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Puzzling combination, that the anti-Bushite forces in Congress do make a push against the Bushites. But, when push comes to shove, they also (almost) always ultimately back down.
Why that pattern? Why this charging forth and poking at the beast but then retreating when it turns to bite? Is this about the realities of power --a kind of prudence in the face of a true threat-- or is the retreating a kind of cowardice, where a battle is lost that could have been won?
It looks like a form of weakness to me. And then the question is, whence comes this weakness?
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Fighting against a powerful force, fighting against gangsters, fighting against bullies, fighting against people who are altogether lacking in scruples and willing to do anything to protect and extend their dominance-- this is the work of heroes.
But in America, in our time --and particularly in those players in the political arena who are representative of the liberal half of the American spectrum-- heroes seem to be in unusually short supply.
What is the source of this dearth of heroism?
At one level, I think, the problem is that along the way we --in culturally liberal America-- lost sight of what we thought a human being is supposed to be. We withdrew the emotional and spiritual investment in an image of the human ideal as something we felt impelled to strive toward.
I can see it in the movies: the movies of the 30s, and 40s, and 50s, were MUCH MORE INTO LOOKING AT THE ADMIRABLE than movies in recent decades. In some liberal circles, "admiration" as a human practice has become as quaint as honoring the Geneva Conventions became in other, right-wing circles.
When people engage less in admiration it is a sign they investing less energy into the ideal image of the human being.
The protagonist as someone we can admire. Losing that is a symptom of a spiritual disease: a letting go of the energy that should invest itself into the cultivation of the good.
Our movies don’t have to go back to the naivete of the movies of an earlier era, but they can do more to get us to invest ourselves in an image of a kind of human ideal. A Jimmy Stewart, a John Wayne, a Bogart, a Gary Cooper, a Burt Lancaster– now there was a man one could admire, in some ways anyway. But one would not quickly say the same of Nicholas Cage or Johnny Depp. Something of an ideal –in terms of some ethic or other– is being offered for us to identify with.
The liberal half of America --with its disinvestment in the image of the human ideal, providing fewer images and ideas to support the achievement of that ideal-- helped lead the way downward for the moral structures of America.
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