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Boilerplate and sounding brass, cont.
For all the high-flown verbiage about American purpose in Boilerplate’s inaugural speech, there was no America to be discerned or felt in it. In the fashion that was developed to a high art at Commentary magazine in the 1980s and ’90s, Boilerplate constantly referred to, praised, and lauded America, claiming for America the leading role in the world as the agent of freedom, and this would appeal to patriotic sentiments. But it all fell flat, because this America is not America the people, America the country, America from sea to shining sea. It’s America the global ideological mission.
There’s such an emptiness in this view of America, a tinny, hollow quality. The more ambitiously ideological our politics become, the more soulless they become. Email entry |