Spring Break
Tradition? Try moving into this century
A confederacy of dunces
Noel Runyan
Issue date: 1/16/08 Section: Opinion
Would you want to live in what would become the United States, circa 1630? I don't know if I would.
For all the hue and cry raised in certain corners today about the cozy relationship between certain Christian denominations and certain politicians, one needs only to look back to the first decades of the Massachusetts Bay colony for comparative peace of mind. That was hard-core theocracy - a place where drunkenness and sexual relations outside of marriage were punishable offenses.
Some of us got our first real introduction to Puritan theories of jurisprudence in high school, in Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter." Contemporary America is somewhat different. Nowadays, we don't put drunks in stockades or sew a red letter onto a cheating spouse's clothes. Now we go into rehab or hire a divorce lawyer, both of which are (at least in the case of rehab) infinitely more humane than the variety of measures designed to solidify the Puritan establishment of yore.
Without question, the United States is a more enlightened and more humane place now than it has ever been in the past. No one in the mainstream of society today will object to an interracial marriage or a woman practicing medicine, or even running for President. In the face of all the injustices that persist to this day, the poverty and the hopelessness that still plague our inner cities and rural expanses, Americans can claim - in all seriousness - to be living in the most progressive, most liberated age in the country's history.
And yet, I cannot shake the feeling that there is an undercurrent of nostalgia running through this country, a hankering for that old-time religion, the return to the city-on-the-hill mentality. Why else would we make such incredible demands of our political candidates?
Not only must candidates possess a razor-sharp intellect, knowledge of international politics and finance, the ability to complete a declarative sentence and a fashionably jingoistic foreign policy, but candidates must also inspire a sense of homey confidence - that "aw, shucks" kind of trust that one might only find on re-runs of "Leave It to Beaver."
For all the hue and cry raised in certain corners today about the cozy relationship between certain Christian denominations and certain politicians, one needs only to look back to the first decades of the Massachusetts Bay colony for comparative peace of mind. That was hard-core theocracy - a place where drunkenness and sexual relations outside of marriage were punishable offenses.
Some of us got our first real introduction to Puritan theories of jurisprudence in high school, in Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter." Contemporary America is somewhat different. Nowadays, we don't put drunks in stockades or sew a red letter onto a cheating spouse's clothes. Now we go into rehab or hire a divorce lawyer, both of which are (at least in the case of rehab) infinitely more humane than the variety of measures designed to solidify the Puritan establishment of yore.
Without question, the United States is a more enlightened and more humane place now than it has ever been in the past. No one in the mainstream of society today will object to an interracial marriage or a woman practicing medicine, or even running for President. In the face of all the injustices that persist to this day, the poverty and the hopelessness that still plague our inner cities and rural expanses, Americans can claim - in all seriousness - to be living in the most progressive, most liberated age in the country's history.
And yet, I cannot shake the feeling that there is an undercurrent of nostalgia running through this country, a hankering for that old-time religion, the return to the city-on-the-hill mentality. Why else would we make such incredible demands of our political candidates?
Not only must candidates possess a razor-sharp intellect, knowledge of international politics and finance, the ability to complete a declarative sentence and a fashionably jingoistic foreign policy, but candidates must also inspire a sense of homey confidence - that "aw, shucks" kind of trust that one might only find on re-runs of "Leave It to Beaver."
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