SATURDAY: Does the American project "belong to the ages?"

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2024

On balance, is Marc Thiessen right? This very morning, at 6 o'clock, there we sat, watching the first hour of the "cable news" program, Fox & Friends Weekend.

The three regular friends were all present. We'd say that two are "true believers." On balance, we wouldn't grant Cain that excuse.

Fox & Friends Weekend, regular co-hosts
Rachel Campos-Duffy: At age 52, true believer by way of a form of conservative Catholicism. 
Pete Hegseth: At age 44, true believer by way of a meritorious Army National Guard career.
Will Cain: At age 49, too smart to be fully sincere about the various presentations with which he plays along. Or at least, so it seems here.

Those would be our assessments of the personnel. 

Concerning the program itself, it's a fairly obvious propaganda program. It seems to have been designed to advance corporate messaging and to enhance corporate profits by dint of the way it panders to the preconceptions of a tribal audience.

In yesterday morning's report, we showed you some of the pseudo-journalism which emanates from this Potemkin news program. This morning, as we watched the friends, a famous statement kept coming to mind:

Now he belongs to the ages.

Apparently, so said Secretary Stanton as he stood at the deathbed of President Lincoln. In the contemporary context, is the American experiment on the verge of "belonging to the ages?" It is possible that we've moved down a long, winding road to a location "now too much for us"--to a place from which there will be no coming back?

In the coming week, we'll explore some of the ways our own nation, such as it was, has been transformed into two warring tribes. Along the way in the past dozen years, we're quoted statements by three major anthropologists describing the muddle we're in.

More than a decade ago, we started with Norman O. Brown, who made this opaque statement as part of a Phi Beta Kappa Address way back in May 1960. As the great professor spoke, Candidates Kennedy and Nixon were out there on the trail:

BROWN (5/31/60): I sometimes think I see that societies originate in the discovery of some secret, some mystery; and expand with the progressive publication of their secret; and end in exhaustion when there is no longer any secret, when the mystery has been divulged, that is to say profaned...

And so there comes a time—I believe we are in such a time—when civilization has to be renewed by the discovery of some new mysteries, by the undemocratic but sovereign power of the imagination, by the undemocratic power which makes poets the unacknowledged legislators of all mankind, the power which makes all things new.

We have no idea what he was talking about, and neither did anyone else. That said, Brown seemed to think, even then, that some essential "secret" at the heart of the American experiment was being profaned in such a way that our society was destined to end in exhaustion.

As can be seen in this lengthy New York Times obituary, Brown was very hot at the time. He's almost never mentioned today. At roughly that same time, Professor Brabender was describing another part of the process to which we the American humans have succumbed in this day:

Where I come from, we only talk so long. After that, we start to hit.

We only talk so long! That was Professor Brabender's telling observation about the highly imperfect wiring with which us the humans are saddled. 

Decades earlier, Edward Cummings, in a bitterly caustic poem, had described key parts of the process out of which our contemporary propaganda programming has emerged. We often think of these scientific observations when we watch today' "cable news" shows:

Humanity I Love You

Humanity i love you
because you would rather black the boots of
success than enquire whose soul dangles from his
watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both

parties and because you
unflinchingly applaud all
songs containing the words country home and
mother when sung at the old howard

Humanity i love you because
when you’re hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink and when
you’re flush pride keeps

you from the pawn shop and
because you are continually committing
nuisances but more
especially in your own house

Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it’s there and sitting down

on it

The professor's observations were offered in the form of a caustic anti-war poem, which continues on briefly from there. 

Small world! At the time, our own father was already working at the Old Howard, the vaudeville house where Cummings later said he heard the favorite joke which inspired his unconventional approach to poetry.

(John Wilkes Booth had played an earlier version of the Howard, though that was well before our father's time. In his autobiography, Harpo Speaks, Harpo Marx said he got his first unintentional laugh while on stage at the Howard, during our father's tenure.)

Professor Cummings was angry. In this analysis, he prophetically described some of the human behaviors which have brought us to the present state of affairs. Most notably, the great observer of us the humans said this about the basic wiring with which we seem to be saddled:

you would rather black the boots of success than enquire whose soul dangles from his watch-chain 

To some extent, so it seems to go on programs like Fox & Friends Weekend. So too on the weekday properties of that propaganda franchise, Fox & Friends First and Fox & Friends, whose performers have been churning the agitprop since 1998

Meanwhile, how about this observation?

you are perpetually putting the secret of life in your pants and forgetting it’s there

That may explain why high-end news orgs like the New York Times agree that this destructive pseudo-journalistic behavior must never be reported or discussed.

On those Fox News Channel programs, the various collections of friends churn the mandated propaganda. The fuller secrets of life are routinely "placed in their pants."

Red America's TV viewers are asked to hear only a carefully culled selection of the world's basic facts. In fairness, similar conduct can often be observed within the "cable news" TV shows aimed at our own Blue America.

As November 5 approaches, a basic question exists. Few of us in Blue America ever ask questions like this in a serious way:

How in the world did we get to this place? Is it possible that there's something different we could have done—those of us over here in our tribe?

In our view, Blue America's role in the present decline began in the mid-1960s. For today, we'll restrict ourselves to a tease concerning a recent dispute. 

For the record, Candidate Trump has made a million disordered remarks. Yesterday afternoon, we showed you his latest Truth Social post, in which he erupted again.

That said, we the humans seem to be wired in a fairly obvious way:

We prefer to tell the simplest possible story as we drive our tribal narratives forward. With that in mind, we're going to suggest that Marc Thiessen may have a basic point pretty much right in his new column for the Washington Post.

(On balance, he may also have it pretty much wrong.)

Tomorrow, we'll show you what we mean. When we do, we'll include a new, basic point about What Candidate Trump Is Widely Said To Have Said. 

This point had never occurred to us until the past few days. Also, we've seen no evidence that it ever occurred to anyone else.

Donald J. Trump gets it wrong all the time. At this site, we've long assumed that he's (clinically) disordered in a destructive way.

That said, does our side ever get anything wrong? Are we mere humans too?

In the larger sense, is the American project on the verge of "belonging to the ages?" How did we ever get to this place? Was there anything we could have done?

Three anthropologists tried to inform us.  We'll suggest that it didn't quite work.

Tomorrow: Thiessen speaks