In particular, the draining of energy from the image of the ideal impoverished the motivational springs for acts of heroism.
Heroes are, by and large, people who have cast themselves into that role because of their devotion to living up to a heroic ideal. In the heroic ideal of the American man --enacted in countless films of an earlier era-- when evil rises up, the ideal American man rises up to fight it. He does not shrink, in fear, from that fight. That would be a violation of the hero's ethic of honor.
In America today, we do not now have enough people who would rather die than dishonor themselves, even if that death were merely a political one. We do not even seem to have enough people for whom it is a tough choice if the path of the honorable hero leads through great danger.
That’s what the movies I was brought up on were always teaching us boys: you stand up to evil and you fight to defeat it. Captain Midnight. Batman. Superman. Jimmy Stewart in MR. SMITTH GOES TO WASHINGTON. John Wayne in countless films (though the question of good and evil was muddier with him). Or my hero Burt Lancaster –who was, in my adolescence, my idea of manly strength and courage– as an American individual in FROM HERE TO ETERINITY and as the French railroad man Lapiche during World War II in THE TRAIN. Gary Cooper in, for example, HIGH NOON.
None of these guys ever played people who would allow themselves to back down from the Bushite power out of fear.
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In this way, those in the American culture still interested in the ideal –the religionists– were handed over by the cultural left to the con-artists rising on the right, to the Bushite powers with their phony heroism conceiling the very things –greed and power– that Jesus most railed and fought against.
And the failure of the heroic on the left also opened the way for phonies from the right to posture in jump-suits aboard aircraft carriers-- the photo-op enacted to con those Americans hungry for an image to admire. The regime sold them heroism where there was none, where indeed there was only thuggery dressed up in hypocrisy.
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The right knew so little about the Good that it mistook evil for Good. So turned around had they become. So twisted up by their seducers, playing upon the twists already instilled by their harsh and rigid socialization.
While the left never mistook Bush for God's annointed, it nonetheless could not see the evil.
The Democrats could stand next to this evil, and fail to see the scope and depth of it. American liberalism could not see because its map of the world was too lacking in a vibrant moral dimension for the notion of good-vs-evil to register clearly and with suitable energy.
And for the same reason –a lack of spiritual depth– it lacked the fire in the belly to stand up to scary evil when it did raise its ugly head in the form of the Bushite regime.
The Democrats’ scandal, for example, with respect to their role in the authorization of force in Iraq –and then having to deal with the unexpected political consequences of the war’s becoming mired in this ugly pit– is not at the level of values so much as of courage. It’s not that they welcomed being put into the position of casting such votes. Nor would they have charted the same course on their own. But they were trapped as they saw it, and allowed themselves to be driven into line through a Bushite combination of threats and conjobs.
Cowardice and weakness, growing out of the disconnect with the spiritual power of prophetic truth and the active power of heroic resoluteness.
Andrew Bard Schmookler's website www.nonesoblind.org is devoted to understanding the roots of America's present moral crisis and the means by which the urgent challenge of this dangerous moment can be met. Dr. Schmookler is also the author of such books as The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution (SUNY Press) and Debating the Good Society: A Quest to Bridge America's Moral Divide (M.I.T. Press). He also conducts regular talk-radio conversations in both red and blue states.
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