Happy Independence Day 2005, America!
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| 02 Jul 2005 (Reuters) Beyonce Knowles dances during Destiny's Child Live 8 performance in Philadelphia |
It was, he says, all about "chasing that paper" — i.e., money — along with the fame, glory, and celebrity that are its accoutrements. Artists were more interested in pitching — themselves, their latest singles and CDs, their concert tours — than prompting elevated consciousness. Ollison:
Even if some of the stars didn't have a product to push or an ego to stroke, they certainly weren't going to miss an opportunity to be seen — if not heard. One of the most surreal moments at Live 8 was in the press tent when Anna Nicole Smith showed up. Wearing a pink halter top that barely contained her cantaloupe breasts and skin-tight jeans, she posed and preened for pictures and never uttered a word.
"Why are you here today?" journalists wanted to know. But Smith kept quiet as she turned her behind to a photographer — for a better view, I guess. After about a minute or so of vacant smiles, Smith, who coyly flashed the black pasties she wore under that stripper-like top, was escorted by the waist off the press tent stage.
Mightn't this be a better world if, for example, performers like Beyonce Knowles thought twice before appearing on stage in "a too-tight, too-short miniskirt" — especially on such an occasion as a benefit concert like Live 8?
Aren't things just way, way too sexed up, these days?
Can we have too much liberty?
oldstyleliberal asks these questions in the context of the surprise retirement announcement by Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Implicit in her seat being refilled on the nation's highest court come next October is very likely an end to legalized abortion, sometime in the next few years.
President Bush is expected to nominate a jurist that, unline Justice O'Connor, will vote to overturn the Roe, Casey, and other decisions that presently make state laws banning abortions unconstitutional.
If said jurist can obtain Senate approval — a big if — he or she will very likely turn the typical "O'Connor court" 5-4 majority which favors letting Roe stand into a 5-4 anti-Roe bloc.
oldstyleliberal personally thinks abortion ought to be legal: a matter of individual conscience. Yet, oddly enough, he feels this country would be better off going back to having abortion be illegal.
His feeling is that, on matters of concern in today's so-called "culture wars," this country veered way left during the period from, say, 1965 to 1980. The Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion for the first time was handed down in 1973, right in the middle of this period.
Ever since then, the cultural and religious right has been quite successfully raising hell.
Ever since then, our politics have become ever more polarized, making it harder and harder for our leaders to make needed compromises for the advancement of the public good.
Ever since then, our popular culture has gotten, more and more, all about me-me-me-me-me.
And ever since then, our sense of sexual modesty and marital discretion has flown right out the window.
Can we have too much liberty?
Stripped of legal and constiutional jargon, the basic sense of the Roe decision was that no one can tell a citizen of the United States what to do with her fetus. Her freedom is unlimited when it comes to deciding whether or not to carry her pregnancy to term. Her decision is a private one which she makes alone, with at most her doctor's help.
The corollary seems to be, in terms of how people have actually reacted to this legalization of discretionary abortion, that if it's OK to abort, then there must be absolutely no valid societal strictures which remain in place to rein in our personal, marital, social, and sexual behavior.
All so-called "Victorian" bets are off. If Anna Nicole Smith wants to show us her pasties and Beyonce Knowles wants billions around the world to see her panties, the expected, self-absorbed reaction is that of Zykia Moore, "a wishbone-thin, 16-year-old junior at University City High School in Philadelphia," who told music critic Ollison of one of her main reasons for attending Live 8: "I want to get into a video because I can dance. Can you get me into a video?"
That, and it was "a nice day." Plus, "I'm trying to see Destiny's Child, Maroon 5, Jay-Z, and Will Smith."
Anything about the suffering in Africa? Not a word.
Roe came at a time when the Zykias of the '60's had turned the corner into young adulthood, after some pretty darn idealistic teenage years. Though we couldn't actually stop the war in Vietnam, we did see some of the kinder, gentler thrusts of our '60's zeitgeist reflected in cultural and political ways. The Democratic Party in particular adopted reforms that were supposed to make it more ... uh, democratic. More broad-based. More responsive to "the people."
Actually, for better or for worse, what Democrats grew more responsive to were left-leaning, reformist, special interest groups ... such as feminists. The "women's liberation movement" couldn't get the Equal Rights Amendment ratified, back in the '70's, but it could rejoice nonetheless in the Roe decision.
Surprisingly it was, for the American left, not the millennium many had hoped for. For one thing, the right began fighting back ... hard. For another, a lot of leftists, saying they'd been "mugged" by the "reality" of the civil unrest and moral slide of the period, moved over to the right and became neo-conservatives. Plus, the paleo- and neo-conservatives proved to be much better organized than, say, the feminist organizations pushing for the ERA. The forces of the right rallied support from rank-and-file America by means of (in those pre-Internet days) sophisticated direct-mail campaigns. Before you could say Ronald Wilson Reagan, they had put one of their candidates in the Oval Office.
Reagan appointed Ms. O'Connor, the first woman ever to serve as a Supreme Court justice, who went on to craft one of the most significant and praiseworthy tenures ever recorded on the nation's High Court ... but who wouldn't help overturn Roe. Meanwhile, the culture grew ever less kind and ever less gentle. The radical-liberal dream of the '60's generation for peace, love, and human brotherhood and sisterhood died amid ever greater self-obsession, or greed, or narcissism ... whatever you'd like to call it. And, in terms of how libertine and depraved our sexual/moral conduct could get, the beat would go on and on and on and on.
Is there a connection here?
Is it possible that the social conservatives are right: you can't get to love, peace, and human brotherhood on a ticket of radical, absolutely unfettered personal and sexual freedom?
Can we have too much liberty?
oldstyleliberal has come around to the belief that, today, right now, we in fact do have too much freedom.
Each of us has become too convinced that "it's all about me." We've stopped believing that "no man is an island," that (in the words of an idealistic song from back in the day) "he ain't heavy, he's my brother."
Little wonder that the people who vote their "moral values" nowadays are trying, quite simply, to "take back the night." And it looks like, with Sandra Day O'Connor's replacement on the Supreme Court and with the expected subsequent overturning of Roe, they may get their wish. Their campaign of over 30 years has finally brought this country to a historical tipping point ... and though he's been staunchly on the other side, oldstyleliberal, this blog's proprietor, is actually glad.
He's glad because maybe now, with the culture wars over — oldstyleliberal is admittedly looking ahead a year, or five, or fifteen — it will actually be possible to have liberals and conservatives meet in the middle to get things done ... things like enacting a program of wage insurance that can help American workers endure the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as we compete economically in an increasingly "flat" global marketplace with the likes of India and China.
Things like making Americans' pensions and health benefits portable, so they aren't lost when people switch jobs.
Things like actually making American schools the best in the world.
Things like finding ways to wean us off foreign oil and gasoline.
Things that will move this country forward for a change.
These are the things we so desperately need, and they are exactly the things that get back-burnered in the poisonous, polarized, hyper-partisan atmosphere we have now, when the Senate spends so much time and energy on averting "nuclear options" and taking a hand in whether a Terry Schiavo might be allowed to die in peace.
If overturning Roe is exactly what is needed to take the wind out of the sails of the culture wars — and oldstyleliberal thinks it is — then let's get to it. Let's allow President Bush to name whatever properly qualified jurist he wants to, to replace O'Connor. Let's bring the necessary case or cases before the Supreme Court. And let's strike down the three-decade-old constitutional ban against the individual states' anti-abortion laws.
Then let's take a good, hard look at the benefits of turning back the clock to a period marked by, at one and the same time, greater sexual restraint, less self-aggrandizement, more personal deference, less cynicism, and higher regard for others. Let's stop celebrating kinkiness, knavishness, and churlishness and, as once we did, let's start extolling the milk of human kindness.
Maybe by Independence Day 2010, if all of this comes true, we'll be en route to fulfilling the American Dream as never before!
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