Sam Smith – Lately I’ve come to think of America as
no longer divided politically by
liberals and conservatives but as a country split by the powerful and the weak,
the fun and the obsessive, the honest
and the deceptive and human and the egotistic. With a father who worked for
FDR and my own activism and media work, I have experienced America in the most recent third of its existence but,
right now, it seems so dramatically different than just a while back.
After all, presidents used to represent their party and
supporters more than their personal dysfunction. With Trump we face an unprecedented leader
who feels he can start a war that no one asked him for because of his power
rather than the concerns of his
constituency. I covered my first Washington story more than six decades ago and
have never seen our national politics so badly affected by a distorted
mentality.
Trying to figure out what is really happening has led me to
realize that the real institutional winner in all this has not been politics
but show business. Our culture as well as our politics has been increasingly
reflective of the growth of television, movies, and the Internet over
communities, civic associations, and values found in neighborhoods, churches and families.
One of the effects of this change has been the lessening of real
human interaction in favor of watching things and a change in the role of
citizens based more on what they like and less on who they are. Part of the cost of the rise of Donald Trump,
for example, is that for many he can become a role model above, say, their
mother or brother.
I have lived in cultural models of both the present and the
past. Washington DC was my home for decades until I finally
escaped full time to a small town in Maine. I now live where we don’t have Trump
like characters defining our lives and values. Instead, I rarely hear a lie and
we have five good candidates for governor, an overflow I have never seen
before.
Even Washington had different ways of living depending on
whether you were part of its power and prestige. Most of the country never
heard about this because their image of the city was dependent on media that
did not consider the culturally sound or decent to be worth covering.
In the case of Washington when I lived there, for example,
few in the rest of the nation knew that
the city was majority black and had culturally strong communities even with elected advisory neighborhood commissions.
I have long viewed important news as far beyond just money
and power, in part because as a teenager I took what was then one of only two
high school anthropology courses in the country. So influential this was, that
I went on to be one of about eight anthropology majors at Harvard. And to this
day the habits and values of news figures mean a lot to me. As well as the cultural effects on their
constituencies.
We need to rediscover our role in our communities, our
respect for decent others, caring for those in pain, and contempt for those whose
only real success has been achievement of status at the expense of others. We
need to rediscover our communities, our gatherings, unselfish values, and those
who share our interests.
As Donald Trump illustrates, even his selfish goals have not
made him happier or more at peace. Like other would-be dictators he is, in the
end, his own worst enemy.
