Glenn W. Smith

For years the American conservative movement pandered to a Christian Right they mocked in private to leverage election victories. Trust me, I heard plenty of Republican consultants and officeholders refer to them privately as “the crazies” in the ’80s and ’90s. Now the religious zealots are leading the GOP around by the nose.

So here comes “Culture Wars, The Sequel,”

If the government authorizes the denial of contraceptives to the employees of particular institutions, then it’s the government denying that health care, not the institutions. Wavering Democrats and Republicans, too, should stop and think about that. Acting overtly to deny certain health care benefits to a subset of American citizens is immoral. It’s also stupid.

We proudly consider ourselves children of the Enlightenment. But we are not so quick to recognize that other parent, the Inquisition. Any attempt to disown it, however, only makes it stronger and more dangerous.

When then-President Richard Nixon sat down at the piano on the stage of the Grand Old Opry in 1974, he was reinforcing a conservative, polemical wall of sound to help contain several decades of transformational popular music, from blues and jazz to rock & roll. Music was the last thing on his mind.

As part of his notorious race-based “southern strategy,” Nixon led the efforts of conservative elites to co-opt American country-western music. He got the idea from George Wallace’s 1968 campaign, which Wallace had filled with country stars like Hank Snow and Hank Williams Jr.

Alone in the walnut-paneled music room, his favorite of Fair Lane Mansion’s 56 rooms, automobile tycoon Henry Ford picks up one of his two Stradivarius violins. It is 1920 or so and Henry, cocooned in his woolen three-piece suit despite the summer heat, stretches his bow arm for a little elbow and shoulder room.

Henry plucks the A string uncertainly, then steps to the grand piano at the far end of the room and searches the keyboard for A. Counting forward on the white keys from Middle C – C, D, E, F, G, A – he pokes at the A, then plucks the A string of his violin again. His ear hears the same pitch. Unison, they call it, a good name for the sound of happy hands on his assembly line. He plucks the other strings and touches a couple of tuning pegs lightly, but doesn’t adjust them. Close enough.

We don’t see as much of the old New Year’s Baby as we used to. Remember how the covers of national magazines and editorial cartoonists used to show that happy little cherub entering the world as grumpy old Father Time left town with the worn-out year gone by?

I bet the Earth and all its critters love Christmas day. Not the religious part, particularly. But, with due respect for those of us who follow different paths, Christmas is pretty close to an international holiday. And that means as we emerge into the sun on Christmas day, the place is quieter than any other day of the year. You can almost hear the planet sigh.

I don’t think it takes much imagination to notice that our collective grasp of the real is not what it could be. If it were, the permafrost would not be thawing. “Grab this branch and never let go” is a consistent refrain in today’s public life. The last thing the powers want is a reinvigorated imaginative public bent on the re-enchantment of the world.

It’s a presidential primary as docu-comedy. Some talking jumping beans mount the debate stages and the talk shows and tell us, one after the other, that he or she must be out next president if the Republic is to be saved. Begging the question, from what exactly?

The horrors of the Penn State rape scandal should remind us of a truth too easily lost in this era of corporate personhood: institutions of all kinds and sizes are by their nature morally empty.

I suppose our culture’s general sexual ineptitude is one reason this fact is easier to see in instances of violent brutality involving organs of sex. But ugly institutional moral failures of many kinds happen all around us every hour, every day.