Duke Divinity Call & Response Blog

Jacob Weisberg's article highlights the inconsistencies in the public mood that may have had their finest hour this past summer when an irate taxpayer shouted in a public forum that he preferred the government keep its hands off of Medicare. A Darwinian analysis of the current situation would suggest that congress, in its own dysfunction, has evolved merely to fit its environment. A more helpful analysis might begin with conventional historiography. Matthew Brady brought the horrors of the Civil War home to American parlors by publishing his bloody photographs, shot on the battlefields. It is arguable that, from the 1860's to the 1960's, Americans grasped that to approve of war and to engage in bellicose rhetoric were costly: one's own children could be sent off to die for The Cause. The War in Iraq, though, negated that equation. Now it was possible to fulminate from the sidelines, wave the flag and encourage hostilities, safe in the knowledge that one's own clan was secure: others' children would go and die. This severed rhetoric from responsibility, arguably paving the way for a Senator's sensing no impropriety in paralyzing government until a bit of federal funding descends upon his home state. Ironically, the Enlightenment ideal of freedom of speech may eventually lead to the decay of democracy. When speech no longer carries with it any responsibility for the public good or to posterity (the latter figuring prominently in the foundation documents on the United States), chaos will likely evolve.