Chuck Peek’s 2021 April blog
Looking back from the vantage point of our country’s continuing political turmoil, it becomes pretty clear that from its colonial beginnings to today we have been dominated by four fundamental ideas.
The first idea is to be found in its religious origins and even today continues to rest on a religious or spiritual understanding. Variously evoked as Providence, the God in whom we Trust, or the deity spoken of in the scripture often invoked in support of American ideals, a sense of a “higher court” before whose judgment we stand is one constant among Americans regardless of their particular religious stripe, ethnicity, identity, or heritage. Most of us share a sense that we enjoy something basic to American life because we were “endowed by our creator” with rights and responsibilities that have a higher authority than even our own Constitution. Whether the great awakening is from the pulpit or the Edmund Pettus bridge, the call to follow the author of the moral universe gets a hearing in America.
Christmas Pageant, Trinity Church, Copley Square, Boston, Massachusetts, noted for Phillips Brooks and O Little Town of Bethlehem
Secondly, there has been from the beginning a strong pragmatic strain in our value system. One way or another we admire a “get ‘er done” philosophy. There is often an impatience with fine points of philosophic or dogmatic difference in favor of what practical difference our beliefs make. Sometimes this strain accounts for the center stage we often yield to commercial interests, to both Main Street and Wall Street, to wherever the business of America is business, enlightened self-interest, success. Commercial possibilities slept uneasily with religious sentiments in the bed that sired America. Feats of technology or engineering, accomplishments that overcame the odds, and songs about the railroad or Erie Canal have a place in the heart of America. Click and Clack sustained the classical music and news on public radio!
Before there were William James and John Dewey, there was Ben Franklin, his practicality, and the seeds of the business of America is business
Thirdly, the call to transcend ourselves, our circumstances, our material conditions—Transcendentalism itself—captures our hearts and minds. People out fishing from a boat on a nearby lake who stop to “breathe in” the sunset, mini-versions of Thoreau out in his cabin at Walden, before he chased home for more cookies. Versions of Socratic dialogue in our classrooms, schools centered on freedom of expression, art institutes, concert halls, community theaters, Kwame Dawes’s This American Life in Poetry started by Ted Kooser, all speak to trying to be our better selves, to appreciate the sublime, to enjoy the small ‘g’ greens at Augusta or put our hearts into the big ‘G’ Greening of our environment. That is why there are so many songs about rainbows. (And, see point one above, what’s on the other side.)
Alcott’s Orchard House, a monument in the Transcendental Movement in America. Much nicer than Thoreau’s rustic cabin at Walden
For very few of us in daily life or in our national history does any one of these eclipse the others. Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream, LBJ had a Civil Rights Bill, and Lady Goga belted the national anthem across the national mall on the same steps as Garth Brooks. We aren’t naturally a divisive people. We aren’t naturally just one thing or another but a sometimes curious, sometimes glorious blend of our religious and romantic and practical interests and accomplishments. I shovel my right-wing neighbor’s walks, he shovels mine. We like neighborliness, cooperation, harmony.
But, if you are really following here, then you are by now thinking, this is only three strains. At the outset there were four. Why yes, careful reader, four there were and four there indeed are—and here comes the fourth. Every once in a while, some group or another gets seized by the idea that only one of these legs on the stool is worth sitting on. They start out as nice, well-balanced people and then one day they are the imbalanced champions of their own lopsided extremes.
Ideology transforms us into religious or transcendental or pragmatic purists. The pure logic of one position or another blocks out all the other logics, perspectives, bodies of experience, traditions. Ideology is the poison we spread when we begin to take too seriously not our beliefs but ourselves.
The transformation sometimes starts as a Great Awakening, a Consciousness Raising, A Slogan on the Waiting Room Wall. And then it swells into the sentiment that everyone who disagrees with us on anything should be cast out into the nether darkness. Some poet, a woman most likely, said there is nothing so dangerous as an idea—especially when you have only one.
Aside from Hawthorne’s Scarlett Letter and assorted other pogroms, the Salem Witch Trials are one of America’s most iconic scenes of hysteria. Of a piece, though, with The Ox-bow Incident and not hard to update with photos of our fairly recent rash of children separated from their parents at our southern border
This sentiment we call Puritanism, our fourth historic tradition. The origin of the term was connected to a northern European religious faction imported into the colonies in Massachusetts, but the purist sentiment itself can attack at random and from any angle. Atheists are notoriously puritanistic, as are many vegans, as can be cattle ranchers. Folks out on the political right or left are quite often tempted to puritanism, because ideology easily subverts clear thinking, hardens the once-open heart, closes the once-open mind, and alienates us from our own experience.
We see the “ism” alive and well in the billionaire backed bullies and bigots of the Bannon philosophy whose figure-head occupied the White House for four years (and whose avatar occupies the Office of Governor here) and whose followers tried to occupy the Capital on January 6. (They didn’t even have to mount an assault here—our Governor invited the gun-toters to bring their totes to the Capitol!)
What an Epiphany this past January 6 brought us! Puritanism is always know-it-all-ism. This land is indeed not your land, only my land, from the border wall in California to the New York Island called Trump Tower.
We could round the purists up and make them wear a Scarlet Letter P on their bodices, but then making people wear their shame is a purist tactic. If we did that, we would have met the enemy and found, as Pogo warned, that they are us! I prefer any of the other three American traditions of thought to the one that would eliminate all the others. But mostly I prefer the blend of the three running like tides through the waters of American life.
As evidence of the efficacy of what Walter Lippmann once termed America’s “broad democratic middle”, just look at the change a few days in January produced in USA 2021. The prelude, from a half decade before: We elect a bragging bully, and suddenly, as if from the mists, a lot of bragging bullies begin showing up on the streets, bragging and bullying. They finally end up in the halls of Congress, occupying the desks and offices of elected officials, abetted by some who were elected through gerrymandering or voter suppression, all pretty much from the same tribe (though not of the same caste—the oligarchs stayed safely in their counting houses, counting out their tax advantages).
Then, four years later, we elect a genuine nice guy, and it looks as if, suddenly, out of the nooks and crannies of life, there start to appear nice people doing nice things. The Presidency is indeed a bully pulpit. From it came the sermon that led a journalist to give a mask to a health care provider reduced to using a garbage bag as protection against COVID-19.
Do you think that four years from now we might see a new crowd in the halls of Congress, this time legitimately elected by the people to the House and Senate in an election open to all rightful voters? (Or in our own State House?) Just a few more nicely balanced people in those seats could begin to transform our legislative and judicial branches from domination by ideological purists! After all, stalemate is just a word for the puritanical spirit stretched thin.
The May blog, appearing close to Memorial Day, will be my semi-annual necrology—some of those who have died since the New Year’s blog.
Kearney, Nebraska
April 2021
capeek 