Columnist Joe Klein gives the latest round of the culture wars a look over, in Time magazine . This piece from the New York Times' Sunday Week in Review does the same. Both reference Mel Gibson's bloody "Passion of the Christ" and the Superbowl half-time show's sexual crudity, along with gay marriage, as the latest touchstones of cultural discord. Gibson's film, which has both anti-Semitic and homophobic overtones, is a religious-right wet dream, from what I hear (haven't, and won't, see it). I'd say, it's the theology of Sissy Spacek's mother in "Carrie." (Here's Christopher Hitchens' take, from Slate.) But the Superbowl antics gave the country a taste of the culture left's sexual infantilism, and provoked an understandable backlash that's aided the anti-gay marriage cause (since both get lumped together as manifestations of threatening sexual anarchy).
The polarization really is stunning, but we should recall that times of harmony in the U.S. have been few and far between. From the revolution to the civil war to the sufferage, prohibition, abortion and civil rights struggles, polarization has been a long-standing theme, as the dialectics between greater liberty/equality and preserving tradition/social cohesion play themselves out. What could be more American?
Taking Count.
Oxblog finds at least 44 U.S. senators are opposed to the
anti-marriage amendment, leaving the amendment's supporters far shy
of the two-thirds needed. No time for complacency, but certainly a
good sign.