You are currently browsing the daily archive for October 28th, 2008.
Bekah over at The Road Well Travelled has some positively stunning thoughts on the need for political reformation in the United States according to the John Allen article I posted earlier.
Four years ago there was some play in the blogosphere about creating a Catholic alternative. If you searched my blogs archives, you’d find some links back to the particular blogs that were promoting this at the time. It’s coming around again, through a few more prominent blogs. The problem is there just seems to be a lack of motivation in the proper fields. I’d be all over it in a heart beat, but I have no poli-sci experience, no knowledge of how to start a third party or how to influence the parties we have! I did a little bit of research four years ago and it looks like you need to have a core group in any state you wish to raise a candidate, and every state’s regs are different. So you’re talking about a significant presence in every state in the nation, or at least a significant presence in one state to kick things off, which is difficult to engender given the basic scattered nature of the blog population which are discussing these ideas.
On a tangential note related to the platform issues that are in discussion in various comment boxes, I think that the Constitution, namely in the Bill of Rights and Amendments, has a fundamental flaw. I believe that Protestant ideology* is too enmeshed in the foundations of the country. What I am referring to is the over-emphasis on the individual as a unit of society. An alternative paradigm is to consider the family unit as the basic unit of society and formulate the role of government around supporting, sustaining and stimulating the life, health and well-being of the family to raise successful, contributing citizens. I believe natural law supports this structure. An individually centered government is too easily subverted to a government protecting its own self-interests through manipulation of the individual rather than preserving the public square for the ultimate development of the human person through protection of the natural formation of the individual within the family. What benefits families, ultimately benefits individuals, as psychological research, especially in the area of broken homes, demonstrates. But the reverse cannot be held as true, as individual “rights” can indeed conflict with the well-being of the family unit.
I absolutely, fundamentally agree. She raises excellent points about the nature of the Constitution, which is why, as I wrote in an earlier post, I believe Roe v. Wade to have been pretty consistent with the tradition of American jurisprudence and constitutional law. The problem is the Constitution itself.
It’s hard to say things like that, because here in the States, the Constitution is holy writ. It is revered and studied and debated. There are differing interpretative schools, true, but the document itself is never questioned, its foundations challenged. We simply don’t even consider that the founders may have messed up, founded the government on flawed ideas of what the ultimate end of man and state should be, and that those ideas, taken to their logical conclusion, have led us to this place.
A truly Catholic ethic — not creedal Catholicism — needs to form the core of our government, and I agree the focus should be on the family and the good of the family. To that I add that our top-down system needs to be transformed into a bottom-up one, embracing the principle of subsidiarity, with decisions always being left to the lowest competent level.
TIME has an absoltely bloody fascinating article on the unexpected and unlikely global phenomenon that is the High School Musical franchise.
Traditionally, a television’s show success hinges on reaching a particular market on a particular night. But HSM’s success has been built less from high viewer ratings than generating buzz — and buying — connected to the show. “HSM showed a [show's success] doesn’t just happen on one night,” says Ross. “You weave it together, forming a partnership between programming and marketing. You go different places to reach different people.” The franchise had good timing; HSM’s appearance coincided with the rise of a global middle class that’s equipped to absorb it. When it first came out in 2006, the newly minted consumers in the Middle East, Latin America and Asia had the TVs to watch it on; their kids could keep the buzz alive via Internet and cell phone. After the movie aired on Chinese TV, Ross called his man in Beijing to ask for viewer numbers. “Oh, above average,” came the response. “About 50 million.”
I often wonder if this sort of thing doesn’t presage some sort of global, Western-style monoculture distinguished only by culture flourishes instead of actual beliefs and honest differences, if the rise of the global middle class doesn’t demand the massive export of American entertainment and restaurants to the point of superceding their own. Of course, all of this has been tied to the bizarre phenomenon of America’s endless economic growth which has, in fact, finally ended. If the economic collapse continues, I wonder how much American culture will be able to spread overseas in the way it’s accustomed to doing so.
I wrote back in August (really, it was June) about Zora Neale Hurston, a prominent African-American writer, philosopher, and anthropologist, who opposed the end of segregation. It was the strangest thing I’d ever heard; never had I even entertained the notion that segregation was anything other than a profound evil, a moral wrong sustained by the government.
I wrote:
A prominent black intellectual, a prominent member of the Harlem renaissance, opposed the end of segregation in the United States for what she believed would be its inevitable damage to black culture and distinctiveness. Integration, she argued, would only reinforce the idea that the only notable difference was skin color, and encourage ethnic identity as opposed to cultural identity. Essentially, she believed segregation was a good thing, ultimately, in allowing the development of a strong, well-defined black culture that was a good and wonderful thing, which she experienced during her formative years, and which she ceaselessly advocated. In her writing for Fire! Magazine, which she published alongside Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman, she argued that black writers should not abandon dialect-writing; where some maintained that it further reinforced the idea that blacks were to be subordinate, Hurston held that strong dialect was essential to black culture, and should be clutched tightly and cherished.
In a way, she was right about the effects of the end of segregation; previously vital, vibrant black communities across the United States have dispersed, and much of the old black culture has been obliterated through the en masse assimilation of the population. Jackson Ward here in Richmond, once considered the Harlem of the South, an essential center of African-American art and music, is now mostly a student district, and the city of Richmond itself, despite being mostly black in population, has little remaining to distinguish it from Virginia as a whole.
I agree with Hurston to the point that the development of black culture — really, the development by any group of a self-sustaining and enriching culture — was good thing of itself, and she was right in that the end of segregation resulted in that culture’s collapse. I think that the HSM phenomenon is a symptom of a global problem, the conquest of the world by American culture to the detriment of the receiving populations. We associate modernization with Westernization, never concluding that there could have been a distinctly-Japanese way of living in the modern world, or a particularly African expression of the same. But we don’t and can’t know, because any country’s rise to wealth and prosperity is accompanied by it being divvied up into markets by foreign companies who begin importing blue jeans and Jessica Simpson.
Is this a good thing?
John Paul II always used to write about how it was necessary for cultures to remain themselves, that there is something special about Poland and about the Igbo and about Thailand and about Papua New Guinea and about Mexico for their Polishness, Igboness, Thainess, New-Guineanness, and Mexicanness, respectively. These cultures have found their own approaches on how to deal with life and its concerns, new ways to understand and live the Gospel, that they have valid things to say to the human experience — and that our endless economic and cultural conquest diminishes and devalues all of that.
With thanks to Shortpacked!
