Zell's Bells
Amazing how the people who spent six months trying (with success, alas) to convince the nation that Howard Dean was off his rocker for taking it to George Bush with authority and conviction are now watering at the mouth over the hateful rantings of Senator Zell Miller (D-Bizarro world). Since Zell didn't really say anything new last night - and since I'm really busy this week - I won't say anything new about Zell. Instead, I ask your indulgence for a re-run of a piece from February, following one of Zell's tastier speeches on the floor of the Senate, which asks the question...
Why Does Zell Miller Hate America?
Yesterday [February 13, 2004], Salon published an astonishing speech recently given on the Senate floor by retiring Georgia Senator Zell Miller, who still for some reason calls himself a Democrat. In the speech, entitled “A Deficit of Decency,” Miller declaims the moral decay of America in the strong terms reserved for those who don’t need to care what the public thinks anymore. It’s the familiar rant of the old man who’s time has passed, wondering what the hell is wrong with kids today, and warning that the world is going to hell in a handbasket unless we restore some of those good old-fashioned values. What makes it scary is that, for the next 10 months anyway, Miller comprises 1% of the upper house of our national legislative body, and when he calls for things like a constitutional amendment to “ensure religious freedom” (e.g., prayer in schools, public display of the Ten Commandments, etc.) and legislation to “limit the jurisdiction of the federal courts in certain ways,” you have to take him seriously.
Miller doubtless speaks for a lot of people frustrated by the pace and direction of social change in America. There’s a lot about our society that’s coarse, ugly, ignorant, faithless, frustrating and unfair. Miller, in his seventies, is old enough to remember a more genteel and civilized era that, in the rosy haze of his memory, is probably purged of the pains, conflicts, repression and myriad injustices that were integral to maintaining the surface of tranquility for proper white men like himself. Many of his constituents, too young to have experienced it firsthand for themselves, probably form pictures even more seductive, especially in comparison to the insecurity and uncertainty that surrounds them in the present day, when they have to fight for the respect that was due them by birth just a generation ago.
In one memorable portion of the speech, Miller takes aim at rap music:
Does any responsible adult ever listen to the words of this rap crap? I'd quote you some of it, but the sergeant of arms would throw me out of here, as well he should. And then there was that prancing, dancing, strutting, rutting guy evidently suffering from jock itch because he kept yelling and grabbing his crotch. But then, maybe there's a crotch-grabbing culture I'm unaware of.
Miller is certainly entitled to his opinion. I don’t mind rap, but – call me old-fashioned – I have to say I prefer Charlie Parker, Prokofiev and the Clash. It’s a matter of taste. Zell has his, I have mine, lots of other people have theirs. There’s a bunch of contemporary music I find distasteful, but I’m not interested in having the FCC try to ban Toby Keith from the airwaves. That would be, to coin a phrase, un-American.
See, here in America, there are lots of people, all looking for the “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness” guaranteed to us in our Constitution. Some find their salvation in Jesus and the Bible. Me, not so much. Some watch the Super Bowl and Nascar. I’d rather watch baseball and the Tour de France. Some folks find their own gender sexually attractive. For better or worse, I don’t seem to be wired that way. But as long as these folks don’t do any harm to me or my property, I really don’t have much to say about what they like or how they live their lives. For one thing, I don’t care, and for another, even if I did, it’s none of my business.
Miller and those who agree with him clearly do care. They are intensely interested in other people’s choices, other people’s values, and other people’s legal and consensual behavior. Rather than seeing American society and civilization as the end-product of millions of individual tastes, expressed through personal choices in commerce, aesthetics, religious (or non-religious) affiliation, they see an ideal culture to which individuals must be made to conform. Their ideals come from a selective (some would say “narrow”) understanding of history, theology, art and human sexuality that lacks richness, but has the virtue of simplicity. It provides their often complicated and ambiguous lives with a sense of clarity and purpose, and offers hope when objective conditions might tend toward despair. And that’s just fine – for them.
Like all human beings, they desperately seek external validation for their individual tastes. The worst of them are not content with the lives that their decisions have constructed for themselves, but want everyone to live as they do. Appeals to “tradition” and Scripture color their opinions with righteousness, and a sense of participation in a larger cultural movement animates their crusade to have their tastes, morals and preferences embroidered into the formal institutions of public life and enforced on the unwilling through the actions of the government.
Fortunately, the founders of this country understood these tendencies and created a system with a bias toward freedom. Under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, it is very difficult to use the coercive power of government to enforce matters of taste and morals, and comparatively easy for claimants to compel respect and equal treatment for minority positions and views. The United States is a liberal republic by design, from inception. Its institutions are built to embrace change and open questioning of everything, from policies to values, and its laws are hostile to the imposition of orthodoxy. People like Miller have a real problem with this, but it’s not by accident. For someone who claims to support the “original intent” of the founders, Miller ought to read his Federalist Papers a little bit more carefully before demanding fundamental changes to our system that breach the wall between Church and State, and demand that the government take sides on issues of values and morals.
The right to rage against the ignorance, tastelessness and wrongheadedness of our fellow citizens is our birthright as Americans. Miller is in a long tradition of cranks and critics, hardened by age and narrowed by fear, calling down from on high against the decline of morals and the crumbling of civilization. Yet, despite it all, American civilization endures, prospers, grows and changes. We manage to make do and find happiness in our lives, sometimes by exploring new experiences and other times by falling back on the comforts of tradition. So to the Zell Millers past and present, real believers in democracy say, thanks for your concern, but we're going to be all right.
As a young man, Miller himself must have reached a point in his life where he had to decide which beliefs of his elders he would keep, and what new ideas he would embrace. In his political life, he gracefully accepted the dramatic change in race relations that swept over his native state. He probably had to make a radical reassessment of old notions he had grown up with, and for this he deserves respect. That’s why it’s pitiable – pathetic, even – to see this statesman in the twilight of his career, cowering in fear: fear of change, fear of freedom, fear of the choices his fellow citizens might make unless coerced and indoctrinated by government.
Why does Zell Miller hate America? Because he hates and fears Americans – at least the ones not just like him - and he does not trust us with our own freedom.
7:56:37 AM 
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