Overview
The Cold War with the Soviet Union may be over, but America is now at war with itself. Citizens are raising their voices against other citizens who hold opposing views. How can we reconcile these competing perspectives? What does it mean to call yourself a patriot when your opponent believes you are a traitor? If, as Abraham Lincoln warned us, "a house divided against itself cannot stand," will America fall apart, or can a new patriotism be born out of these conflicts? In A House Divided, Mark Gerzon, co-founder of the Rockefeller Foundation project The Common Enterprise, a network of community-building efforts to find common ground, invites us to move beyond these divisive, polarizing views. Gerzon's work has taken him and his colleagues into the heart of the most bitter community disputes in the country. There he discovered the America that is divided not into geographic states, but into states of belief about what is good for this country. In his book he journeys through these Divided States of America: Patria, Corporatia, Disia, Media, Gaia, and Officia. He lets each state speak for itself, so that we can understand what each believes and why. He shows how "new patriots" from each of these six states are working successfully with their opponents to heal seemingly insurmountable conflicts, reuniting our divided house and safeguarding America's soul. Without taking sides or joining the battle, Gerzon lays bare the many causes for strife in our country and describes clearly what must be done for America to become once again the United States.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Gerzon (The Whole World Is Watching) defines six overlapping yet adversarial belief systems that, he contends, dominate American life. Adherents of Corporatia champion the free market and believe that the private sector should set the nation's agenda. Citizens of Disia ("the Disempowered State"), including leftists, feminists, black and gay activists, see a society based on exploitation and oppression. Gaia's subscribers pursue social action grounded in global consciousness. The remaining three belief systems are Officia (faith in government), Patria (the religious right) and Media (those who set their standards by TV, radio, computers and entertainment superstars). Gerzon complements his analysis with profiles of bridge-building "new patriots," among them Paul Gorman, head of the interfaith organization National Religious Partnership for the Environment, and Marjorie Kelley, founding editor of Business Ethics magazine. Gerzon, who is preachy, concludes by challenging readers thus: "Create your own agenda for repairing this magnificent house we call America." 50,000 first printing; author tour. (Mar.)Gilbert Taylor
France of the ancien regime had three estates; Gerzon ("The Whole World Is Watching" [1969] and "A Choice of Heroes: The Changing Faces of American Manhood" [1982]) doubles the number for contemporary America. And the estates, as in France of yore, just don't get along. "Corporatia" hates "Officia" but "Gaia" (the transformation state) abhors "Corporatia," and on the sidelines brooding are "Patria" (religious people) and "Disia" (disempowered people). "Media" is the only unifying social segment in Gerzon's typology, in the negative sense that what pours from TVs and newspapers incenses the others. The author goes on to exhort readers to a "new patriotism," defined as a melding of each estate's gifts, offering Disia's conscience and Corporatia's ingenuity as examples. Ordinary people who have effected Gerzon's notions round out the text, and they indicate the primary readership: activist conciliators and idealists, whom Gerzon's system should spur.Kirkus Reviews
A former flower child's disjointed exhortation for everyone to get along and have a little faith in democracy.When he was a child in the 1950s, writes Gerzon (Coming into Our Own, 1992, etc.), three in four citizens believed that government served their best interests; the figure now stands at one in eight. What has replaced the United States, in Gerzon's annoying conceit, is a Divided States of America, whose residents are citizens of six different nations: patria, the religious state, which argues that America is a Christian nation; corporatia, the capitalist state, based on unwavering belief in the free market; disia, the disempowered state, which believes that government is founded on the oppression of racial and economic minorities; media, the suprastate, "a part of the corporate conglomerates, yet distinct from them"; gaia, the transformation state, whose citizens feel that "a new paradigm of thinking . . . is transforming every aspect of society"; and officia, the governing state, whose citizens believe that government alone can override the divisions in society. "Can a nation whose citizens hold fundamentally different beliefs remain united?" Gerzon asks. Answering in the negative, he raises the fear that present social conditions will result in civil war. To stem the bitter divisions (our awareness of which he ties to the end of the Cold War and the disappearance of an external enemy) Gerzon, a professional mediator and consultant to the Rockefeller Foundation, proposes a series of community-building endeavors that are unlikely to bring Jesse Helms and Jesse Jackson to the same table. His prescriptions boil down to dewy New Age nostrums, as he invites us to join in a "campaign for our country": "We must view America," he writes, "with the humility and wonder with which a child looks through a kaleidoscope."
Gerzon makes astute use of printed sources to back up his arguments, but his analysis remains maddeningly superficial and wholly unconvincing.