OF A GOLDEN AGE

The American identity today is more complex than ever before. Our populace becomes both more evangelically Christian and more liberal, creating a polarized national climate that is stressful to even casual participants.

I hate this.

It deeply saddens me that the first female Republican vice presidential candidate is serving as a token for her small-town folksiness and extreme social-conservative values. I’ve accepted that John McCain would say anything at this point, even though he was always the voice of Moderate reason to the Bush administration. I even choked down the smarmasaurus speeches of Mike Huckabee and Rudy Giuliani in an attempt to hear their side, though my interest waned when Huckabee harped on how Sarah Palin and McCain both believe life begins at conception.

There is a distinctly urban-versus-rural flavor to this election that makes me deeply uncomfortable. Small-town America is not a romantic notion any more than “the Big City” is. My experience, and those of most young people I know from small towns, was overwhelmingly negative and alienating. If a town’s size allows everyone to know and pursue everyone else’s business, this is never, ever a selling point, nor should it be for a classical conservative: small government, less interference, more privacy. On the other hand, cities don’t have any inherent advantages besides more revenue in one place and more carry-out restaurants. Having spent big portions of my life in many environs (suburbia, a town of 4,000, a city of 35,000, and now Chicago), I don’t like the idea of a potential President who spouts on God’s will and believes in abstinence-only education. Frankly, we’ve had enough of that.

Anyway, diatribes aside, this election is getting me pretty hot under the collar, and at least abstractly I appreciate that it’s doing the same to the rest of America. If everyone is fired up about politics, participating in the process, arguing about it on their smoke breaks, heck yes. This, underneath any specific situation, is the beautiful American system that I truly love.

Of course, that doesn’t mean Lee Greenwood’s song, this entry’s title, is any less embarrassing.

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