• Tag Archives American identity

  • Then Again.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Last day of Imbolc      Waning Moon o Winds

    Since I was nervous last Sunday and wrote about it here, I thought I’d also post this reaction, printed in the Groveland E-Wire.

    E-Wire, Vol. 11, March 19, 2009

    What You Missed Last Sunday

    American Identity in the Time of Obama, Presented by Rev. Charles Ellis

    Charles Ellis based his talk on the book “Who Are We?” by Samuel P. Huntington.

    Agreeing with Huntington’s analysis of US national identity from his book, Charles laid out Huntington’s assertion that this identity has four parts: race, ethnicity, ideology (or creed) and culture. Charlie explored these four parts and talked about their changes over time.

    Charles disagreed, however, with Huntington’s assertion that “…Americans should recommit themselves to the Anglo-Protestant culture, traditions and values…”, saying that Huntington does not account for change, and that the America rooted in Anglo-Protestant traditions will not be the same if Latino culture rises up strong.

    Charles ended on a passionate note, saying “Never, ever let it be said that love of country and dissent from governmental policy are contradictory. Never, ever let it be said that we cannot form a new perfect union, a new nation conceived in the fires of Latin culture and Asian values, yet a nation neither Latin nor Asian, but American, not an Anglo-Protestant America, but a new nation, one never seen before on the face of the earth.”

    He got a standing ovation.


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality Writing 📎and tagged

  • After the Service

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc            Waning Moon of Winds

    To follow up on the morning jitters.  At the end of my American Identity sermon I received an unusual and rare compliment: everyone clapped.  I took time on the way in to center myself and become part of the beautiful day underway.  As I got more centered, I remembered that I had never served and never intended to serve as a parish clergy.

    Why?  Because my views occupy one end of a spectrum, the far left edge.  In the Presbyterian community they perceived me as a prophet, so much so that when I left back in 1990, the Presbytery bought a large print of a Jewish prophet and gave it to me in a nice frame.  Oh, yeah.  That was my place.

    I recall a 1972 sermon at Brooklyn Center United Methodist Church on July 4th.  After I got done calling the congregation to patriotic resistance to the war, I went back to stand by the door and shake hands.  The congregation split like the Red Sea and went everywhere but where I was.  I’m that guy.

    This sermon has a radical message to and it received resistance today, but in a much gentler and more dialogical way than that one 37 years ago.  I’ve learned some and this community of people knows me well, so we can disagree and still remain friends.

    As Popeye used to say, I y’am what I y’am.


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality Our Land and Home Politics Writing 📎and tagged

  • With Apologies to Canada and Mexico

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc            Waning Moon of Winds

    I edited and revised American Identity today.  It needed a paragraph indicating what I believe to be similarities between the ante-bellum USA and our current era.  National identity was weak during the ante-bellum period and is weak now.

    In ante-bellum America the Unitarians William Ellery Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson made a strong push for American letters.  On the one hand they wanted a break with the European dominance of American literature, painting and scholarship; but more, they wanted American letters, literature rooted in the American experience, painting using American themes and flowing from the genius of American talent and scholarship trained in the new nation and carried out by American academics.

    American identity is weak now for several reasons.  Increasing Mexican immigration has raised a potent challenge to the Anglo-Protestant traditional US culture.  We are now a multiethnic, multiracial society, but our identity has only made tentative steps to say what that means.  We lost a prime enemy in the USSR and now have no one over against whom to identify ourselves.  Since the 1960’s there has been an erosion of trust in the basic institutions of our society:  business, government, the church, education.  Each of these challenges the old ethnic, racial and Anglo-Protestant consensus that underwrote US identity through the 1950’s.

    Like the ante-bellum USA this is a time for a new American letters, a new American literature, a new American painting and sculpture and music, a new American poetry and a new American scholarship, one that reflects the multiethnic, multiracial society we have become.


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality Humanities Letters Our Land and Home Politics 📎and tagged

  • I Love the Midwest

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc      Waxing Moon of Winds

    Finished the Asmat tour and a visual thinking strategies (VTS) tour for 3rd graders.  I give them tomorrow morning.

    Put together the legislative update for the Sierra Club blog and a morning entry for the Star-Trib.  Soon, it will be nap time.

    This afternoon and over the weekend I’ll dig back into the American Identity piece for the 15th. It’s been fallow since Monday, but it has not disappeared from my consciousness.  I’m leaning now toward a definite geographic hook, an addition to the more usual psycho-political work I’ve read in Huntington and some of the other essays.  I’m not sure yet whether I consider it an equivalent to those notions or whether it is a more important category.

    Here’s what I mean.  The notion of a nation is abstract, in the instance of a nation as geographically large as the USA, it can become even more abstract.  My hunch is that, as all politics are local, so are all experiences of national identity.  In other words, my experience of my land, my hometown, my home state or region is, both of necessity and emotional depth, the basic ingredient of my affection for my native land.

    That is not to say that This land is my land, from California to the New York Island doesn’t also inform my national identity.  I feel the Rockies and hollers of Appalachia, the rain forests of Washington State and the glaciers of Montana have a place in my sense of national identity, some of them in spite of my never having visited them.  They recede in importance for me, however, when I compare them to acre after acre of corn and wheat.  They do not have the emotional resonance for me the Great Lakes have, especially Huron, Michigan and Superior.  My life has been lived in the towns and cities of the Midwest and I love the Midwest.  When I think of my US identity, I think first of the Midwest.

    More on this to come.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Faith and Spirituality Great Work Our Land and Home Politics 📎and tagged

  • Living In An Abstract World

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc           Waxing Moon of Winds

    Oh, geez, as we might say here in Minnesota.  Got a phone call from my dentist’s office this morning asking me if I remembered my appointment.  No, I didn’t.  I said, “I’m just sitting here.”  The receptionist laughed and we rescheduled.  This is the second missed appointment in a month, including my showing up for a 10:00 o’clock tour at 10:45.

    I know what’s going on right now.  I’m deep in research for my American Identity presentation at Groveland on the 15th, researching my first Asmat art tour for this Friday and running fast to keep up with the changing legsilative fortunes of the Sierra Club legislation.  The research and the Sierra Club/Star-Tribune blogs occupy all of my attention.

    That makes me very happy because I love research and I love opportunities to turn around and share the results, which all of these instance allow me, but it also means I’m living in an abstract world that often fails to read the calendar. Oh, my.

    Gotta do something about this, but what?  Let me see, if I read something about it?


    📂This entry was posted in General 📎and tagged

  • Life-Long Learning

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    7oaks250Imbolc    Waning Wild Moon

    My weatherblog has been up for almost a month now at the Star-Tribune Weatherwatchers site.  The weather has not been interesting.  It has been either really cold or not so cold.  Little snow.  No storms.  Some days gloomy, some days not.  It taxes me metaphorically to comment.  I never appreciated how difficult attending to relatively stable conditions could be.  It makes the whole concept of news make a lot more sense.

    I began yesterday a protracted period of study.  I need to get up to speed on the Sierra Club’s issues for the blog.  I have a special tour for Annie to put together, a piece on textiles and crafts.  In order to learn more about the weather I’ve decided to devote the next two or three weeks to cloud research since the type of cloud helps make the blog more weather savvy.

    After my wondrous sheepshead night last week, I’ve also decided to read my two sheepshead books and see if I can pick up some tips for my play.  A big one:  14 trump, not 13.

    On March 15th I have a presentation I’ve titled American Identity in the Time of Obama.  Work to do on that one, too.


    📂This entry was posted in Art and Culture Weather +Climate Writing 📎and tagged

  • American Identity: What Is It?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    2  steep rise 30.30 WNW9  wchill -5  Winter

    Full Wolf Moon

    Got my copy of the Mahabarata today, four doorstopper sized books.  You read a long book the same way you read a short one, one page at a time.

    The seed database has most of the seeds entered with planting dates, inside and/or outside.  It will make the process of following the garden this year much easier.  It will also make evaluating the varieties and their production much simpler.  The garden has a straightforward demeanor this time of year.  It resides in the realm of fantasy, hard to even imagine with several inches of snowcover and windchills really cold.   The windchill just changed to -9.

    Tomorrow I’m going to cover a meeting of the MN Senate Energy, Utilities, Technology and Communications Committee. The Sierra Club’s Government Relations person, Michelle Rosier, has a meeting in New Orleans until late in the week.  (Windchill now -10. )  This meeting has an interesting focus: Discussion of anticipated federal stimulus package.  In a state with 5B+ deficit, the conservation should reveal some lines of attack.

    Emerson’s American Scholar contains his usual wise bits and some extraneous thoughts, but I’m half-way through it and he has not gotten to the American scholar yet.  I’m starting here on American identity piece:   American Identity in the Time of Obama.   Emerson’s time set about with clear intention to create an American character, an American identity.  If they could, we can, too.  But first I want to know what they did.

    BYB:  I’m interested in the ex-pat perspective on American identity.


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality Great Work Myth and Story Writing 📎and tagged