(from Fuel For Thought, 2004)
Moral Values and
Cancer (November 3, 2004)
At 3:30 a.m. today I tuned to CNN and listened to Bill
Schneider reporting on exit polls, his effort to explain how the exit polls
could have got it so wrong about Kerry’s presumed success earlier on Tuesday. He said people kept talking about “moral
values, moral values, moral values” one after the other. And in today’s NY Times, Nicholas Kristof
reminds me that one third of Americans are evangelical Christians (98 million
white-robed souls), and that they feel “Democrats are contemptuous of their
faith”.
I became so frustrated I googled “moral values” to see if I
could find some way to understand why I could be feeling so alienated. As I scrolled down, I spotted a reference to
Tennessee Williams. I’ve always felt
that Southern writers/artists have had a good fix on the hypocrisy in our
culture (Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor also pop up, especially O’Connor’s “A
Good Man Is Hard to Find” and “Good Country People”—check them out to
experience the blindness of those who will not see.). Williams’ genius, of course, has been shunned
by our homophobic culture, so his cultural observations have lacked serious
considerations, because the red states (see last paragraph) regard him, I
suppose, as an elitist.
Anyway, in his study of Williams, “’Certain Moral Values’: A
Rhetoric of Outcasts in the Plays of Tennessee Williams” Darryl Erwin Haley
states, “The outcast characters in Tennessee Williams's major plays do not
suffer because of the actions or circumstances that make them outcast but
because of the destructive impact of conventional morality upon them… religious
outcasts, who are vehicles for the playwright's commentary on contemporary
Christianity.” And Williams, like Faulkner and O’Connor, fuses this naïve, evangelical
Christianity with the naïve vision of America as a culture of well-wishers and
engaged citizenry. They demonstrate what
we have been experiencing recently—the zealous frenzy of the 98 million
evangelical Christians thumping the message of God being at the core of the
land of the free and home of the brave is really a front for the land of the
spree and the home of the knave. They
are blind to the ground level, real time issues, because they are assured of
The Rapture. These are the people O’Connor
includes in the character of the grandmother whom The Misfit (serial killer)
refers to when he says, "She would of [sic] been a good woman if it had
been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."
The NY Times editorial writer says no matter who wins the
election (as of this writing, Kerry has not conceded) the country must pull
together. Is this possible? My ancestry in this country goes back to the
early 1700s, but I don’t feel that I belong here. I have never felt this alienated. My moral values have to do with civility and
the general welfare. I don’t see those
values being exercised by the majority of the people in my community nor in the
way this nation squanders its wealth on consumption. Everything I see is smiley faces, yellow
ribbons and get-the-hell-outta-my-way-and-the-devil-take-the-hindmost.
As I looked at the red and blue map of the voting results,
the map seemed to be bleeding internally.
As the youth vote that decided not to show up will discover as it ages,
the thing about internal bleeding is that when you find the blood in your
stool, it’s already too late. That’s the
insidious nature of colon cancer. The
symbolism here resonates for me. Beneath
America’s show of might and right, of preciousness and righteousness, we are
not mindful of our deteriorating cultural health.
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