Fourth of July, 2009 AD
Some time ago, the actor Gary Sinese admitted that in his Malibu, California neighborhood his is the only house on July Fourth to fly the flag.
Malibu, of course, was Obama Territory before there was an Obama. His unwillingness to wear a Flag lapel pin was not without precedent. Or precedents.
Still, Royal Oak, Michigan isn't Malibu. It now has artistic and cultural pretensions. But a block or two from its pleasantly middle-class hipster Main Street is the real Main Street. Families, churchgoers, even a Republican or two. And more churches than bars and restuarants. Walking back from lunch today, I looked up at a multi-storied condominium on Main Street (one of many -- always a sign of Culture in residence) to see a solitary flag moving slowly in the breeze from a balcony. One balcony among dozens.
On my own street, a minute or so away from the high rise condos, there were more. As there always are. But, it seemed, not as many. In ZakariaWeek we are told that we now live in a post-American world. It's worse than that. We live in a post-American America. Post-sovereigntist they call it in the West Wing.
I've been watching, for the first time, Carl Sagan's COSMOS. I always wondered about its massive popularity. When he talks about science and the history of science, it is often first rate (produced in 1979, it is obviously dated technologically, but there are worse introductions to cosmology). Twinned with the drumbeat against the Church is his enthusiasm for a post-nationalist world.
There is no reason why physicists should know anything about civics. No reason why -- with their big, evolution-produced brains -- they should be able to make the distinction between Huntington's "Anglo-Protestant" political order and, say, Russia's gulagism, Iran's theocracy, or the earnest if clumsy constitutionalism of a dishonestly reviled Honduras. Physicists made the atomic weapons for America and Russia. And, if given more time and money, would have for the Third Reich. Science, despite Sagan's boyish faith in it, is not, by nature, moral.
But Science gives Power without Borders its legitimacy. At the EPA, a physicist/economist is muzzled because meterological observations raise questions about the human origins of everyday weather. Power without Borders requires absolute conformity. Neither Sagan nor his dream President would admit that the American nuclear deterent checked the Russian nuclear threat. But that's what happened. American restraint coupled to America's power more than anything prevented The Big One as our Cynic Laureate Randy Newman calls it. Without that bilateral civic diversity, where would we be?
The professionally cultured -- cynics all, like their poet laureate -- are still idealists. Idealism is the flip side of cynicism. But this coin does not represent Good and Evil, but rather, Power and Powerlessness. Now that Science and Art have their perfect president they can afford to be patriotic. But they're out of practice. So the flags don't fly. And, with a few more administrations of "our kind" in office (and there is always an "our kind," color and sex don't matter), there will only be one flag. So they hope.
Royal Oak is geographically large, but with as many people living here as in Astoria, Queens with its fraction of the territory. A few miles away from downtown I biked past a house flying what might be the "new flag." A photo image of the earth from space. Who knows? Maybe the new flag will have the globe floating on a rainbow field or the black, red, and green of pan-Africanism. (I know that African tribes have been suprisingly resistant to it, but, that's my point.)
A flag for the "gathering of the tribes" as the Woodstock post-nationals would have it. But that isn't going to happen. Sagan and Obama believe that there is a distinction to be made between multiculturalism and tribalism. There isn't. At some point a decision has to be made as to what kind of political order we want and need. Anyone who has seen the Detroit City Council in glorious brawl mode knows what happens when no one wants to decide anything. The solution for our dream President is bureaucracy and lots of it. It will certainly prevent almost anything from happening BUT chaos.
So it goes, as our previous Cynic Laureate, Kurt Vonnegut used to say. America is the UN if the UN had even a baby's fluttering grasp of civics. Astoria with its scores of different languages and ethnic groups proves that everyday. Unlike Detroit, dozens of school children aren't shot every year in this town across the river from Manhattan.
Our food isn't great. Other cultures have produced better painters, composers, architects, writers, and poets. But on July Fourth we celebrate something unique in history. The civic genius of the English-speaking peoples. At Harvard or NYU or Boston College they might call it Empire Day. Who cares? Because in a real sense, it is as much a holiday for England and Canada and Australia and New Zealand as for us here in beleaguered, whipsawed America. For Hong Kong and Taiwan and South Korea and Japan too, perhaps. Even if they don't know it or want to acknowledge it.
When Bronx-born director Stanley Kubrick moved to England he may have said he was escaping America. Yet, each Fourth of July, he celebrated the holiday with big bombs-bursting-in-air noises, like a real American. What did his English countryside neighbors think? I like to think that they came to expect it and now miss it since he died. That's what I like to think.
Woodstock got this wrong as with most else. The tribes don't gather. They do flee to America and England and Canada and Australia. For their lives, sometimes.
I would ask Carl Sagan if he were alive, isn't there also cultural evolution? He seems to think so and that the UN and the EU are its masterful complex culminations. But not the US Constitution or its centuries-in-the-making English counsin? As in science, don't the results count in civics?
In Gary Sinese's Hollywood, people often talk about someone being "evolved." Usually in connection to faith in global warming or the Democratic Party. I would like to think that Prof. Sagan would have evolved, if given more years, to at least understand my questions?
That's what I would like to think.
Sam Macomb
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