(5:51 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Further Critical Observations on Contemporary Culture

• The monastic movement can only survive in the modern world by becoming a tourist attraction, where people come away with wonderful souvenirs of inner peace and joy. This would naturally lead to a reform within the movement itself that would make it more realistic and sustainable in the long term: the replacement of full-time monks and nuns who have committed for life with part-time, casual monks and nuns who come and go from monastery to monastery. In the Catholic Church, the priesthood has already adopted this model out of necessity (i.e., priests travelling from parish to parish in order to meet immediate needs on an ad hoc basis). Monasteries would do well to read the signs of the times and move forward on their own terms, rather than having change forced upon them, as it will be in any case.
  
  
• One might hope that Republicanism will be discredited, if not by the time of the 2004 elections, then certainly after another term of George W. Bush's somewhat reckless approach to governance. Although gerrymandering may well ensure a consistent Republican advantage in the House of Representatives, it is still possible that the Bush presidency would convince some to leave the party and render gerrymandering irrelevant. The true danger may well be a Democratic Party that, far from having lost its soul, never had a soul to begin with, and presents itself as a common-sensical alternative to Republican excess. In the political situation as presently constituted, I cannot see any room for genuine imagination. We have only two choices:
  
  
  1. A Return to the Cold War: The focus is on catastrophic, long-shot threats, and the enemy is demonized to the point that substantive criticism of the present order is effectively ruled out from the start. Moral clarity is equated with a certain ideological blindness, and the word "national defense" is used to paper over the fact that the primary function of the military is in fact to subdue other nations, which pose no credible, sustained threat to the American mainland.
     
  2. A Return to Clintonism: Let us not forget that Bill Clinton was even more warlike than George W. Bush is feared to be, and also let us not forget that the Democratic Party fully endorsed the use of force against yet another small nation whose "threat" to America was laughable at best, WMDs or not. Is Clintonism finally anything other than the old Cold War logic, delivered with more finesse due to Bill Clinton's clear intellectual and oratorical superiority to George W. Bush? Is Ronald Reagan not the true horizon of American political discourse, whether right-wing or "left-wing"? (Though "both options are worse," I doubt that very many can adequately formulate a program that would go beyond mere Clintonism, viewing the Democratic Party as the savior of our comfortable lifestyle, which is ultimately what Bush's incompetent policies threaten.)
  
  
  
• The war against cigarettes is a red herring -- logic would dictate that rather than focus on long-shot risks of cancer from second-hand smoke (well over 90% of those who contract lung cancer are themselves smokers), an initiative that truly sought greater health for society as a whole would seek to reduce the number of automobiles in use, which daily cause substantially more deaths than smoking could ever dream of causing. The closest we get is the (necessary and proper) campaign against drunk driving, which itself represents a red herring to a certain extent. The focus on long-shot catastrophic losses, above identified as "Cold War logic," is the foundation for our entire political discourse, in which we are supposed to believe that our primary concern should be cutting taxes on the extremely wealthy, in order to prevent the possibility that the government will take from me millions of dollars (when I, too become extremely wealthy). The American flag should, by all rights, be an image of a lottery ticket.

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