c. 1998 Religion News Service
(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.)
UNDATED _ I sometimes get angry at those smug Europeans, especially the French, who think Americans are savage and uncivilized. After all, we saved those folks from two of the most uncivilized systems _ Nazism and communism _ the 20th century has experienced, but we’ve received precious little thanks for the effort.
More recently, however, I have begun to think they may have a point.
Consider this diverse litany of issues and trends marking contemporary American life:
_ The death penalty. We are the only country in the civilized world that still has capital punishment. That’s bad enough, but a lot of us seem to enjoy seeing men and women put to death, especially if we’re from Texas, where the custom is to dispose of one every week or so. Next, we’ll probably have live TV coverage of executions.
_ Movies. I don’t hold with those European intellectuals, including the pope, who equate American culture with the films we export. But consider the two top films of the year _”Titanic”and”L.A. Confidential.”The former is a ghoulish exercise in voyeurism in which we watch 1,500 people die horrible deaths. The latter is the most disgustingly gruesome film I have ever seen, an ugly mess justified because it is”film noir,”whatever that means.
_ Education. Excluding the oil sheikdoms, we are the richest country in the world and spend more money on education than anyone else. Yet we are content with an educational system that produces young men and women whose science and math scores are inferior to those in many Third World nations. Moreover, the power of the public school ideology, of the teachers’ unions, and of the fear of damaging a kid’s self image seem to prevent us from doing anything about it. Is it civilized to be content with such abysmal education?
_ The power of prosecutors. We have become the laughingstock of the world as a prosecutor who was supposed to investigate a decade-old real estate scandal probes the private sex life of a sitting president. Yet Judge Starr _ a Texan be it noted _ called it”standard prosecutorial practice”when his legal thugs browbeat Monica Lewinsky’s mother for most of a day. And he’s right. That sort of thing happens every day in the federal courts. A U.S. attorney once told me prosecutors could indict any businessman on in Chicago and even if they couldn’t get a conviction, they could bankrupt and ruin the reputation of the target. This is civilized?
_ Sports Utility Vehicles, a.k.a. trucks for suburban matrons. These behemoths are a danger to their drivers and even more dangerous to those who happen to get in their way. They are killing machines, not quite cruise missiles perhaps, but in crowded traffic not much different from a tank. They are justified by the argument that aforementioned suburban matrons need a truck to carry around all their children’s stuff. Is not the proper question why the kids need so much stuff?
_ Immigrants. We are a nation of immigrants but by what kind of morality do we justify our antipathy to them. Gov. Pete Wilson of California was re-elected in La-La Land by using Latinos as scapegoats for the state’s problems. In fact, Latino Americans are hard-working, family people, with strong community ties and deep religious faith. They are not an instance of minority pathology and should not be treated as such by either the right or the left.
_ Iraq. A very large number of our citizens, especially those who currently dominate Congress, are unhappy we have not bombed Iraq back into the Stone Age. They want us to”take out”Saddam Hussein without American casualties but with little regard for how many tens of thousands of Iraqi we kill.
Most of these examples of American incivility represent a disregard for human life and human freedom, those precious characteristics that distinguish a savage people from the humane. Not only are the barbarians at the gates, they are all around us.
DEA END GREELEY
