Temperence

Mark Noll in his "History of Christianity in the United States and Canada" defines temperance as "liberation from the bondage of drink.” In several places he implies that the spread of religion in the 2nd Great Awakening is beneficial. He attributes this spread to successful missionary work, and the success of the Methodism in particular to it's spiritual accuracy. In general, Noll shows a bias towards religion.


Why do I associate a fear of alcohol with a religious attitude? Religions frequently include alcohol on their list of forbiddens. I may have been calling on my Puritan stereotype of portraying pleasures as sins, and thinking of my high school classmate whose Mormonism prevented her from watching R-rated movies.

Erik On Democracy

Technically, in a democracy every issue is a referendum. Officials are few and with limited power. Whitman has suggested that a political system is a merely a prerequisite for democracy, and that in a democracy literature is simple and cheery. Viewing democracy as a social condition instead of a political system is preferable for AmCon, since America is a republic and not a democracy. However, Whitman’s particular variation of this idea is improbable self serving. By proclaiming literature as the most significant art form, he inflates himself to the herald of an age of literary giants. That golden age never came; Whitman himself started writing more nuanced works after the war, including  a great deal of all the evils he say should never be mentioned in great literature. The US only became THE world leader after the cold war, that only lasted a few short decades. Our main cultural exports were movies and music—British books are at least as popular is American ones, even here in the US.

Speaking of Britain, Whitman seems to think that the only democratic nation is the US. Surely he had read the Magna Carta and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. It is nowadays found all over the world, spread as much by European democracies colonizing as by the US.

In this cultural democracy, democracies and republics are interchangeable. Though we usually vote for representatives, similar assumptions underlie both systems. Each vote is equal. Everybody in the relevant group gets to vote. Whichever person or decision gets the most votes wins. Take the process of electing a president as an example. The vote of someone from Wyoming counts for a lot more than of someone from California. However, each voter in a district of California has equal power to elect a representative. Thus the present system seems fair enough, and it hasn’t yet been changed.                      

It is impossible to escape the assumptions of the society we are born in, and democracy is embedded in every American. The Nobel Peace Prize this year went to a Chinese dissenter, Liu Xiaobo. As westerners with democratic ideals, the prize committee sympathized with the dissenter. The Chinese government, understandably, felt that giving Liu Xiaobo the prize made no sense whatsoever. How could a peace prize go to someone who was undermining progress in a perfectly peaceable country? At worst, democracy clouds our judgment and prevents us from seeing that there are other ways.

I mentioned this story in class already, but this time I’d like to highlight a different aspect of it. Pinochet offered a referendum on whether or not he should stay in power. The democratic culture in Chile was able to peacefully remove a violent dictator with military support from the US. Because we absorb democracy as children, everyone agrees on the gist of it, if not the details. Even Pinochet believed that if the majority was against him, he must be doing something wrong. The best aspect is that it provides a convention on how to decide things without conflict.

This way of deciding applies just as much to everyday life as to brand political movements. When my friends and I are debating what kind of pizza to buy, we usually take a vote. Because we all believe it’s best way to decide things, we rarely challenge the results. The Board of Regents elects the president of St. Olaf, and many day-to-day decisions are made by committees of faculty members who discuss and then vote on issues. Shareholders vote on the board of directors for a company, who elect the chief-whatevers-officers who actually run the company.

Lincoln's Interpretation of Democracy

Lincoln sees himself as continuing the democratic ideals of the founding fathers, as do our current presidents and politicians. The interpretation of those ideas has evolved significantly over time and varies greatly from person to person. If "all men are created equal," does "men" include women? Does "equal" mean equal incomes? Equal votes? Marx values economic equality; libertarians value equal rights. Even though so many claim to follow the same basic ideas, wars have been fought over how shape the ideals into a political system.

Moderation

 "When America didn’t exist men and women were compelled to invent it, BECAUSE MANKIND CANNOT EXIST WITHOUT FREEDOM AND STILL BE FULLY HUMAN."

So reads the tea party declaration of independence (by "admin;" at http://countyroots.com/policynotparty/). Of all the views expressed in the declaration, many are too extreme to be taken seriously. For instance, the sentence above implies that no one was human until 1776. It begs the question: why have Homo Sapiens lived for so many millenia, and not been compelled to invent America until so recently?

"Men and women where compelled to invent America because they could not exist without freedom." This rephrasing is moderate and hard to refute. If "admin" had applied a similar treatment to the whole document, it would be more believable and powerful.

Facts

Writes Howard Zinn in A People's History of the United States:  "Ruling elites seem to have learned through generations--consciously or not--that war makes them more secure against internal trouble" (79).

Take the cold war as an example: McCarthy and other leaders of the red scare created rabid anti-communism, impairing the ability of unions the strike and reinforcing class distinctions. Walt Disney's fear of socialism certainly contributed to his "I will not negotiate with reds" attitude toward the strikers at his animation studios. Like many facts in Zinn, this is depressing but true. Johnson always glorifies the mythical figures in history, probably leaving readers all warm and patrotic inside. That comparison reminded of a quote from my statistics teacher, Anthony Becker,

"Facts make you cynical," which reminded of a quote from Stephen Lucas:

"In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it [the word "fact"] was used most frequently to denote an evil deed or a crime" (The Stylistic Artistry of the Declaration of Independence).

Reading Zinn, it sometimes seems like most historical facts really are evil deeds or crimes.

Chuckles

Writes Jim Cullen on pg 35 of The American Dream:

"The Puritans remain vivid precisely because they're so irritating."

The Puritans are the antithesis of our modern society, full of negative freedom. Cullen's amusing remark animates this point.

Tea Time Tenty Ten

 

Just as we were discussing Tea Parties in class, I received an invitation to one! Alas, going all the way back to Washington is a tad far for a tea party, but I would like to point out who is drinking tea and why.

The Tea Party was coordinated Sophia Trinh--Environmental representative to the ASG of Bellevue College. Besides drinking fair trade tea (out of your own cup and not a disposable one), partiers can eat cupcakes and swap clothes (a form of recycling). The values of these tea partiers extend beyond the environment to social justice--consider that fair trade has nothing to do with the environment. They hold stereotypical liberal values-, such as environmental and social justice.

Why tea? Why not coffee, or hot chocolate? For seem reason, stereotypical liberals hold a fascination with ancient China. Yoga, Buddhism, meditation, and tea all wrapped up in this. The particular brand of tea that is at the tea party--Tazo--has tidbits of ancient Chinese wisdom under the bottle caps, and the back of the labels have jokes about Buddhism, meditation, monks and tea. The colonists drank tea to show class, among many other reasons. In this case, everyone can afford tea. Tea is a symbol of a value system shared by people who are friends with the Environmental Representative.