Musings
I teach a university course in Religion and Popular Culture in which I use materials and texts that document and illuminate that ambiguous phenomenon called "The American Dream". We trace the course of the messianic impulse in US ideology from Coton Mather's "City Set Upon a Hill" to Ronald Reagan's speeches about the unique sacredness of American expenditures of Blood and Treasure.
This Election Campaign has given the world a great deal of American dreaming. Obama's candidacy both echoes the emancipatory impulse of Dr ML King and relies on the hyper-inflated Ad-Agency verities of the slogan, the gesture, and The Brand. What are Canadian progressives to make of the campaign of The Urgency of "Now", "Hope", and "Change"? I believe a cultural history of Canada indicates that we are easily a less "belieful" people than our neighbours to the south. Even in the babysteps of their meta-narrative, Americans had the enthusiast Puritan dream of a Theocracy on their soil, they have experienced a much stronger and more unnuanced celebration of Boosterism, Babbitry,and The Power of Positive Thinking. In listening to our Vet fathers and grandfathers on the topic of America we were told that Americans "wear their hearts on their sleeves" and that we must try to escape when they begin to tell us how they won WW 1 and II. Canadians, used to a parliamentary system, snicker at Prime Ministers. We know these characters are mere politicians. But Americans have an imperial president who is head of state and one sometimes hear Americans semi-religious claims about "my President". Such claims have driven their republican democracy towards imperialism and war.
I think the Obama candidacy resembles the canadian 67-68 spirit of Trudeaumania. I must confess to disliking Trudeau politics but more than that I disliked the near-hysteria and intellectual capitulation of the canadian chattering class before Trudeau. It was not just his Bill of Rights that further individualized or rather de-collectivized Canada, we were further assimilated by Trudeau's popularization and vain celebration of the cult of the Celebrity-politician. (Tommy Douglas and Robert Stanfield were laughed at as old un-photogenic relics of pre-modernity. )
The positive, redemptive side of The American Dream also exists. Langston Hughes' democratic, socialist soul extolled this dream in his great poems, Martin Kuther King exploited the democratic core of the American vision in his leadership of the Civil Rights Movement. And if one wants to go back to intellectual roots we could all benefit from reading Tom Paine once again. The question to the Obama phenomenon is then: which Hope and what Change does your campaign tilt toward? Are we seeing the rise of a new clustering of left social movements that can push a centre-left President to bring significant internal and international progress to the forefront? Or are we witnessing the collapse of a legitimate rectitude about politicians and the rise of a very ambitious man who has spent his adult life observing, adopting, and co-opting the accents, politics, and aspirations of the oppressed? I am puzzled by Obama, I am sorry to admit I expected his maneuvering on Surveillance, on the Death Penalty, on Israel/Palestine and on Corporate Finance, to be pure Pax Americana vintage Civil Religion. After all people who aspire to become the Imperial President overseeing the 800 foreign bases defending "US national interests" do not aspire to the very different job of becoming leader of the left-movements in and around the Democratic Party.
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