This piece will be appearing this week as an op/ed in newspapers in the very red part of Virginia (VA-06) where I was the Democratic nominee for Congress in 2012.
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Romanticizing is Dangerous When It’s a Lie
Being dedicated to the truth, I have suspicion about people romanticizing things—meaning making them look more like something ideal than they really are. But I am also quite fond of such romanticization.
I like romanticizing “Romance” for example. I’m a real sucker for a story that tells of lovers getting it together by the end — that “happily ever after” feeling. “Sleepless in Seatle,” for example, and then “You’ve Got Mail.” But the list of such “romances” is practically endless. (It’s obviously popular, as even a good number of Westerns and war movies put in some romantic relationship, thereby giving heart to the drama that’s mostly about conflict, violence, and power.)
A previous piece of mine here titled, “The Sacred Space of Lovers” is a kind of romanticization in that it boils down the best of what can be achieved between lovers into its wonderful essence. At its best, what transpires between lovers is as fulfilling as anything in life, methinks. And so while recognizing that this “sacred space” is achieved only sometimes, and only to a degree, in the actual moment-to-moment lovers’-relationships in our lives, I welcome a romantic story that taps into those feelings.
It's not a Lie, it’s a way of emphasizing the ideal in a part of our lives worth celebrating.
Another thing I like to romanticize is that vital piece of history in which the FDR-led United States and the Churchill-led United Kingdom created a force that was instrumental in rescuing a big part of the world from the terrors of a cruel and aggressive Fascist regime.
It wasn’t all virtuous and heroic. But FDR and Churchill were great leaders who brought out the best in their peoples at an especially important time in the human world’s ongoing battle between Good and Evil. I am happy to turn to those movies (American or British), that were made in war time for propagandistic purpose to idealize that genuinely heroic effort.
While sometimes it’s important to look sometimes at the more complex realities, the romanticized versions are still telling a basic truth.
However, if what the romanticization tells people is basically a Lie, romanticization can be dangerous.
For example, great art was put to the use of Evil in the 1930s when a talented filmmaker (Lili Riefenstahl) made propaganda films for Hitler, helping fortify the Nazi regime as it prepared to extend its cruel domination across the European continent.
Riefenstahl’s film -- “Triumph of the Will” -- was beautiful. The regime it romanticized was ugly.
The falseness of that romanticization reminds us that Satan was often called the Deceiver, and that the film’s impact could only serve Evil.
Another instance of destructive romanticization has been the mythologizing of the Confederacy, with its supposedly noble “lost cause.”
That deceptive romanticization began immediately after the Civil War, even though the reality was then still fresh in people’s minds. The Reality was, as the Confederacy’s leaders had declared as they launched the secession that launched the war, that the Confederacy represented the “great truth” that the superiority of the white man made it right for him to make slaves of the black race.
The Confederacy was about White Supremacy, and slavery, period.
But for one group of human beings to treat another group of human beings as the white plantation-owners treated their slaves, as human livestock, is no noble cause.
Romanticization that’s false has destructive effects. Just as the Lie of the nobility of the Confederate gave this nation a terrible nightmare of a war in the 19th century, the enduring role of that romanticized Confederate spirit continues to play a destructive role in the political life of the nation.
The Confederacy comes with an attitude toward the rest of the world. That attitude can be inferred from how it has been used over the years in the public realm.
- The Confederate flag grew in prominence during the resistance to the insistence that black Americans be given “equal protection under the law,” a century after the post-Civil War Constitution promised it.
- And when the mob carried that flag in their assault on the Capitol to overturn the results of an election that was known to be legitimate, those people were summoning up what they understood as the spirit of the Confederacy.
Such use of a falsely romanticized Confederacy underscores how the political health of a nation depends upon Truth.
And now we have another such deceptive romanticization: “Make America Great Again,” when it can readily be shown that Trump is actually taking a wrecking ball to the heart of America’s greatness.
It is not making America great again to have a President
- who is attacking the constitutional order that has been the foundation of our blessings,
- who is making the United States look ugly in the eyes of our longtime friends, and
- who sides with the fascist war criminal in Moscow and against the brave people who are punishing the Russian aggressor from succeeding in taking the world back into kind of barbarism and tyranny America has always opposed.
What we should be romanticizing now instead are the ideals that have really made America great—romanticize the “Rule of Law,” which protects a free people against corruption and tyranny. That isn’t a Lie, but an important truth to which it behooves us to rededicate ourselves in this dangerous moment.