War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars …
As a guide to the late twentieth century culture wars, Hartman is unrivalled. War for the Soul of America features incisive portraits of individual players in the culture wars dramas, ranging from legal scholar Robert Bork and Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, to dissident feminist Camille Paglia and artist Andres Serrano of Piss Christ fame; cogent discussions of the culture wars' major texts, including The Closing of the American Mind (Allan Bloom, 1987), Gender Trouble (Judith Butler, 1990) and The Bell Curve (Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, 1994); and revealing presentations of the signal culture wars controversies, including the 1985 porn rock congressional hearings spurred on by Tipper Gore, the heady controversy about changes to Stanford Universitys Western Civilization curriculum (students marched and chanted, Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western cultures got to go), and the early 1990s dust up about the Smithsonian Air and Space Museums allegedly offensive-to-veterans curating plans for the display of the Enola Gay Hiroshima bomber plane. If you lived through the 80s and 90s and paid attention to the news (or were anywhere near a college campus), reading Hartman sometimes feels like debriefing with friends after a raucous night out, an experience punctuated by laughter, head-scratching, and moments of regret for the excesses involved.
There are no more genuine culture wars firestorms like those outlined above today, according to Hartman, only passing flare-ups that are more farcical than poignant. By the turn of the twenty-first century, Hartman says, memories of an Ozzie and Harriet normative America had faded. A growing majority of Americans now accept and even embrace the cultural change wrought by the 60s. This argument is attractive, especially if you lean left. New peoplesblacks and other racial minorities, immigrants from strange lands, Catholics, Jews and other non-Christians, atheists, women, gays, lesbians, the disabledlaid claim to the nation, met with fierce resistance but eventually triumphed. The culture fractured but was then reconstituted into a more diverse and inclusive whole.
This explanation is neat but ultimately unsatisfying. In asserting that the culture wars were a temporary adjustment period, Hartman overlooks the extent to which they have been institutionalized into the very fabric of American society. Fox News, for example, has provided a non-stop, 24-hour televised arena for the culture wars ever since 1996. (MSNBC, on the Left, serves a similar, if less influential and pugnacious, function.) Take note also of our political primary system, in which the extremes of both parties have an outsize role in selecting candidates and shaping political platforms. Hartman points to changing attitudes about homosexuality to support his contention that the culture wars are finished. Homophobia is on the wane and public support for gay marriage is up, dramatically so. Hartman is undeniably right that homosexuality is no longer such a divisive subject in our national conversations but it is worth making a distinction between culture wars issues that may be blunted and others that will always be sharp.
Most important of all, arguably, are the controversies that linger in public education. We have a radically decentralized educational system, as historian David Labaree has pointed out, with some 14,000 individual school districts interacting with the local, state, and federal governments. Under these conditions, the capacity for passionate disagreement about what to teach the 50 million children and adolescents enrolled in public school is enormous. As I write, the Louisiana Senate Education Committee is considering the repeal of the 2008 Louisiana Science Education Act signed by Governor Bobby Jindal, which gives cover to teach intelligent design [and] creationism. Jindal, who majored in biology at Brown University, said, I don't want any facts or theories or explanations to be withheld from [students] because of political correctness. Last week, aftermonths of rancorous debate,the Acalanes Union High School District school board in Lafayette, California, reaffirmed its commitment to working with Planned Parenthood educators to deliver its high school sex education curriculum. The school board was not swayed by the arguments made by the NOISE (No to Irresponsible Sex Education) Coalition that Planned Parenthood is a business that sells sex. Two months ago, the Oklahoma legislature introduced a bill that would ban funding for AP U.S. History courses in light of the College Boards new curriculum guidelines. The bills author, Republican Representative Dan Fisher, said the redesigned framework emphasized what is bad about America, while neglecting American exceptionalism. Schools are much more than conveyor belts for academic contentthey are also critical sites for the transmission of beliefs and values from one generation to the next. Curriculum disputes in the culture wars idiom are not going away anytime soon.
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War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars ...