Yahoo! News AP Headlines
Saturday March 6 11:34 AM ET Some Say America in Cultural War
By CALVIN WOODWARD Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON (AP) - There's a ``war'' going on in this country, but most people may not notice. It's about whether absolute right and wrong exist and whether Americans can even tell the difference.
In the midst of prosperity, some thinkers see a decline in things money cannot buy - values, morals and old truths.
Commentator Pat Buchanan pledged at the onset of his third presidential campaign to ``clean up all that pollutes our culture.'' Another prominent activist from the right, Paul Weyrich, has gone as far as suggesting conservatives separate themselves from U.S. culture - ``an ever wider sewer,'' he called it - because the ``enemy'' has won.
A president who lied and still leads is held out as an example of cultural decline. So are magazine covers peddling sexual gratification and raunchy TV. Even the move toward turning George Washington's birthday into a generic Presidents Day is cited as a sign of how this country has fallen.
``I wonder if, after this culture war is over that we are engaged in, an America will survive that will be worth fighting to defend,'' Rep. Henry Hyde of Illinois, the leading House impeachment prosecutor, told the Senate in his effort to unseat President Clinton.
The culture war is an apocalyptic struggle ranging across the landscape of national life, yet hardly visible to so many. It takes multiple forms: the constitutional impeachment drama, Hollywood fare, billboard advertising, the teaching of history, behavior on college campuses, Internet content and more.
The question about absolute truth vs. relativism has engaged philosophers since the earliest time: Is truth eternal and unchanging or is it relative, depending on circumstance, time and place?
To the cultural warriors, America is ``slouching towards Gomorrah,'' the biblical city destroyed for the sinfulness of its people. Yet the disquiet is difficult for many to fathom. Most social indicators either are good or improving.
``There is a cultural war among the elite,'' says Boston College sociologist Alan Wolfe, author of ``One Nation After All.'' ``But it doesn't go much farther than that.''
Even some of the book titles at the center of the conflict recognize that people are not really with it: William Bennett's anti-Clinton ``The Death of Outrage'' and Robert Bork's ``Slouching Towards Gomorrah.''
James Hunter, who popularized the phrase in scholarly circles with his 1980s book ``Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America,'' agrees the fight mobilizes no more than 10 percent of the population.
But he says that does not diminish its intensity or importance. Elites, after all, shape what is taught to children, shown on TV, turned into law and resolved in courts.
``Certainly the majority of Americans live their lives fairly removed from these kinds of tensions,'' he says. ``That doesn't mean there's not a culture war.''
The culture war is often traced to the 1960s, the decade of protest, free love, beads and bad pants. Some slogans from that time still hold meaning today, among them ``Do Your Own Thing.''
``Americans are pretty tolerant,'' says Todd Gitlin, once at the vanguard of the counterculture as president of Students for a Democratic Society. ``They have their judgments. They just don't think people should enforce their judgments.''
Gitlin, who wrote ``The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars,'' concedes the 1960s eroded traditional authority and brought on the ``rambunctious relativists'' - perhaps the sort of people who later would judge that Clinton should stay in office.
That is how GOP Rep. Tom Delay of Texas, the majority whip, saw the impeachment struggle. He told the House it was ``a debate about relativism vs. absolute truth.''
Some public opinion research indicates Americans, while more religious than many cultures and hardly freewheeling about sex, are moving toward consensus on many social issues. No seething cultural conflict is apparent.
Wolfe ticks off areas where he is finding common ground among most Americans.
``Working women,'' he offers. ``That used to be a big fight. Race - we used to have overt and explicit racism. No one questions the principle any more of racial equality. God - we used to have furious battles between Catholics and Protestants.''
An August 1998 poll by The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation found strong majorities supporting both ``traditional family values'' and the idea that people should be tolerant of those who live by moral standards that they consider wrong.
But for some warriors there remains too much moral equivocation, too much garbage on the tube, too far a drift from the verities.
Weyrich, president of the Free Congress Foundation, declared that his side has ``probably lost the culture war.''
He is suggesting conservatives consider such steps as home schooling and getting rid of TV, saying ``we have to look at what we can do to separate ourselves from this hostile culture.''
Hunter believes that what is driving the cultural war is a distinctively American, ``almost irrational, concern for perfection.''
``There are ways in which we as Americans at the end of the 20th century are just as much Puritans as our Puritan forebears,'' he said. ``There is this impulse to build a city on a hill and for that to be a bright and shining light, and we won't accept anything short of it.''
He says the advocates hold firm to their positions; some argue abortion is murder, while others, on the opposite side, believe in homosexual marriage.
Stay tuned, he suggests.
``Any conflict that is institutionalized in a number of very prominent, well-funded organizations and whose historical and cultural roots go back as far as I think they go back, is not going to go away any time soon,'' he says.
So much for making love, not war.
