Yankee Girl Gone Wild, Democratic

Not every country is such a hot mess as is the United States of America. Our outward-facing point of pride in the world is democracy, yet the GOP still has representatives like Scott Brown in blue Massachusetts, able to knock out the Democratic supermajority in congress. Republicans are de facto accepted as having the word on American values; who objects when someone holds up a pro-life poster next to an American flag? If they do object, it’s not as loudly as the voices protesting welfare, affirmative action and stem cell research.

Another messy point: democracy was first prevalent in the South, where Republicans now avidly denounce those slippery Democrats. The government is a tool to build up business, the industrial north said. People, in their ignorance, cannot be trusted to govern, it said. The North started out full of the same ideological stubbornness that now defines many red states’ voting. They leaned on intellectual status rather than active concern for the radically “Other” for social security.

How did New England become a place where no idea debuts without passing the scrutiny of hundreds of thousands of students and passionate autodidacts? Sounds like a shameless democracy. Sounds like we northerners let our wild ideas get in the way of our peaceful, boring decency.

I am deeply opposed to the possibility that thinking could be a source of moral decay. Thinking - that process of withdrawing from human events in order to procure ideals that may positively direct those human events - is one of my favorite activities. I am loathe to surrender my thoughts to belief without extracting proof first, and am disdainful of anger as a reaction to hardship. I don’t believe in losing my head in argument - that’s the quickest way to lose. When lonely, I would rather go to the library than talk to someone about it. Drawing moral boundaries feels like an intellectual cop-out. Sharing my feelings without reflecting on them first - sometimes I wonder if at that point they still are feelings - is the pathway to anarchy.

Therefore, the South - in its love of immediate gratification, its reactionary tendencies, its obsession with human stories in country music, the dysfunction of its cholesterol-filled arteries and its violence against those who cross social boundaries - is the face of America that terrifies me as a wild dog terrifies a housecat, or a football player a gaunt, traveling musician. It is the embodiment of the most negative experiences I have had, from being called cruel names for not flirting with a football player to being deaf to people whose ideals are unpopular. My Southern self chastises me for keeping a closed heart to social authority, and on the other hand drives me to guiltily cling to the authority of my native cultural smugness. I am comfortable with the kind of social authority that excludes the earnest. If there were any social authority in me aside from the pomp of fashionable thinking, I don't think I would recognize it.

Collaborative reason in government is that of which our country has to be most proud, but New England is not where I see it happening. Yes, democracy is thought about more here. We ask constantly: What is democracy? How is it structured? Is it possible under the current conditions in Massachusetts, New England, the United States, the world? Does it require moral sacrifice? Where is evangelism’s place in democracy? The media’s, education’s, the fine arts’, unions’, self-doubt’s, sex’s place? How should we use our money? Where should we place our attention as a world power with the ability to direct the development of “second and third world countries”? Have we made racial progress? What can science do for humanity now? What defines the human family? Why have we failed, failed, failed to be a force for good in the world?

With all of these problems to occupy a Bostonian's mind, it is easy to see people who bring their personal desires into community as unthinking caricatures. The label that speaks to me most immediately is that of the Southern Belle. Talk about a hot mess - feeding her vanity at every opportunity, demanding respect, making mistakes and then taking them back, breaking hearts without remorse as she discovers who she is in all of her "wild beauty."

Everything that gives a sensible industrial girl a headache. Everything that brings a Federalist to the point of bitter surrender in the cause for progress. Everything that undermines the values of hard work, pride-in-virtue, self-inquiry and having one’s ideological act together.

Everything that bears out a politics of humanity, and a source of hope for America as a compassionate world power.