Overview
From Jack Blake's perspective, the grand American experiment in individual freedom is in imminent danger from within, and the enemy is our own gullibility. In particular, the screaming intolerance and political aggression of the fundamentalist Christian right threatens the Founding Fathers' vision and makes us look, in many disturbing ways, like the most notorious totalitarian regimes of this century. With cool, lucid prose and a scientist's eye for numbers, Blake dissects the polemics, cuts through a haze of perceptions, and finds a nation at war with its own highest ideals. Our nation has been portrayed by the religious right as a decadent, immoral, licentious state. Already we hear End Times theology spouting from our television sets, and every day the newspapers tell of conservative, often literalist, Christians seeking, and gaining, political power. Blake draws upon this apocalyptic diatribe as his inspiration. Blake cannot, however, give a solution to the "problems" of offensive art, apparently dangerous science, secular humanism, homosexuality, violence, and crime. Many of these so-called problems are, when viewed objectively, either manifestly human or, at worst, a small price to pay for freedom. Many of our problems are so deeply entrenched in the biological fact of being human that the best we can do is understand and control them. In the end, our most precious freedoms derive not from a uniform and coerced conservative religious moral code but from well-educated, intellectually strong, and individually courageous citizenry. In the final section of the book, Jack Blake suggests how to build such a generation of Americans.Editorials
Kirkus Reviews
Further proof, if any is needed, that there is almost nothing new left to say about the culture wars.But the pseudonymous Blake certainly makes a game attempt. Using the upcoming millennium as his admittedly flimsy excuse, Blake revisits all the exhausted controversies from flag-burning in school to multiculturalism to naughty government-sponsored art. But his attempt to arrive at "rational" positions on these issues—and many others that he seems to feel driven to pontificate about—unintentionally demonstrates the limits of reason. Most of us can agree with his broadly enunciated belief that "I cannot have any freedoms without defending the rights of others to have theirs; I cannot have my relatively dignified life on Earth without working to ensure that others have theirs." Unfortunately, it is in the all-important details that consensus inevitably breaks down. On what side of human dignity should we locate abortion or capital punishment or even naughty government-sponsored art? This is where we start to leave the realm of reason and descend to the murky depths of opinion and even irrationality. Still, there's probably nothing to oppose in Blake's other nostrums to help us "survive past midnight, December 31, 1999." Yes, we should read more, visit art galleries more, teach our children well, and spend less time on social small talk and more time discussing the big issues. To help us save the world and ourselves, Blake provides an eccentric two- page reading list, including such luminaries as the Durants, Norman Mailer, and Ralph Nader. But don't look here for Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, or any of our culture's other seminal minds. (For the place of these thinkers in the culture wars, see David Denby's Great Books, p. 944.)
Like a sugar pill, this book is reasonably harmless, but there are many more effective remedies available for our cultural aches and pains.