The greatest benefit of the current presidential campaign, which we can only hope (and, of course, strive to determine) will have a positive outcome this fall is how it is nourishing the human spirit of the American electorate and even the whole world. Sometimes in life, it is the presence of a profound wrong that serves to ignite the “better angels,” to quote Lincoln from his second inaugural address, of our collective soul. Lincoln’s reference came in the darkest hours of the bloody Civil War as an aspirational affirmation to us all that we can, and must, do better.
Now, the same sentiment almost naturally endowed the Democratic National Convention last week with an almost spiritual hue. It was all about uplifting our humanity, to have it carried off by “better angels” to a better tomorrow. Faced with the crass banality and creepy indulgences of Trump for eight long and enormously distasteful years, the human spirit cries out not for blood and revenge, but for a loftier sense of self and purpose.
In this dizzying universe, where the daily discoveries of the Webb telescope these days about deepest space, black holes and quantum entanglement confront us with the challenge to find our significance and importance, we are confronted with a culture that wants to exploit our doubts and fears with fantastic images of a dystopian future, of extraterrestrial civilizations of cruelty and indifference, and a sense that the “Greed is Good” mantra should be emblazoned on our currency. Such sentiments have been around all along, but were given a huge boost by the fascists and plutocrats who rallied in the aftermath of the 1960s assassinations of our great leaders for constructive change in that seminal decade – JFK, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy and Malcolm X – with a massive anarcho-hedonist counter-revolution in the 1970s that held high the slogan, “Do It, 100 Years from Now, No one Will Know the Difference.” Strides in the women’s movement were met with by flooding the culture with debasing pornography exploiting the images and bodies of women, and the emerging Gay Liberation movement was steered in a similar direction, while flooding the ghettos and campuses with drugs and inward turned riots and violence was the fascists and plutocrats’ remedy against the efforts at a better and more equitable society in that decade. That was the era, the time and place, that spawned Trump.
The nihilism, cynicism and socially-condoned individual and collective selfishness of that sad era (the term, the “Me Decade” was coined then) set loose the scions of corporate greed and their counterparts in the pulpits of so-called “evangelical” churches and elsewhere to offer the public shallow fixes of “sex, drugs and rock and roll” on the one hand, and a phony religious selfish egotism on the other.
As a society, we did not know what hit us. Only now, building on the gains of Obama, Hillary Clinton and Biden, are we beginning to recover.
