to the addition of the Bill of Rights, something that was added to the Constitution to assure its passage, religion is mentioned only, as Kramnick and Moore note, in order to mandate that there be no theocracy in the United States, something that on one side of the coin separates religion and the American state and on the other separates the American state from religion. The founding fathers, after all, knew the dangers of theocracy not only because of its long European history—Christianity as a state religion in what became Europe goes back to the Roman Empire—and reality but because many of the American colonies were theocracies as well, theocracies where, for example, Quakers, were murdered because they were not “orthodox” Puritans.

Kramnick and Moore are also very good at exploring the ideologies of American’s founding fathers in relation to religion. They note rightly that founding fathers like John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington, who many on the right have turned into secular "orthodox” Christian saints, were not the nationalist Christians who are so prominent in America and American politics today. Many of the founding fathers, in fact, were Deists, those who denied the Trinity, the Christian notion that god has three faces, god, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost or Holy Spirit. They note that Thomas Jefferson, one of America’s founding fathers and writer of the early drafts of the American Declaration of Independence, made his own version of the New Testament, the Christian Bible which was added to the Jewish Tanakh, in which the miracles and other supernatural elements were removed, in order to produce a Jesus who Jefferson thought was more real, a Jesus who was a kind of an Enlightenment figure before the Enlightenment (akin to how Joseph Smith made Jesus a Mormon before Mormonism in the Book of Mormon). They note that James Madison, the author of the US Constitution, played a significant role in helping pass Jefferson’s Virginia's Statute of Religious Freedom, a statute written in 1777 and passed in 1786, which mandated religious freedom in once theocratic Virginia (Anglicanism was the colonial state religion in Virginia) thanks to his Memorial and Remonstrance of 1785, which, in turn, argues for religious liberty and against theocracy, documents that made religion in the US a private not a public or state matter. 

Where Kramnick and Moore are wanting is their failure to explore how this secular constitution written by Enlightenment philosophes who, while using a language about god that was very similar to those who regarded themselves as “orthodox” Christians, gave different meanings, more deistic meanings or twists, to that language, something those wedded to a literalist and fundamentalist reading of language often fail to get or refuse to get (thanks to political and ideological correctness). They fail to explore the fact that one variant of American Protestant Christianity became the unofficial state religion of the United States beginning with the second Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century, an unofficial theocracy that lasted well into the twentieth century, and an unofficial theocracy that many on the right point to as evidence that the US was and always has been a Christian nation.  

Another thing wanting in Kramnick and Moore is a reflection on who this book is meant for. If it is meant for those already convinced of the fact that the US is a secular nation then it is simply made to order for an already present echo chamber. If it is aimed, at least in part, to those on the right who misread the empirical facts about the secular American Constitution it is doubtful that many on the right, particularly the Christian nationalist right, will read it in the first place and it is likely that if they do they will do what often times happens when cognitive dissonance occurs, should cognitive dissonance even occur in the first place, they will simply become even more convinced that the US was a Christian nation. After all, for far too many on the mythhistorical right ideology creates reality rather than the other way around, something proven yet again by the malreview of the book by one Dan Crawford on Amazon, a Pontius Pilate like corporation that refuses to weed out politically and ideologically correct reviews from fact based reviews. Crawford accuses, Kramnick and Moore of being "atheists", offering no evidence whatsoever for this claim, and maintains, despite empirical evidence to the contrary (see page 96 chosen at random, for example), that the authors do not quote the words of the founding fathers. It should also be noted that Crawford blissfully ignores the bibliography at the end of the book while making the claim that Kramnick and Moore offer no sources for their arguments. And so political and ideological correctness goes.

The Books of My Life: The Whites of Their Eyes

 

Honestly, I don’t know what to make of Jill Lepore’s The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle Over American History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, The Public Square series, 2010). Actually, if I am honest, I kind of know what to make of it. I feel a little of this and a little of that about it. I feel a little comme ci and a little comme ca about it.

Lepore’s The Whites of Their Eyes is interesting structurally. Like the Tardis (it is perhaps most like the Doctor Who episode "City of Death") the book bounces back and forth between the present, the present being 2009 in Lepore's book, and the past, the past being the revolutionary era of the so-called founding fathers of the American Revolution, the era from the late eighteenth century to the early 19th century. 

The 2009 present in The Whites of Their Eyes is grounded in a kind of ethnography, but not a very deep or detailed ethnography, of people associated with the latter day Tea Party in Boston and the current events related to this latter day Tea Party in Massachusetts. Their various political rallies at various historical sights in Boston and the Boston area is grist for Lepore's mill. Another 2009 present is grounded in Lepore’s critique of this latter day Tea Party and how it approaches and interprets the history of the American revolutionary era.

The past of The Whites of Their Eyes is grounded in a historical synthesis of what was happening primarily in Boston during the revolutionary era. So, we get a discussion of the American colonial reaction to the various taxes imposed by the British government on the American colonies, taxes meant to reduce the British debt which was incurred partly because of its defence of the Colonies (see the French and Indian War). The Whites of Their Eyes also explores colonial response to those taxes, which led to the Boston Massacre, when British troops stationed in the American colonies fired on and killed several protestors, and the Boston Tea Party, when some colonials dressed as American First Peoples boarded ships in Boston harbour filled with tea and dumped it in the drink. Along the way Lepore introduces a gallery of characters including founding father George Washington, founding father John Adams, Adam's wife Abigail Adams, founding father Benjamin Franklin, Franklin’s sister Jane Mecom, printer and newspaper publisher Benjamin Edes, founding father Samuel Adams, founding father Thomas Jefferson, the man who road himself into American history books Paul Revere, the Black man Crispus Attucks who was shot and killed during the Boston Massacre, and poet Mercy Otis Warren. Lepore uses this past, which also includes discussions of the US Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, a discussion of the tensions over slavery during the era in Boston, a discussion of the founding fathers response to religion in the era, and a discussion of the difficult life of Jane Mecom financially and the mental health problems within her family, to try to paint a broader and less mythhistorical picture of this era in American history than that of the latter day mythhistorical modern Tea Party.

Lepore also uses this synthesised past to distinguish professional history from mythhistory, the historical sensibility that dominates the contemporary Tea Party. For Lepore the “history” of the contemporary Tea Party is grounded in a romanticism that decontextualises the past jerking it, in the process, out of its cultural, economic, and political contexts or frames, sanctifies it, making the events associated with it sacred and the founding fathers saints with hagiographies to be written about them, and recontextualises it in a present, doing injustice to the real history of these events and these people in the process. For Lepore, and I agree with her entirely here, the mythhistory of the 2009 Tea Party is a fundamentalist history, a cherry picked history that tends to leave out the social and cultural lives of those who aren’t the great men of history, of women, and of Blacks. The fundamentalist Tea Party history, in other words, is a history grounded in the present and the culture and ideology of the present and which reads a romanticised and selective contemporary history, culture, and ideology back into the past turning it into a mythic history of that past. As a consequence, as Lepore notes, the mythhistory of the Tea Party really isn’t history, a history grounded in empirical evidence and valid interpretation. It is a disneyfied or disneyfornicated, pollyannish, and manichean history, nor history, in other words.

This mythic history of the present does injustice to the historical record as Lepore notes. It does injustice to the contradictory and situational attitudes the founding fathers of the past had to religion and the role religion should play in the new American state. Mythhistory, for example, leaves out the fact that the founding fathers said different things and meant different things about religion at the time and the fact that several of the founding fathers were not “orthodox” Christians at the time by the standards of what passes for “orthodox” Christianity today. As Lepore notes the founding fathers were diplomatic about religion (Washington), continually tinkered with it. Jefferson cut and pasted to take out the miracles of the Bible (the famous Jefferson Bible), and Madison defended it (in its natural religion not fundamentalist religion form). All of them did agree on one thing, as Lepore points out, however, that there should be no establishment of religion (theocracy) in the new United States. Additionally, as Lepore notes, the authors of the US Constitution specifically stipulated that there should be no theocracy in the new American state, that there should be no religious test for office holders, those running for office in the US did not have to be Christian, in other words, and that the civil rights of Americans was not to be grounded in religious ideology. She also notes that the treaty between the new United States and the Muslim “pirates” of the Barbary Coast stipulated that the US should not be a Christian nation though this reality has not stopped theocratic and generally nationalist Protestants from trying to make it in to one over the years (something that should tell you something about theocratic Christianity).

Mythhistory also, Lepore argues, does injustice to the fact that both Jefferson and Madison did not argue for an originalist position with respect to the US Constitution. Originalism or original intent theory is an ideology which tries to ascertain what the writers of the Constitution meant at the time. For founding fathers Jefferson and Madison, however, the Constitution was alive and had to adapt to changing times because times changed and animated minds had to change with the changing times if their minds were to remain alert and alive. For them history was progressive, moving in a direction that would invariably lead to improvements. It should also be noted that the originalist position that dominates so many legal minds these days, including at the US Supreme Court, really isn’t originalist since an originalist interpretation of the right to bear arms would have to rule that the arms Americans had the right to bear were only those present in late 17th century colonial America since that is what the writers of the Constitution had in mind when they talked about the right to bear arms. Originalists thus aren’t really originalists. They are actually proponents of the Constitution is a living document that can and should be amended given that times change position though they don't recognise it unable to see the motes in their own politically and ideologically correct eyes. They see the Constitution as a living document since they magically turn muskets into AK-47s, something the founding fathers simply did not have in their minds when they inserted the right to bear arms into the Bill of Rights.

By counterpointing the realities of the past with the political and ideological correctness of the Tea Party of the 2009 present Lepore shows that the history of the contemporary Tea Party is not the real history of the American revolutionary past. This is, of course, important and critical but it raises a fundamental question: will the Tea Partyers of the present (or their populist Trumpian children) actually read Lepore’s book? Personally, I doubt it. As my old religion professor said to me once, arguing with fundamentalists, in this case with the political and ideological fundamentalists, is akin to arguing with a brick wall since true believers, by and large, simply create their own political, economic, cultural, geographical, and demographic realities. And even if these politically and ideologically manufactured realities are challenged cognitive dissonance generally leads to few defections and paradoxically often ends up strengthening the attachment of true believers to the socially and culturally constructed "realities" that are a central part of their identity formations.

Like so many history books, particularly those aimed, as Lepore’s book is, at a popular reading audience, The Whites of Their Eyes is full of anecdotes including anecdotes about the disappearance of, for example, Thomas Paine’s bones, the Thomas Paine who was an agnostic and who Glenn Beck, one of the televangelists of the Tea Party who was briefly on Fox news, magically transformed into an exemplary “orthodox” Christian founding father. She provides information on when the Boston Tea Party was first referred to as the Boston Tea Party, 1834. Anecdotes like this, I am sure, play well with the general audience Lepore aims the book at. But? 

At the same time The Whites of Their Eyes provides excellent summaries of the significant Revolutionary history of the American colonies, summaries on the American Revolution, particularly in Boston, which was an important centre of revolutionary activities in the colonies at the time, explorations, if we can generalise from the stories Lepore tells about Mecom and Warren, on the history of women in the Revolutionary era, and summaries relating to the tensions over slavery in Colonial America and, again, particularly in Boston 

Lepore does make some important general theoretical points. She rightly points out that the mythhistory of the contemporary Tea Party is similar in form to the lost cause mythhistory of the post-Civil War US White South. Myths, she shows, and she is not alone in showing this, can be similar in form but different in content in that they can sacralise different tales whether of the American revolutionary past, the Southern post-Civil War past (the myth of the lost cause), the Canadian myth that it was the destiny of the nation to settle from the Atlantic to the Pacific, or the Australian myths associated with the great men who settled the bush. She rightly points out that the Tea Party mythhistory is, because of silences about what their mythhistory elides, such as the stories of women and Blacks during the Revolutionary era, anti-pluralist. Its mythhistory is tales of "great" men, “great" White men. She rightly notes that mythhistorians fail to differentiate between opinion, the belief that the US was a Christian nation, for example, and the fact that it wasn’t as the treaty between the US and the Barbary “pirates” makes clear. She rightly notes that mythhistorians generally prefer politically and ideologically correct opinion to empirical fact. Cultural sociologists and, particularly cultural and social anthropologists, of course, have long been familiar with the fact that mythic symbols work this way still it is nice to know that some historians are cottoning on too. 

If you know someone who has deeply imbibed American mythhistory but still has an open mind (open to quantitative and qualitative empirical and scientific research grounded in evidence) you might give them The Whites of Their Eyes to read. Whether they will have a road to Damascus experience or a gradual change of mind is an open question since, as social scientists have noted for some time, it is not easy to open the closed minds of most true believers. At the same time we know it is possible to open closed minds. Several members of the Westboro Baptist Church, for example, have left, the Church something that shows that seeing the light is possible. That many Mormons who have left the LDS faith and become mirror images of themselves when they were Mormons, given that now instead of evangelising for Mormonism they are now evangelising for some variety of Mormonism was a fiction I was brainwashed into, shows that even those who leave retain some aspect of who they were (see, for instance, the YouTube videos of John Dehlin and Alyssa Grenfell). Moreover, it must be remembered that at the same time as some have exited the faith many still remain faithful members of the Westboro Baptist Church despite widespread polemical and apologetic and empirical criticism of them. And if the Westboro Baptist Church tells us anything it tells us that groups with a strong identity grounded in symbols associated with their own mythhistories often see criticism through the prism of persecution and see themselves as suffering servants of the Truth, making undermining their mythhistory with the facts difficult at best.

Musings on The Twilight Zone Episode "He’s Alive”...

 

I really didn’t watch that much television when I was growing up until we moved to Dallas. For some of you out there this might seem a bit paradoxical since my father worked for Philips, a maker of televisions and other electronic equipment (not to mention a great and, now that it is gone, a much lamented classical music label).

The television we had in those days was one of those typical big and heavy black and white TV’s of the era. Me and my sister would sit as close to it as we could get. We did eventually get a colour television, though I don’t remember exactly when. It was probably sometime in the seventies.

The main reason I watched TV in those halcyon days was for the movies. As I have mentioned before in these blogs there were movies galore on Dallas’s five TV stations: CBS, NBC, ABC, and, in particular, on the two independents that broadcast in the city.

I did not like most of the shows on the network prime time schedules of CBS, NBC, and ABC during the 1960s and 1970s. I would watch Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch, which my sister kind of liked,  but they weren’t my cup of tea. I watched The Ed Sullivan Show and other shows of that ilk for the music. I was there, for example, when the Beatles appeared on Sullivan. I watched The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour for the same reason, for the music. I simply put up with what came before and after on these in order to see the week’s musical guests because I was a hard core pop and rock musicoaphile at the time. 

What I really liked on Dallas TV, beyond the movies, were the older shows on the independents and the local schedules of Dallas’s network stations. I loved and still love The Dick van Dyke Show. And I loved and still love The Twilight Zone. To me The Dick van Dyke Show and The Twilight Zone were and are amongst the few shows on American over the air commercial television that can be spoken of in the same breath as the great British and English television shows. 

I was reminded of just how good and just how prophetic The Twilight Zone was and is recently during the Heroes and Icon (H&I) network's Rod, White, and Blue Twilight Zone marathon. There are, of course, many episodes of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone that I have found memorable over the years. there was the episode centring on a operation on a woman’s face because she thought she was ugly (“Eye of the Beholder, 1960). There was the episode in which Billy Mumy thinks people into the corn field ("It’s a Good Life", 1961). There was the episode in which aliens use that good old time human fear of the other amongst those living on the all-American Maple Street ("The Monsters are Due on Maple Street", 1960). There was the episode about a concentration camp commander (Death’s Head Revisited”, 1961). And there was the episode about an American Adolf Hitler (He’s Alive”, 1963).

Like so any episodes in The Twilight Zone “He’s Alive” is deeply allegorical. In "He’s Alive” Dennis Hopper plays Peter Vollmer, who, as a boy, had a difficult childhood abused as he was by his father and neglected by his mother. He finds comfort in a Jewish neighbour who had survived the Dachau concentration camp and meaning in Naziism. With the aid of an unseen figure Vollmer becomes the head of the local Nazi movement thanks to the rhetorical and strategic skills (creating martyrs) he learns from his unseen mentor. Under his leadership Vollmer’s fascist movement goes from being a joke to being a serious movement. The twist—one always finds a wonderful twist at the end of a Twilight Zone episodes—is that the unseen figure is the real Adolf Hitler (listed as Adolph in the credits).

The allegory that is at the heart of this episode, of course, changes with the changing times. Today, thanks to changing history, the allegory in “He’s Alive” has taken on a different interpretive life. What does not change with the changing times, however, one Rod Serling, who wrote the episode notes, is that Hitler, the allegorical Hitler, the metaphorical Hitler, is always with us. 

And he, of course, is always with us in some way, shape, and form. Today in the United States we have yet another, to quote Serling’s introduction to “He’s Alive”, “little man who feeds off his self-delusions and who finds himself perpetually hungry for want of greatness in his diet.” Like Vollmer and like Hitler this little man was abused as a child. Like Vollmer and like Hitler this little man imagines himself as a man of steel. Like Vollmer and like Hitler this little man feeds off the adoration of the masses. Like Vollmer and like Hitler this little man uses fear of devilish others including immigrants, to spread his gospel of hate, sometimes unsubtly subtly). Unlike Vollmer but like Hitler this little man is a bully boy of the seventh grade order. Unlike Vollmer and like Hitler this bully boy little man has achieved power and is increasing his power as the countervailing power of courts, the legislative branch, the universities, the corporations and the media either aid and abet him or step aside allowing him, by doing this or remaining silent, to do his will. As Sterling predicted in 1963, in other words, what Hitler represented is always with us in the real world not just in the twilight zone.

On the isn’t it ironic side of the ledger, the actor who played a Nazi in “He’s Alive” and who was Jewish would go on to play a gestapo officer in Hogan’s Heroes. Additionally, Paramount, which owns CBS now, recently settled a legal suit with the litigious and blackailing Trump over the editing of an interview with Democrat presidential candiate Kamela Harris on its 60 Minutes series despite the fact that the suit has little in the way of merit. Paramount, you see, has a mega-dollar merger deal they want the President-King's assent to. This means that Paramount, like  Columbia University, Indiana University, and several legal firms, has become a Vichy like collaborator. History ever repeats?

“Get Out Before It is Too Late”: An Open Letter to the Lawmakers of New York State

 

What happened in Minnesota over the weekend—the assassination of a Minnesota Democrat lawmaker, the attempted assassination of other Democrats, and the planned assassination of others who were politically and ideologically incorrect in the eyes of the assassin—should remind us of the history of political violence or terrorism in the United States since its inception. 

It should remind us of the attacks on and cleansing of Loyalists during the American War of Independence and the confiscation of their property without recompense. It should remind us of bleeding Kansas with its guerrilla wars between abolitionist and pro-slavery forces, wars that were brutal and terroristic. It should remind us of the Quantrill’s pro-slavery and pro-Confederate raiders and their brutality which included the massacre of “civilians in places like Lawrence, Kansas. I should remind us of the racist Ku Klux Klan and its campaign of terror and terror killings after the Civil War. It should remind us of White supremacist attacks on those who are not them. It should remind us of anti-abortion attacks on abortion clinics and abortion doctors. It should remind us that Timothy McVay bombed a government building in Oklahoma City in response to what he saw as government terror in Waco, Texas. 

The immolation of members of an Adventist religious group by, at least in part, the US government should also remind us of government sponsored violence and terrorism, federal, state, and local, over the course of US history. It should remind us of the US government’s actions against rebellions in the early years of the Republic. It should remind us of the use of militias and the military against labour actions and socialists, communists, and anarchists. It should remind us of Waco. And it should remind us of the terrorists who attacked the US Capitol in 2021 under the delusion that their man, Donald Trump, actually won an election he lost. And it should remind us that in his first days in office President Donald Trump pardoned those convicted by juries of attacking the Capitol looking for lawmakers to, what, lynch?

Of course, none of these will remind most Americans and most American lawmakers of the history of violence, including state violence, that has erupted over the course of US history. Most Americans, after all, prefer to live in a Disneyish world of mythhistory rather than in the world of real history. Bright colours painted over dark ones do make the ideological world go round in the United States.

I remind you of this history because now that Donald Trump has returned to office we are seeing an uptake in non-state and state political violence and terrorism in Minnesota and in California. We are seeing an uptake in the power of executive branch of the government. We are seeing an uptake in executive branch deportations of immigrants and rumblings that the executive government may deport Americans who are not politically and ideologically correct in Trumpian terms. We are seeing the executive branch trying to avoid and undermine the rulings of the court, the third branch of the US government. We are seeing increasing “arrests” of Democrats by ICE, masters of Trumpian chaos and intimidation, which seems to be trying to prove that it is Trump’s own little Gestapo. 

Trump, of course, thinks of the American state as his corporation, He has no problem or compunction about using this corporation, a corporation which he controls and rules over,  for his personal financial benefit and gain. He is also using this corporation to further a political agenda that is arguably fascist.

As one of the three American academics who fled the United States and Yale for the University of Toronto in Canada told the Guardian yesterday there are important lessons one should learn from the Nazi takeover of the German government. Getting out earlier than later before it is too late is one of them.

In this spirit, I urge the lawmakers of New York to consider two proposals. First, to form a Union with California, Oregon, Washington state, and the New England states independent from a United States, a nation that should actually be called the Confederate States of America. Alternatively, I would urge New York lawmakers to consider petitioning Canada for admission as a province in that nation, Can we be the tenth. I would urge lawmakers to consider these two proposals before it is to late.

While Democrats seem to be treating Trump Mach Two as business as usual and as something that will end I don’t think one can treat what is happening as normal and I am not sure that Trump will willingly leave office. He may even want to pass his the US on to his son and heir. We are clearly, as many academics and intellectuals have pointed out, on the road to fascism, on the road to a White supremacist, literalist, misogynist, and terroristic fascist United States governed by the leader of a new religion, a theocratic cult, Donald Trump, a cult that brooks no political ideology, economic ideology, or culture other than its own. Do something before it is too late. Hoping that all things must pass is not doing something.

Musings on the White Evangelical Ubermensch and Making America Christian Again.

 

In cultural anthropology you are taught—and rightly so—that cultures vary across space. Contemporary cultural anthropology and history rightly teaches us that culture also varies across time. 

Despite the simple descriptive fact that culture varies across space and time there are many who have thought and who continue to think, despite the more than ample evidence to the contrary, that many people create their own “realities”, that a mixture of reality and rationality can cure anyone of this false reality syndrome and that, as a consequence, the human race can live happily ever after as they progress ever further toward paradise along the yellow brick road to utopia, a secular version of the Christian Eden.

The problem with this notion—that humans can progress thanks to science and rationality—is that it does not grasp the obvious fact that those who live in manufactured “realities” don’t simply go away or fade into the dark night of superstition anymore than does religion, ignorance, stupidity, or moronicity. There are, for example, many White Protestant Christian evangelicals, who believe that Donald Trump is god’s weak yet strong vessel who has been called by the White Protestant Christian evangelical god to make America great and godly again. As a consequence, they do not and cannot believe that Trump resoundingly lost the 2020 election, though he, of course, did, something that should be a red flag for those who believe that god makes the world go around for if he does and if she made Biden win in 2020, well you get the picture. God’s will, they believe, can only be subverted by devious and demonic subterfuge making the Trump lost the election of 2020 ideology akin to the idiotic and moronic claims that Jews were secretly poisoning wells and murdering Christian children in the Mediaeval era of European history and the various variations on this anti-Semitic theme in Europe and European settler societies seemingly ever after.

The fact that created “realities” and those who believe them and have faith in them don’t go away also explains why you cannot compromise with those who believe they have a monopoly on the truth and who, as a consequence, believe they are called by god to a holy crusade to make god’s will be done, the point at which Christianity paradoxically given Nietzche’s criticism of Christianity as the religion of the weak, meets up and merges with the will to power of the Christian Nietzschean macho superman on a crusade for Christ. These “Christian” ubermensch will take the inch of compromise, say a religious oriented charter school, but they want the mile, they want to make the charter school a house of intense socialisation, what some might call indoctrination or brainwashing. Even the mile, however, isn’t good enough for them. They want the proverbial whole nine yards. They want to make the United States into their own image, something that should not be surprising given that they are self-satisfied, holier than thou, we are always in the right because god is on our side saintly sinner theocrats. And they will not stop until they make America into their own image by “convincement” or coercion, the carrot or the stick. 

Welcome to TrumpWorld, a world that never goes away, and OrangeTrumpifornication. So, be afraid, be very afraid.

The Books of My Life: The Atheist

The sad fact about many if not most biographies about “important”, economically, politically, culturally, personally “significant" “subjects”, is that  they tend to be hagiographic and hence mythical and consequently decontextualised. Though most biographers for whatever reason—some are intentionally censored—want their “subjects” to be saints, most of the subjects of biographies are neither saints nor sinners. They are rather, as are most if not all humans, if in varying quantities and qualities and in varying circumstances, both.

Richard Le Beau’s biography of Madalyn Murray O’Hair, The Atheist: Madalyn Murray O’Hair (New York: NYU Press, 2003), is a biography of a “subject” some saw as a sinner, “the most hated woman in America” some called her, but who others saw as a saint, the tower of strength who helped return America to the nation that it was in the beginning, a nation that was not only a place where religion could be freely practised—some scholars refer to this as the democratisation of Christianity, others as free market Christianity—but a nation where there could be, as the US Constitution guaranteed, no establishment of religion, no federal American theocracy, an America where one was free not to be religious. O’Hair, as Le Beau notes, like all those who feed off of the fame, fortune, and misfortune celebrity breeds and brings, learned to treasure and use her status as saint and sinner. She seemed to love being the sinner and saint lighting rod and playing to the crowd, for and against, just like all celebrity salespeople including that noted flim flam man of late twentieth and early twenty-first century America, Donald Trump.

In Le Beau’s biography O’Hair is a real flesh and bones human being. Le Beau’s O’Hair is a Shakespearean figure who fights the good fight against bigotry, religious and “secular”—a fight which was perhaps ultimately tragic in that O'Hair recognised, in more private and reflective moments, that was likely ultimately to be a failure—and the essence of evil for other Americans because she was perceived by them as one of those who gave us an America that was decadent, an America that was devoluted, an America that was a nation that was no longer on god’s side. 

O'Hair was also a paradox as Le Beau makes clear. She was, as Le Beau points out, the kissing cousin of her Christian evangelist and televangelist counterparts. She was an authoritarian organiser and salesperson, in her case, a salesperson trying to sell organised atheism to groups of people with varying “interests” who could probably never be fully organised in the first place—something O’Hair also realised in reflective moments—and who had often been cowed into fear by social, political and cultural contexts that surrounded them. As O’Hair realised from observing Jerry Falwell’s nationalist Christian advertising campaigns in the 1970s and 1980s aimed at particular demographics, fear was useful in selling a product, something Christian proselytisers and religious elites, Washington political elite, American economic elite, and modern advertisers recognised earlier on. As a consequence, O'Hair was not averse to using the same strategies as her Christian nationalist kin to raise monies from whom all blessings flowed for herself, her family, and her social movement. 

O'Hair was, as Le Beau notes, a symbol whose star and celebrity rose and fell and rose again and fell again as America changed and changed again between the 1960s and 19990s. O’Hair’s celebrity declined, as Le Beau notes, in the 1960s only to revive somewhat in an era in which America saw a neo-liberal and right wing populist religious like cultural revival in the late twentieth century. O’Hair’s second coming, however, as Le Beau notes, did not rise to the level of celebrity she had from 1960s and into the early 1970s. 

As Le Beau’s attentiveness to the ebbing and flowing of O’Hair’s star power points up, Le Beau’s biography does an excellent job of putting O’Hair’s life in context. O’Hair, as Le Beau notes, became a celebrity, a symbol of good for some and of evil for others, at the height of the Cold War. He does a fine job of contextualising O’Hair’s life and thought in the surface rigidity of Cold War America—there were always countercultures and subculture which ebbed and flowed in the post-World War II period it should be remembered—with its conformities and demonisations of “the other”.  O’Hair, of course, was one of the most infamous and famous of these demonised “others”, of those demonised as“commie atheists” in Cold War America before the shock of the not so new sixties. It is also very good at contextualising O’Hair’s life in the broader history of scepticism and atheism. Le Beau provides an intellectual history that traces O’Hair’s influences to figures like Robert Ingersoll, Friedrich Nietzsche, and others. He provides an excellent summary of O’Hair’s synthesis of a variety of different intellectual sources relating to science, atheism, the origins of religion, theocratism, American civil, civic, or public religion, Christian nationalism, Christian persecution, the importance of a “real" education, and socialisation for conformity, among other things. 

Where I had problems with Le Beau’s biography was in those cases where his very useful emic or going native approach got in the way of an etic or distanced and hence more scientific analysis. This lack of etic analysis is particularly apparent when Le Beau is discussing the very public break between O’Hair and her out of wedlock son, William in whose name the Supreme Court case arguing that public involuntary school prayer violated the US Constitution, and who later converted to right wing fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity. Unlike Le Beau, Murray’s polemic reduces his mother's polemicising and empirical analysis, decontextualising it in the process, to family and personal issues, a trait common to most humans who typically can’t see the proverbial forest though the proverbial trees. The problem I had with Le Beau’s “analysis" here was that he did not critique William's decontextualisation and personalisation of his mother’s ideology. If Madalyn was rebelling against family, against an absent god, and against the suffering that is life, trying to find a meaning or meanings for it—theodicy—so was he. If atheism was a crutch for O’Hair, right wing American Christianity was a crutch for Murray whose troubled life, a troubled alcoholic life, eventually led him to Alcoholics Anonymous and to its close cousin right wing Christianity, something that gave him and his life meaning along in his war with his mother just as atheism gave meaning to hers. If O’Hair loved the limelight so did he. While William's road to Damascus conversion turned him into a celebrity within a particular identity community. It is kind of odd that Le Beau, in emic mode, plays along with this decontextualisation and offers none of the contextual critique of Murray that he does of O’Hair.

Le Beau’s book was particularly interesting to read in the context of an early twenty-first century that has seen the increasing flexing of political and ideological muscles by politically and ideologically “correct” right wing theocratic our way or the highway and hence fascist American nationalist Christians. As Le Beau notes, the US courts, including the US Supreme Court, hedged its bets in its cases relating to religion and the state though recent history would suggest that the theocrats on the US Supreme Court and in many US states are hell bent on turning the US into a theocratic monarchy. They never pushed the fact that the US Constitution and the fourteenth amendment to that Constitution, which made theocracy in the states of the US unconstitutional, which prohibits the establishment of religion—though the US did and does have a civil, civic or public religion that proved somewhat flexible as the sixties show—to its logical conclusion. They allowed, for example, religious prayers to continue in federal, state, and local contexts on the basis of tradition, a tradition where meaning supposedly became so empty that it became meaningless in the process. In an era where right wing populists, religious or not, have jigged electoral maps, jigged voting itself cleansing Americans from the voting rolls in the process, a clear statement that they don’t trust their ideas to the marketplace, packed the courts with their politically and ideologically correct polemicists, and jigged the tax system in their favour, amongst other things—something that points up the fact that certain meanings can be imposed by force in a nation-state—Le Beau’s book serves as a warning if likely a warning of someone crying in the proverbial politically, economically, and ideologically incorrect wilderness.

 

Miserable Political Experience: Musings on Politics, Academics, and Political Science

 

When I was an intellectually younger man so one of the major works in American political science was Yale Political Scientist Robert Dahl’s Who Governs, a study of how American government actually worked in one American community, Yale’s home city of New Haven, Connecticut, a book published by Yale University Press in 1961.  Dahl’s book took a consensus and conflict theory approach, the two major theoretical approaches to politics (and by extension American economics and culture presumably) in the social sciences at the time, arguing that New Haven, and by extension the US, was pluralist and stratified and hierarchical in its interest group centred politics.

Who Governs, which made Dahl an intellectual and academic celebrity and superstar, would prove to be a critical jumping off point for empirical and normative theoretical analyses and critiques of American politics in the late 1960s and in the 1970s, the era when I took my undergraduate degree at a university that will henceforth remain nameless because of its increasing theo-fascism. The late 1960s, of course, saw a revival of Marxist theory and practise in the US in American intellectual life and American academia and many Marxist critics of Dahl’s work and his later theory of polyarchy. grounded in his early work, saw Dahl as too much of a consensus theorist. Dahl, however, was hardly, like Max Weber, a purely consensus or functionalist theorist since he argued that there were power inequalities in American political culture. Some interest groups, Dahl argued, had more power, authority, and hence influence than others. But then attacks in the social sciences during the long sixties on consensus and functionalist theorists was as much in the heady and overgeneralising academic air just as it was in the countercultural air of core nations more broadly at the time and this almost revivalistic oxygen did not really breed more nuanced critiques. 

For many of those who did recognise that Dahl was both a consensus and a conflict theorist it was Dahl’s conception of power that many of them had a problem with. Many of Dahl’s critics found it to limited and limiting. Subsequently, of course, the conception of power and its adjunct authority has broadened in the social sciences since Dahl and this is all for the good in my opinion. Power is not only about getting A to do B, as Dahl had it. It is also discursive. Humans are, as contemporary studies of power have shown, embedded in socially and culturally constructed webs thanks to socialisation, for instance, that rule out certain ideological options by marginalising them and silencing them, something that should be remembered in these looney politically and ideologically correct days on increasingly fascist university campuses. As such power, in both its social and cultural constructionist discursive and rhetorical form and in its ability to make A do B form, is central to traditional, modern, and postmodern societies with their class, ethnic-racial, gender, and age inequalities.

As I have grown older I have become increasingly convinced that conscious ideology plays a very limited role in how American (and core nation) politics actually works and functions, something that some if not many academics and intellectuals embedded as they are in their own little fetishised world  of Enlightenment rationality with education as the means to right thinking enlightenment and subsequently liberation (intellectual and academic nirvana) aren’t likely to agree with me on. There are, of course, a few true believers for who conscious ideological purity is important. Sometimes such ideological purity movements can give rise to a cult centred around a charismatic figure in the Weberian sense. I give you the contemporary Republican party which has become an institutionalised cult centred around their holy figure of Donald Trump, their Tangholio. For most potential voters, however, I am increasingly convinced, fatigue, tiredness, and weariness of the party in power plays an important role in who they vote against and who they consequently vote for.

Such weariness of those in power, of course, works hand in hand and hand in glove with the demagogic polemical attack strategies of those prominent political forces not in power. In a media world with a steady diet where those prominent and elites out of power attack those in power for all sorts of political, economic, and cultural woes, with their sky is falling sensationalistic if it bleeds if leads apocalyptic rhetoric coming from polemicists and demagogues and which has become central to the communication sphere, works quite well, as it always had, with the masses. As such, the social and cultural construction of weariness and tiredness is quite easy to manufacture and, in turn, manipulate. We can readily see this process working in contemporary Britian where those who once voted Tory, even in areas traditional Labour geographies which switched to Conservative in the last election, look ready to switch to Labour to throw the bastards out in the upcoming election. We can see it in Canada where the Liberals of Trudeau, who won two successive elections, are running behind the Conservatives once again. Shades of Harper Tories. We can see it in attack dog politics in the United States today.

Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean to assert that political culture is nothing but fatigue politics. Luck and being in the right place at the right time are factors in elections. The recent Labour victory in the United Kingdom, for instance was aided and abetted not only by fatigue with the Tories after fourteen years of Conservative rule in the UK but also by scandals in the Conservative Party, the incompetence of the Conservative Party, specifically the incompetence of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, and scandals in the Scottish National Party, all of which aided the Labour Party. 

Additionally, there are, as I noted earlier, true believers who operate on the elite faithful and elite demagogic political levels and on the mass political level in the core nations. There are a cadre of true believers among the masses. Political culture in core nations is also, as the celebrations of D-Day today show, symbolic, grounded in cultural meanings even if those cultural meanings, as they have been on this “sacred" D-Day, rather and necessarily so vague since one can interpret things like “freedom” and “liberty’ in multiple ways while others can see such meanings for what they are, the ways and means great powers like Imperial America, Imperial Russia, Imperial China and wanna be Imperial Europe manipulate the masses via vague declarations that play on national and regional faiths and broad notions of what has been socialised into some as profane.

Life in the Pissant Swamp: Musings on the University at Albany's Project Renaissance

 

For many of those who dream of going to university and who dream of being an academic someday the academic life is often surrounded by and encased within a web of romanticism. The problem with this is that many of those who romanticise academia have a Californicated rather than a real view of university life and of the professors they hope to study with. In actuality, the academic life is very different from the fantasies that fill the minds of those academic wanna bes who romanticise higher education and the academic life. In fact, academia is closer to Peyton Place crossed with The West Wing if The West Wing was much ado about very little if not nothing, than to the fantasy world of mediaeval romance and chivalry which was never really real in the first place.

When I was young and naive I was one of those who romanticised higher education. These romantic illusions and delusions about academe were largely maintained during my undergraduate years thanks to my limited knowledge of and experience with the more Peyton Place and The West Wing aspects of life within the ivy-covered sometimes gothic walls of higher education. Fortunately, this romanticism did not survive my postgraduate years thanks to a number of smacked by reality moments during my postgraduate sojourn including professors who blackmailed female graduate students into having sex with them, its more powerful professors leaving their wives for the less powerful client younger graduate students they worked with, and its ultimately petty political and ideological machinations.

My most intimate experience with the petty political and ideological machination side of academe happened around 1997. I was hired to be one of, if memory serves, six teaching assistants working with six faculty members for a new academic programme at the University at Albany in Albany, New York, Project Renaissance. While I no longer remember all of the dramatis personae in the Project Renaissance saga thanks to the passage of time, I do recall that Project Renaissance was the brainchild of Lil Brannon, who had a doctorate of education from from East Texas State University (one of the many teacher's colleges that became universities in the post-World War II era and now Texas A&M- Commerce), the head the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, CETL, at the University at Albany at the time. 

Project Renaissance's goal was to provide a multidisciplinary living and learning educational experience for selected students. All selected students were assigned to Mohawk Tower, the 22 storey skyscraper in the centre of Indian Quad (now Indigenous Quad), one of the quadruplet quads on the University of Albany campus. At the heart of Project Renaissance's educational focus was a course called Human Identity and Technology, a course that all the students had to take and a course which fulfilled the University of Albany's general education requirement, something that made it more appealing to some students. The goal of these courses--there were eight sections of the course--over the two semesters was to explore how individual identity was impacted by groups, cultures, and institutions, how human identity was impacted by various technologies, and how human identity was impacted by nature, religion, the arts, literature, society, genetics, gender, race, and ethnicity 

Six faculty members and six teaching assistants were hired to teach this course and its course sections. The faculty and graduate assistants were assigned to two groups with each group putting its own spin on the class.. The course I was assigned to, which included V. Ng, some bloke from the mediocre Religious Studies Faculty at SUNY Albany, and another chap whose name I don'tt recall, decided to put a historical spin on the class, something I was not particularly comfortable with given that it seemed to me to replicate the world history courses that were already offered in the History Faculty at the University at Albany. I thus decided, in my discussion section of the course, a section that supplemented the larger course taught by the faculty to at least one hundred students, to be more topical emphasising identity--class, ethnic-racial, gender, sexual/gender identity--in my section. Needless to say, this was a course massively unworthy of the name Renaissance. By the way, I was also uncomfortable with the large size of the generar class meeting--100 students--since it seemed to me to undermine what I thought was one purposes of Project Renaissance, to wit, to provide greater student-faculty intimacy in both its courses and its interactions

I made my concerns public at one of the planning meetings for my group. As a consequence within a few days I was taken off the project at, I was told, the request of the faculty members that ran my group. They didn't even talk to me about this issue before they did the you're fired rag. They simply branded me a heretic--I was told there was concern about my general focus on identity and sexual/gender identity in particular--and ingloriously dismissed from Project Renaissance. They apparently wanted nothing but yes men. Needless to say I learned a valuable and important lesson in how petty power and petty ideological politics play out in the postmodern American university that day.

My ignominious dismissal was, to say the least, a serious problem for a graduate student like myself as I no longer had an assistantship and hence no longer had financial support for the school year. Project Renaissance, perhaps as a result of History Faculty lobbying for me, gave me an administrative assistantship. This lasted a semester instead of the school year as promised. I was summarily dismissed from my administrative position at CETL and Project Renaissance claimed that they no longer had the monies to support me for the next semester. It turned out, of course, that this claim of poverty was a lie. Just before the end of the term I discovered a letter that said that Project Renaissance was planning on getting rid of heretical me and giving my monies to someone else instead.

I contacted the Graduate Student Union of which I was a card carrying member about this injustice and provided the union with a copy of the letter detailing the fact that the powers that be were giving my money to someone else and thus unfairly dismissing me, and filed a formal complaint with the union. The union representative met with Brannon and, at least on one occasion, with Brannon and me. Brannon continued to claim pennilessness throughout the meeting. This experience with the union complaint process provided me with yet another valuable lesson which I have never forgotten, a lesson in the limited power of unions, and in the limits of unions in general. The union was of absolutely no help to me. In fact, the union rep seemed to be more interested in pleasing the powers that be than in helping me in a case where the powers that be were clearly dissembling. As a result, I was only able to continue my doctoral education thanks to the History Faculty which provided me with an adjunct position so I could continue to pay the rent, buy food, and pay for and take classes. By the way, this lesson would be replayed several years later when I taught at SUNY Oneonta where the union conceded to the bureaucrats the right to hide the classes of adjuncts during the pandemic making sure that students could't enrol in the class. a situation that made it impossible for me to continue to teach at Oneonta given that it meant that I would only have one class and would thus not have health insurance and that my pay would be halved, both of which made it impossible for me to continue to commute to Oneonta from Albany to teach given the associated costs. So I retired.

Project Renaissance did not last long. My sense was that many administrative personnel and faculty members at the University at Albany were sceptical about the programme and raised questions about the it during the reevaluation phase despite claims by Project Renaissance that it aided student retention, something increasingly important to the increasingly neoliberal bureaucrats who run second or third level research universities like the University at Albany given the declines in state financial support for higher education. Additionally, the founder of the programme was no longer there to fight for it. Like so many faculty and educational bureaucrats in American universities these days Brannon seemed to be more interested in moving up the corporate ladder to better paying and higher status academic bureaucratic duties and used Project Renaissance to help accomplish this upward mobility bureaucratic feat. Brannon moved to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 1998 where she initially coordinated that university's master's programme in English Education and later became the director of Charlotte's writing programme and the dean of the College of Arts, a position she currently holds at UNCC.

As for my romantic illusions and delusions about academia, they died the day I was wrongly made redundant. I was, as Nick Lowe says, nutted by reality, the reality that academia is just like any other modern corporate bureaucracy in the core nation world and the reality that academic bureaucrats are just like other modern bureaucracies coloured as they are in Niebuhrian grey. The soap opera that is academia is actually, and one should be surprised by this, a mirror of life in general. It. like them, is full of petty rivalries, petty back stabbings, petty blackmailings, petty adulteries, and petty kafkaesque soul stealing bureaucracies. While I am not sure that that old proverb about the less important an institution is the pettier and less important its politics is is true, I am sure of that academia, which is kind of an alternative counterculture that gives academic administrative personnel and its academic faculty a degree of limited and limitedly important power, is, in the final analysis, filled to the brim with a lot of  petty power games that mirror those, if in much less important and impactful form, how governments operate, how economic corporations act, and how humans typically behave. And that ain't romantic at all.

The Books of My Life: The Sky is Falling

 

Peter Biskind's The Sky is Falling: How Vampires, Zombies, Androids, and Superheroes Made America Great for Extremism (New York: New Press, 2018) is a sequel to his Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us To Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (New York: Henry Holt, 1983). In Seeing is Believing Biskind argued that analysts can categorise and classify films culturally along ideological lines. There are, he claims, the films of the consensual centre (corporate liberal or pluralist and conservative), films of the extremist right, and films of the  extremist left. Corporate liberal or pluralist films, Biskind contends, emphasise science and technology and make heroes of its scientists. Conservative films tend to praise the forces of order and make heroes of its soldiers and cops. Left wing films tend to break down the us versus them binary and try to understand and even side with  the "alien", the other, someone or something that is often ultimately a metaphor or allegory for us, we humans. Right wing films tend to make heroes of those seeking revenge and valorise individualism.

In the years between 1950 and the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016, America changed, argues Biskind, particularly after the elections of Richard Nixon in 1968 and Ronald Reagan in 1980. Those years saw the transformation of the United States from an America dominated by a New Deal political culture and practise to one dominated by neoliberal ideologies and practises. During those years the era of end of ideology ended and American political culture was transformed, thanks to the reaction of the "silent majority" to the counterculture and the civil rights movement, the advent of neoliberalism, deindustrialisation, globalisation, hyperindividualism or narcissism, from an America with a supposed consensus on politics, economics, and culture, the New Deal-Great Society political culture, to an America fighting seemingly never ending cold wars over economics, politics, and culture. By the 1970s America, with its cities burning, its students being shot on college campuses, its rageholism resulting from busing for integration and equal education, the Vietnam War, and Watergate, and the increasing Repulicanisation of some White Northern ethnics and many of the South's Dixiecrats, among other things, seemed on the verge of the end of days. By the end of the century, fin-de-siecle American films and television screens were filled not with end of history fantasies about the triumph of American liberalism, but instead with science fiction and horror fantasies about vampire apocalypses, zombie apocalypses, superhero apocalypses (a category that would include the cop superhero we are good they are evil propaganda common on US television), and even those good old time if ever changing with the times right wing White Christian apocalypses.

This fraying of the United States's cultural and ideological consensus and the "rebirth" of culture or ideological wars wasn't only, according to Biskind, reflected in the ideologies of American political culture. They were also mirrored in American films and on American television where the liberal and conservative consensus in so many of the films of the 1950s began to break down. The films of the centre, the films of the old consensus of the 1950s, are still being made, notes Biskind, and they still preach the gospel of good old end of ideology civility, pluralism (though this has moved beyond the supposed 1950s Catholic/Protestant/Jewish pluralism of the era), the progressive nature of science, that American political and economic institutions still work, and that the forces of order can and will keep anarchy at bay. The HBO centrist television show Game of Thrones, for instance, privileges the pluralistic coalition of Jon Snow over the tribalism of Cersei Lannister while still placing that old Victorian warhorse, the family, and that other centrist Victorian warhorse, home, at the heart of the show.

Many of these centrist films are no longer what they used to be, however, notes Biskind. Some of them reflect Hollywoods hedging of its bets by incorporating--Hollywood does love to paint by demographic numbers for fun and profit--elements of the left and right into them making them, in the process, a cultural and ideological hybrid, a jingle and jangle, a yin and yang of cultural and ideological discourses. As a consequence these having your cake and eating it too films and television shows have built in something for anyone whether centre, left, or right. Star Wars, for instance, hid its anti-imperialist message behind a fog of Hollywood serial nostalgia and popular culture intertextuality and helped create passive consumers drugged up on the spectacle of bread and circuses special effects and romance, something that would soon expand the fan boy culture of comic books, creating, in the process, a fan culture in which fans identified with and simulated the characters in the film and television shows they worshipped at the many comic cons that arose and expanded in the era. This fan culture of identity simulation was quite different from the craze for films as films and the directors who made them that characterised the cinephile culture of the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. This paint by the demographic numbers strategy has given us, for instance, the AMC television show The Walking Dead and the HBO show True Blood, television shows that provide viewers with right wing bleed the hearts--and we see a lot of hearts bleeding in these two shows--those on right can identity with and, at the same time, bleeding hearts those on the left can identity with.

In parallel to these developments in the films of the consensual centre, the era from Nixon to George W. Bush also saw the the increasing importance of "extremist" films of the right and the left, claims Biskind. Films and television shows that were once marginal B level Hollywood films and films made by independent filmmakers like American International, have, claims Biskind, become more prominent and even, in some cases, gone mainstream. Right wing films are of two types, argues Biskind. The films of the secular right and the films of the religious right. The secular right films and television programmes today are less John Wayne, one of the most beloved actors of the 1950s and 60s and the premier example of the independent loner cowboy fated to pass away along with American frontier in such movies as The Seekers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, than those of that prime example of the 1970s and post 1970s bleeder of hearts, Clint Eastwood of Dirty Harry and The Outlaw Josie Wales fame. Jack Bauer, the Clint Eastwood stand in in the television show 24, for example, violates the law and engages in torture to keep America safe again and again from a host of Snidely Whiplash terrorists of mostly Islamic, Eastern European, and Chinese persuasion. Deceased former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was so taken with Dirty Jack and his act that he asked how any prosecutor in his right mind could bring charges against the man who saved America again again, something that tells us, Biskind argues, about the increasing prominence and influence of secular right wing films and television shows in American political and ideological culture since Nixon, and something that may tell us something about how important simulacra have become in a media saturated world and an America where film and television celebrities are often elected to political office.

The other strand of right wing films are those of the religious right according to Biskind. The films and television programmes (and literary forbearers) of the religious right, such as the seemingly endless Left Behind series of sixteen books and four films, trods trails that emerged in the Victorian era in mainstream and hegemonic Protestantism, ideologies in which the end times are coming thanks to secular humanism and urban decadence and decay. In these religious horror films good Christians are raptured, bad secularists are up fire creek without a paddle, and those secularists somewhere in between have a choice to make: either get born again and become a bride of Christ or suffer the pain and torments of a world become hellish and await the day of judgement. Speaking of hell, the secularists have their own mundane versions of hell such as the Wessex of ITV's Broadchurch and the Yorkshire of the BBC's Happy Valley where murderers, predators, rapists, and serial killers walk and stalk the streets of the small towns in which the story takes place.

Like the films and television shows of the once extremist right, secular and religious, the films and television shows of the extremist left, though they are more marginal and lesser in numbers than those of the centre and right in post-Nixonian America, also moved away from the consensual centre, writes Biskind. Avatar, for instance, condemns imperialism, including American imperialism, and celebrates the other, in Aviator's case the Na'vi, the natives of the planet that is being invaded by the military, industrial, and scientific forces of the centre. They also challenge, maintains Biskind, the essentialism of the consensual centre, In Avatar, for example, some of the scientists who have landed on the planet to help the military-industrial-governmental exploit the planets natural resource, go rogue from the establishment once they realise what the oligarchic complex is up to. Eventually, two of the rogues join with the Na'vi to fight the exploitative imperialism of the invaders and at least one of the rebels goes native by becoming Na'vi, making them us and us them, if limitedly, in the process, something that has been common in leftist films since the 1950s, claims Biskind.

In his conclusion to the The Sky is Falling, Biskind argues that the demise of the centre, to paraphrase Mark Twain, may have been somewhat exaggerated after the 1970s. Biskind suggests that the centre has revived thanks to the Jack Bauer meets Mort Downey Jr. meets WWE wrestling regime of Donald Trump, a man who has been married multiple times, publicly brags about his sexual conquests, and who publicly makes fun of the disabled. Keep your eyes on the trailer skies for coming film and television attractions of left, right, and centre, or perhaps on the writings of Peter Biskind so we can ascertain whether Biskind's hypothesis about the reviving centre has merit. Perhaps with the 2022 repudiation of elements of the delusional right wing notion that Democrats stole the election of 2020 Hollywood will tack increasingly back toward the centre, assuming, of course, that there is profit to be made by doing so.

Biskind's book should be read by anyone interested in the history of American film and television in the post-Nixon era of American history. Its textual approach, one that takes culture seriously, shows what can be done with the history of cinema and television when one puts films and television shows in the context of history, society, and culture rather than in the context of psychoanalysis with all its accompanying problems as does the crystal ball school of textualism that dominates so much film and television studies these days. While largely grounded in textual analysis with references to interviews with directors, actors, creators, and some polling data, The Sky is Falling is, because it is grounded in history and broadly focused on economic, cultural, and political forces, Biskind's approach to film and television, which finds culture war battles on the surface of filmic and televisual texts, seems, at least to me, far more valuable, valid, fruitful, and compelling than that of cult of crystal ball textualism, which finds ahistorical culture wars devouring texts from beneath them. Another thing The Sky is Falling nicely does is point up the problems associated with the polemical discourse of American conservatives and the American right, namely that Hollywood is a den and web of internationalist and traitorous leftists who are trying to brainwash the masses with their anti-American hogwash. It isn't, as The Sky is Falling nicely shows by isolating centre, right wing, and left wing variants of Hollywood cinema. Hollywood, contrary to the socially and culturally constructed fantasies of the paranoid and conspiratorial right, makes a lot of right wing films as Biskind shows. Very highly recommended.

The Books of My Life: The Culture of the Cold War

The history of American culture and the history of American religion can be profitably understood, at least in part, as the product of a series of cultural, ideological, and religious revivals that have occurred in the North American colonies and provinces and the United States over the years. They can be seen, in other words, as the product of a series of religious, cultural, and ideological awakenings characterised by an increase in religious belief or fervour and an increase in religiosity, an increase in those claiming to be religious and in the number of believers attending the services of their religious organisations.

America's revivals weren't simply religious revivals in the narrow sense, however. America's revivalists, including Billy Sunday and Billy Graham, generally saw their revivals not only in religious terms but also in nationalist or Americanist terms. Such a linkage should not be surprising given that nationalism itself is, at the very least like (and actually is) a religion in that it is a meaning system (ideologies) that takes cultural and institutional form (symbols, rituals, icons, stories, bureaucracies) and has its own chosen people, its own chosen land, its own chosen myths, its own chosen mythic heroes, its own chosen economic system, capitalism, and its own chosen political system, "democracy". As a consequence many of America's revivalists saw the revivals not only as divine occurrences that spread the good news of Christ, as they interpreted him, but also as a divine occurrence that strengthened what was for them an inherently Christian nation or, more accurately, an inherently Protestant Christian nation, the United States of America. For many of America's Protestants, Christianity, as they understood it, was thus American Christianity and the United States of America, as they understood it, was a if not the, Christian nation, and both, as they understood them, were inextricably linked to one another since America was god's chosen land and god's chosen religion was their religion, "mainstream" or dominant American Protestantism.

The ties between American "mainstream" or politically and demographically dominant Protestantism and the American political culture have not gone unnoticed by those who have studied and continue to study America. As historians have noted over the years the First Great Awakening, a revival often tied to the efforts of George Whitfield, played a major role in laying the foundations of a common identity among America's colonists, an identity grounded in the distinction between the colonial "us" from them, the colonising "other", Great Britain. The Second Great Awakening, a revitalisation tied to Charles Finney, many historians tell us, helped provide Americans and America itself with a hegemonic or dominant meaning system grounded in "mainstream" Protestantism. Even more Americans came to believe, as a consequence of the second great revival, that the United States was god's nation, at least potentially and that they should help make it so, that the United States was, at least potentially, a chosen land populated, at least potentially, by god's chosen people, and that they should help make them so, and that the American nation was, at its best, a light unto a world in varying degrees of darkness. Many of America's missionaries who conflated American Protestantism and Nationalist Protestant Americanism thus helped spread not only the gospel of Christianity at home and abroad but also, given the links between American Protestantism and American nationalism, the good news of America itself, that promised land of capitalist get rich quick milk and "democratic" honey, across the nation and around the world.

A number of social scientists and historians, including, perhaps most notably William McLoughlin, have taken note of the link between Christian revival and American nationalist revitalisation. Many of America's revivals, after all, occurred around the same time as heightened great power tensions and great power wars.  Revivals in Colonial New England occurred at a time of heightened tensions between France and Great Britain. Some, have argued that the Salem Witch Trials with its denunciations and its torture and execution of "witches", for instance, was a product of these great power tensions. The First Great Awakening occurred in an atmosphere of tensions between Great Britain and the colonials. Some have argued that the new sects of this revival, Baptists and Methodists, helped give birth to a "democratic" current in colonial America. The Second Great Awakening occurred in the context of tensions over who was and who was not an American. This era saw attacks on Masons, Mormons, and Catholics for being "un-American" in their behaviours and for being members of social groups or social groups that were perceived as autocratic or authoritarian. The revival of the Great War era was characterised by the modernist anti-modernist crusade of Billy Sunday, an awakening where evolution and modern biblical criticism were linked to the evil Hun who many believed was the essence of evil in the modern world, who many believed was Hitler before Hitler. This revival era saw the deportation of aliens (particularly political and ideological "aliens") from America's shores, limits on freedom of speech, and the deportation of labouring men and women from Arizona who were crammed into cattle cars and dumped in the deserts of New Mexico simply for having the audacity to organise for wage increases and better working conditions. This early twentieth century revival eventually split American Protestant evangelicalism into "traditionalist" and "modernist' or liberal camps, split American denominations, most notably, the Presbyterian Church, into "traditional" and "liberal variants, split schools of theology into "traditional" and "modernist" variants, most famously Princeton Theological Seminary, and led, at least in part, to the rise of American fundamentalism, a social movement centred on the defence of the literal interpretation of the Bible and of Victorian norms and values. The Cold War anti-modernist revival most associated with Billy Graham painted the evil godless communism of the USSR as a threat not only to American Christianity but to America itself. In response the federal government once again went after "alien" "heretics" within, including members of the Communist Party, Socialists, homosexuals, and New Deal Liberals. During this era the Cold War faithful were able to change the American "Pledge of Allegiance". The Pledge, which had been written by a Christian socialist, was revised during the Cold War (it had been revised before) to include " under God", while "In God We Trust", was added to American paper money. This change in the American Pledge and the addition of the "in God we Trust" mantra on American paper money nicely shows the links between American Christian Protestantism, the American nation, and between American Christianity and American capitalism, the "American faith".

 

The American civil religion, civic faith, or public religion saw perhaps its largest split in the 1960s as an American prophetic civil religion emerged from the margins and challenged, at least in the minds of America's political, economic, and cultural elite, the official priestly civil religion that had dominated the United States almost since it was born. The, what might be called silent majority revival, which had strong ties to political and economic elites, categorised "dissidents", civil rights dissidents and anti-Vietnam War dissidents, as un-American thereby justifying and rationalising attacks, physical and verbal on them by a variety of bullies and thugs, since they were seen as threats to the American way of life and American law and order. The counterculture of the 1960s has been vilified ever since by many on the right, including Gertrude Himmelfarb in her polemic One Nation, Two Cultures, as responsible for a host of America's ills including a rise in the divorce rate, a rise in out of wedlock births, a rise in cohabitation rates, an increase in sexual immorality, an increase in drug use, and a host of other decadences that are putting, many believed, the chosen nation and the chosen people at risk of god's wrath and, as a consequence, decline or devolution. 

 

The latest major nationalist revival of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century was the revitalisation movement that occurred after the 9/11 terror attacks. The War on Terror revival led to attacks on  "heretics" like the Muslims and the Sikhs, the latter a religious group that was attacked because those who attacked them had no comprehension of the historic and cultural differences between the Sikh faith and Islam, something that shows the lowest common denominator nature of many if not most of these nationalist revivals. This latest of American national revitalisation movements would eventually give us the cult of Donald Trump, a cult cobbled together, in the midst of a War on Terror, from right wing Christianity, right wing ultra nationalism, White supremacism, and conspiracy theory fabrications and delusions. This cult was led by and centred on a flim flam salesman turned right wing politician, demagogue, and messiah-prophet. That this bully demagogue learned his demagogic lessons of innuendo and demonisation for economic and political gain from Roy Cohn, the chief counsel of that once celebrated and still celebrated in some quarters, demagogic grand inquisitor of the Cold War himself, former Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, should not be surprising to any historian of the American national faith. 

Stephen Whitfield's The Culture of the Cold War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, second edition, 1999) is a superb exploration of the culture, official and popular, of one of the United States's many nationalist revival and revitalisation movements, the Cold War nationalist revival movement. Whitfield explores the self-righteous, self-satisfied adolescent bully boys reliving their glory days in the school yard as arrested development adults and cynical demagogues who led the crusade against heretics during the Cold War. He explores the impact of a narrowed American nationalism on politics, books, films, television programmes. It was a culture, as Whitfield notes, in which political denunciations that negatively impacted peoples lives, particularly the lives of those "heretics" who were members of the Communist Party, USA, former members of the Communist Party, "fellow travellers of the party from the late 1940s to the 1960s, New Deal liberals, and homosexuals, anyone, in other words, who didn't conform to a selected national myth. That all this became commonplace in the self proclaimed land of free speech and "democracy"but not to those that know the history of ideological inquisitions in the United States. 

 

Whitfield trods a middle path in his interpretation of the Cold War. Whitfield argues that while the Soviet Union and its spies were a threat to the American way of life, so were--perhaps even more--the anti-communist intellectuals, demagogues, and the masses they demagogued, something that makes them akin to the true believers in the cult of Stalin in the USSR with its orthodox cum communist meaning system and its own periodic nationalist revivals such as that aimed at the Old Bolsheviks and symbolically expressed in the show trials of the 1930s and in which denunciation was a central ritual,  and, the Soviet revival in 1950s that led to conspiracy theory in which cosmopolitan intellectuals and professionals (translation Jews) were trying to kill the great cultic leader, Stalin. The national faith of the US was also similar to that of the USSR, for instance, in its emphasis on conformity. That a nation like the US, which claimed that individualism and freedom lay at its doctrinal core, also emphasised conformity to a very narrow catechism of that national faith is one of the fascinating absurdities of human history and American history.

There are a few areas in The Culture of the Cold War which I think Whitfield could have developed more. While recognising, particularly in the 1999 second edition of the book, that America's has a history of follies--I would call them delusions, fantasies, and forms of social and cultural madness--the book is weak on the history of these follies. Whitfield does a good job of putting the culture of the Cold War in its immediate context but is less better at putting the culture of the Cold War in its broader American revival and revitalisation context. 

A related weakness of The Culture of the Cold War is Whitfield's failure to put Cold War great power politics, that between the US and USSR, within broader great power politics. Great power politics, of course, have been around since the rise of large scale agricultural civilisations in the Near East, the Mediterranean, and China. Both the US and the USSR were the dominant great powers in the Cold War era and as such, they behaved somewhat similar to the great powers of the past and they behaved somewhat similar to each other in the present. I have already mentioned their heretic hunting similarities between the two powers chosen by god or history to remake the world in its image. Both the US and USSR were also, like the imperial powers of the past, ethnocentric (us versus them). They were messianic. They were manichean. They were utopian. They were bureaucratic (meaning that they were not democratic but rather oligarchic). And they were, in the end, Smith's and Jones's caught in an ever spiralling and never ending cycle of trying to keep up with each other, something that is characteristic of great power struggles, cold or hot.

Finally, Whitfield's use of the term "totalitarian", a term laden with negative and normative ideological meaning, is problematic. That term, given its cultural history, arose in a particular context and implies, that humans were simply puppets of the Fu Manchuy leader, and that the masses, all the masses, the totality of the masses, can be easily manipulated by their puppet masters. While this may be generally true--advertisers and demagogues in the US, for instance, have been able to manipulate the masses into supporting wars such as the Spanish American War on the basis of fabrications and Trump has made a career out of spewing delusions (facts that raise questions about the selective use of the term totalitarian)--there was dissent, countercultures. There was and is, for example, dissent in the authoritarian Mormon Church, in the autocratic Soviet Union, and in the oligarchic United States. Any of those terms--authoritarian, autocratic, and oligarchic--are, I would argue, better descriptors than the inherently normative totalitarian when talking about modern bureaucratic oligarchies. We should also remember that modern societies, which are dominated by bureaucracies with intherent hierarchical variations in power and authority, are quite similar cross culturally like those in the US and USSR, pointing up the fairy tale that is the manichean us "democratic", them "totalitarian" binary.

Despite these slight concerns, which may or may not be entirely fair given the focus and short compass of The Culture of the Cold War, Whitfield's book is an excellent brief guide through the noirish main streets and back alleys of one variant of American nationalist culture, the Cold War nationalist revival of the 1950s. Everyone or everyone who can and is able, should read this brief book for it is a reflective mirror for what is happening today in an even more fragmented and equally as rageoholic and deluded America, an America that is experiencing yet another in the cycle of American theocratic and near fascist revivals it has since at least the late 19th century. 

 

I want to end this essay by returning to a quote from John Updike that Whitfield's references in The Culture of the Cold War: Is there a reason for being an American if there isn't a war, cold or hot? In the end this question really isn't relevant for a couple of reasons. Identities are socially and culturally constructed around the us versus them binary. Sometimes these binary distinctions are hard, sometimes they are soft, sometimes they are somewhere in between and oftentimes they vary, in complex societies, within countercultures and subcultures. During wars and rumours of war, the us versus them binaries that are at the heart of identity construction and civil religions, tend to harden into a sacred versus profane manichean dualism. And since there will always be wars and rumours of wars coming to a theatre, television screen, or internet page near you, there will always be a reason for those living in powerful nation-states like the US, Russia, or Chima to identity with great megapower America, great power Russian, great power Chinese, or even a non-great power nation-state like Finland where a Finnish citizen is the citizen of a state with economic, political, and cultural ties to the US, a nation-state that is ultimately a junior partner of Imperial America and a nation that has a traumatic past with Imperial Russia. And so it goes...