Have people in your church started arguing about the nature of God? Probably not.
This is not about America per se, it is about the devolution of the domain of news and popular culture. We are reaping the seeds of the Counterculture. We have at once decided to be permissive of the perverse and needy for acceptance of standards at the same time. So this is about the loss of Walter Cronkite - of a kind of objective point of view that Americans are willing to conform to - and the rise of what we gamers call 'randoms', people we take on board our teams who conform to few of the rules of the game. This is an inherently contradictory position.
At the core of this is the hardened assumption demonstrated here, that 'minorities' are psychologically and inherently unwilling and unable to experience the American experience (as say narrated by Walter Cronkite) because America is fundamentally broken. I just have to say that this to me is a species of a suburban teenager who hates their parents and just knows everything about them and 'America' is both fraudulent and corrupt. This is fundamentally how I view the 'white liberal' social point of view - stuck in its own private Idaho and looking for the right party drug to drown everything out. When they come up sober it's all "Damn if I were a Negro I'd burn all this shit down." This is ossified to the point that it reinscribes racial reasoning even more deeply. All I can say to that is the Baby Boomers are fundamentally a broken record in that regard, and the rest of us have gone digital. That doesn't get rid of the power of the 60-70 year olds who run the country and still listen to the Rolling Stones.
But then that's it, isn't it? Rock and roll is a purloined rebellion lacking the redemptive quality of the Blues, ever on the edge of punk devolution. Rock abjures the transcendence of Gospel. Rock refuses the crossover of ethnics and rarely ever leaves its 4/4 signature, ever flattening all expression into a rebel yell. It is crassly commercial at the expense of the Folk and it is relentlessly omnipresent aiming to be the soundtrack of American life. At its heart it is James Dean, running away from home, looking for artificial danger to escape calm, negotiated civility. It's looking for a reason to shout because it cannot bear to sacrifice for duty. It has to make its own new rules of honor. It won't settle down until it drives off a cliff.
And now the saga continues as a new generation of randoms devours its old. The callow narcissism is astounding. Every declaration of identification attempting to force the planet to gaze at the same navel. Well, just America. Well, just white America. Well, just white America on my side of the aisle in my [inter]section. Yeah then we'll fix the whole thing. The chatting class has become the barking class, a pen of pent-up dogs who couldn't cross the street to save their own hollow souls.
Americans are in a psychological dumpster of their own creation. And that's what they get for trying to find salvation in the mall, on the radio, through broadcasts and broadsheets where everything is always up for debate and renegotiation. It desires disruption with the hope that the new pieces will fall in their favor. It is the refusal to work for common cause - a radical autonomy - that is sustained by a stereotyped partisan media and a stereotyped partisan politics. It is sustained rivalry that, with universal permissiveness, loses its ability to even conceptualize commonality. This is the hyper extension of multicultural counterculture into intersectional identity politics in which provocatuers lead the charge to politicize *everything* - and the major media trots along like Opie to our cynical Garfield. It is everything but Art.
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