The real split in our culture

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.