“Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came“ was a 1970 film starring Tony Curtis, Ernest Borgnine, and Don Ameche, among others.
“Two Gunslingers” — a song released 21 years later by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers — revisits the topic:
“Two gunslingers walked out in the street and one said
‘I don’t want to fight no more’
And the other gunslinger thought about it and said
‘Yeah, what are we fighting for?’”
The purpose of warfare should preoccupy everyone amidst the culture wars roiling America: What would happen if citizens refused to participate, analyzing the cost of ceaseless antagonism towards compatriots — asking who advances with increasing polarization.
Political candidates, their parties and their strategists enable all-consuming Kulturkampf (which is the German word for “culture war” — subsequent, similar conflicts finding foundation in 1870s Deutschland). It is questionable whether people benefit from the notion that neighbors and former friends pose greater threat to our collective security than do China, North Korea, and Russian and Arab oligarchs.
The political class followed purveyors of news stories into an abyss known as action news — nonevents that those knowledgeable of television situation comedies recognize within the theme song from “Car. 54, Where Are You?”:
“There’s a holdup in the Bronx,
Brooklyn’s broken out in fights.
There’s a traffic jam in Harlem
That’s backed up to Jackson Heights.
There’s a scout troop short a child,
Khrushchev’s due at Idlewild
Car 54, Where Are You?”
Traffic jams and missing children eclipse essential issues constituting well-being significantly more than what is found at newstime. Cultural war trivialities are treated as arising to greater importance than war and peace, prosperity, hunger, homelessness, inflation, et cetera.
The imbalance shall continue as long as the electorate oxygenates a raging conflagration: If the American people notify the political class and Fourth Estate that “[We] don’t want to fight” and, “notwithstanding your declaration of war, we won’t engage in combat”, it would terminate the social disunity and dysfunction devastating the commonwealth: Ignominious public officials cannot be reelected if constituents penalize public figures feeding incivility and appealing to demagoguery. News media prioritizing advertising space sales over news fit to print cannot endure creating content to which viewers and readers turn blind eyes; opting for outlets optimizing objectivity and substance.
Presently, we embody Pogo cartoonist Walt Kelly’s insight, coined for Earth Day 1970, “We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us”: The Manichaean quagmire (namely, the reduction into a duality of good or evil — of black and white) that Americans inhabit derives from adulation for individuals desiring divisiveness. Unless the populace refuses to respect the dysfunction undermining the nation, we will remain enmeshed in toxic self-destruction as pathological as the addiction of alcoholics, hard drug users, gamblers, and their ilk — those for whom twelve-step programs exist, attempting to enable an end to self-abuse. We reward behavior which is hardly in people’s best interest, encouraging purveyors of evil — bad actors no less reprehensible than such fictional characters as Mephistopheles in the legend of Dr. Faust, Mack the Knife in Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s “The Threepenny Opera”, and Sportin’ Life in George and Ira Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess”.
If a race to the bottom is preferred, by all means, propagate it. If auspicious futures are desired, Americans must demand that a higher road be travelled.
Jay Wiener is a Northsider
"Opinion" - Google News
June 18, 2022 at 09:02PM
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Opinion: America must demand better - Northside Sun
"Opinion" - Google News
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