For example: when I was a kid the chorus of Don McLean's song "American Pie" would always make me think of a bunch of old men like my Grandpa sitting around drinking themselves to death intentionally. Thus the ideas both of suicide and alcohol poisoning are delivered to an 8 year old's mind in one macabre musical wallop.
On a lighter note, during my Appalachian Trial hike, I would sometimes combat boredom by trying to remember all the lyrics of the song. I could usually get pretty close, but I could never really remember the last verse.
Given all of this, I was intrigued when a friend told me that my good buddy Glenn Beck had done a rigorous line for line analysis of the song. Now, as you may have guessed by the general gist of this blog, Glenn Beck and I are probably not going to see eye to eye on a great many things. But my friend, knowing that I am not a Beckite, told me it was nevertheless worth my while. So I set my prejudice aside and listened to what Beck had to say. If you are so inclined, you can do the same below:
I wanted desperately to scoff at Mr. Beck. Desperately, desperately, desperately. But I found that I couldn't. I think maybe he takes some his symbolism a little far, but if you actually go to Don McLean's website (or at least what purports to be his website) and read what he as to say about it you see that Beck seems to have the right general idea. The song is a lament about how America seemingly lost its way in the turmoil of the 1960s.
So yes, you can mark this day, February 17th 2012, as a historical day: I actually agree with something that Glenn Beck has said. Maybe that is a sign that the Mayans were right, the delicate system of the cosmos has been disrupted, and we are all doomed. It may be time to buy lots of gold, gather weapons and ammo, round up as many virgins as you can find, and head for the hills. If you know someone who can trap beavers and make beaver tail soup, you might want to bake him a cake today so he'll let you join his tribe tomorrow.
But before you do all that let me tell you that something else has happened, which will probably scare you even more.
Everyone says that the best way to make peace is to sit down with your adversary and find something you can agree on, and then go from there. Well, now that I have found something I agree with Glenn Beck on, I find that the more I think about it, the more I have to say some of his ideas seem reasonable when you approach them a certain way.
The few times I have read, watched, or listened to Beck, the big idea he seems trying to get across is that in order for America to remain strong her citizens must be upright. They must be responsible. They must be moral. They must love justice. In parallel with this, in order to remain free the citizens of our happy republic must find a way to do this for themselves, otherwise liberty is threatened.
Now, for the sake of brevity let me take a leap and state with only scanty philosophical proof that our morals and ethical decisions, while a function of our deepest held beliefs and moral sentiments, are also a function of the institutions to which we belong. When love wears a little thin, the very fact that two people are married can, in theory, keep them together in a sort of glue of commitment. Going through the motions at Church can get us through a time where are faith falls a little flat until we recover something more meaningful. The institution believes for us.
Additionally, the stronger an institution is, the more you will assume a certain code of conduct if you want to be a member of good standing within that institution. An example: if you are traveling across the country with the Lucas Cranach Lutheran Church Bell Choir to attend the national bell choir gathering in Lake Woebegon, you are probably not going to leave your hotel room with the innocent intention of getting a sandwich and yet inexplicably wind up at the the strip club next door helping hard working women get through medical school by stuffing dollar bills into their g-strings. Why? Because if the other people in the choir happened to find out what you were doing it would make the last leg of the journey from Oskaloosa, Iowa pretty uncomfortable. You've stepped outside the bounds of what is generally acceptable behavior within the group and for a while you have to live that down. You might still be a part of the group, but you have certainly lost a little bit of standing.
I guess my broader point is that I think that in order to have an upright citizenry strong institutions help. But those institutions have been severely damaged since the 1950's. Divorce rates are high. 40 percent of the children born in the United States are born out of wedlock. God is, in an existential sense, dead; we no longer really need God to navigate through the muck of our lives (we have GPS now, after all). The strong religious and familial institutions which used to give our lives moral structure have eroded to the point where we now live in a post apocalyptic moral landscape. Oh, sure, here and there there are a few small cohesive groups that are living off of Twinkies and squirrels, but those institutions that remain lack the clout to really influence the rest of us who are for the most part out there on our own, living for ourselves and trying to get as much pleasure as we can out of the desolate landscape.
Sounds pretty bad, yes? Without strong institutions life doesn't have a meaning beyond the self. So we demand more from the only thing that is big enough to fill the void: The government. And if government is the biggest game in town, and if we keep demanding more and more from it, eventually we may find that we are putting our faith for the future in the state rather than in ourselves or in God. And what happens when the state supplants religion as the object of faith of the citizenry?
That's fascism, my friends. The more we demand from the state the more we are indebted to it, the less liberty we have, and the more the state becomes a god for which we would suffer or perpetrate any number of injustices and atrocities.
So there you go. I got from American Pie to swastikas in...oh, 5 moves? Not bad.
That's not to say I agree with Beck at all. I'm just saying that if you look at it in a certain way you can't say he's totally unreasonable, at least with regards to what has been discussed here.
Why do I think Mr. Beck is wrong? Because I believe the social contract has changed fundamentally from the time our Founding Fathers penned the constitution. Back then, the idea was to secure the rights of a populous that was made up largely of self sufficient farmers and set up a system of government that was strong enough to rule effectively limited enough to generally let people do what they needed to do. The constitution as we have it is a social contract formulated in the 1780s, with some amendments to fix some of more glaring omissions and punts.
It is now 2012. The world has fundamentally changed. We are no longer a nation of self-sufficient farmers, but rather a population whose jobs, retirements, and fortunes depend in large part on the whims of the invisible hand of the market; a market that too many of us simply do not have the correct combination of intelligence and circumstance to make maximum use of. The existing institutions outside of government are too small to shield us from the beating that the all too ruthless invisible hand can deliver, and unfortunately the government must step in to soften the blows when they come.
There are smart ways to do this, and ways that are more American than French. But we must find them. We have to admit that the 1950s and 1770s are consigned to history and perhaps represent an ideal of perfection that never was really was. A great nation will move forward and not consign itself to the glories of the past.
Also, I think its worth mentioning that perhaps the great sin at the heart of our current malaise is conspicuous consumption as a way of life. The need to have everything cheap and immediately has probably destroyed our character, our bodies, and our world than almost anything else. Rampant consumerism was a hall mark of the 1950s that Beck venerates so highly, and yet also seems to be at the heart of the moral decay that Beck fights against day after day after day.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a levy to drive to. Why on earth would you do that? What's there? A lake? A pot of gold? Guess I'll find out. If you drive a Prius instead of a Chevy, will the leprechaun who guards the pot of gold (notice that's what I have settled on) still give you the gold? Or will he be disappointed in you for not buying American?
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