Aaron Sorkin’s “The Newsroom” has notched up those periodic discussions of patriotism that surface in times of national conflict. Sorkin, known for “The West Wing” and “The Social Network,” favors staccato-paced dialog, point-counterpoint, and dialog driven material. His stuff is inevitably worlds away from the Hallmark cable channel of slurpy, screwball romance. And Sorkin’s as addictive as hell.
By now, everyone is familiar with Will McEvoy’s volcanic rant on patriotism in the first show. (See it at “On Demand.”) McEvoy, along with two correspondents, a political liberal and a conservative, are presenting to a large audience at the Northwestern University journalism school. Asked by a sophomore college student, “Why is America the greatest nation on earth—in a single sentence,” the politicos provide typical fodder. The Democrat: “Diversity and opportunity.” The Republican: “Freedom, freedom, freedom.”
Now it’s McEvoy’s turn and, at first, he agrees with his colleagues. He’s pushed further: “The Constitution is a masterpiece. The Declaration of Independence is the greatest single piece of American writing.” Pushed still further, he rants that “America is not the greatest country in the world. There’s absolutely no support for the statement that we’re the greatest country in the world. 7th in literacy. 27th in math. 178th in infant mortality,” etc. You know where he’s going.
The Newsroom is less than two weeks old, but everybody and his brother, Left, Right and otherwise, has something to say about it. The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum has a critical review. So too, the Huffington Post’s Maureen Ryan, and Politico has “10 vicious reviews of the Newsroom.” Yeah, the show is filled with Sorkinian archetypes. But what’s most intriguing to me is that The Newsroom is getting so damned much attention.
What’s in it for me?
The Newsroom’s popularity is indicative of the fact that it’s now appropriate, perhaps expected, that the American public is getting turned on by conversations and narratives regarding patriotism. The economy, this country’s need for change, Chief Justice John Roberts’ decision, the Affordable Care Act and immigration policy and the role of government are only a few of the issues driving this conversation. Candidly, we really, really need this conversation. But it needs more than a little historical knowledge to get the conversation away from screaming idiocies, and back to the underpinnings of our nation.
Specifically, it’s obvious that there is often a shocking, ignorant departure from the Founding Fathers’ understanding of the necessary tensions for our nations’ success. As Kurt Andersen puts it in "The Downside of Liberty", a thoughtful, brilliant NYTImes Op/Ed, “from the beginning, the American idea embodied a tension between radical individualism and the demands of the commonweal.”
Andersen is an American novelist who is also host of the Peabody-winning public radio program Studio 360, co-production between Public Radio International and WNYC. In a well-thought-out perspective, Andersen argues that what’s happened since the 1960s is all of a single piece. Whether ‘60s hippies or Bohemians, business people and investors, extreme individualism has been triumphant. In short, selfishness and greed won. That being the case, the middle class will go the way of the dinosaur, democracy will come to an end, and everyone—yeah, the top 10% too, will suffer. Unless, of course, the thinking of our nation and our party system get seriously reformed.
“The downside of liberty”
In his article, Andersen points out with a great deal of accuracy that freedom and liberty are not always all they’re cracked up to be. Indeed, since the ‘60s, we’ve participated in the downside of liberty in the form of an ethos that explains not only social liberalism but greed. This business of going overboard and indulging our propensities to self-gratification has a long history—during the 1840’s, the Gilded Age and again in the 1920’s.
But since the 1960’s, American individualism has been fully unleashed.
A kind of tacit grand bargain was forged between the counterculture and the establishment, between the forever-young and the moneyed. Going forward, the youthful masses of every age would be permitted as never before to indulge their self-expressive and hedonistic impulses. But capitalists in return would be unshackled as well, free to indulge their own animal spirits, with fewer and fewer fetters in the forms of regulation, taxes or social opprobrium.
People on the political right have blamed the late 60’s for what they loathe about contemporary life—anything-goes sexuality, cultural coarseness, multiculturalism. And people on the left buy into that, seeing only the ‘60s legacy of freedom that they define as progress. But what the left and right respectively love and hate are mostly flip sides of the same libertarian coin minted around 1967.
So it’s very important, nationally important, that we pay attention to one founder, Thomas Jefferson:
In that letter from 1814, Jefferson wrote that our tendencies toward selfishness where liberty and our pursuit of happiness lead us require “correctives which are supplied by education” and by “the moralist, the preacher, and legislator.”
What better time than this to take advantage of The Newsroom’s setup and revert to my old profession, that of the preacher?
Flickr: Photo by MsNeverAgain