THE MONUMENTS WE'VE DESTROYED.

It's a frequent theme of mine, and it's likely something everyone has in mind, if, perhaps, a different list of lamentations.  Consider Bill McKibben's The Flag, The Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened.  The simplest way to motivate Book Review N^o. 11 is to view the book as a collection of E-T-T-S moments, although, again, each person has a different set of candidates for E-T-T-S moments.  In Mr McKibben's case, a passage at page 152 is emblematic of his set of such moments.

[Real estate ownership] also helps explain a great deal about how America came to be a deeply conservative country, and why most of the ice in the Antarctic has melted.  The only other things in my lifetime that approach its economic impact are the rise of the internet and the ascent of China,.  Understanding how we lost that opening for justice in the 1970s, understanding the rise of Reagan and libertarianism, understanding the failure to grapple with climate change: that means grappling with the sheer economic force of the suburbs.

Bear in mind that Mr McKibben is a doomsday environmentalist of the first water, no matter how wrong he proves to be: and that his memoir is of a piece with a lot of recent policy and politics writing that includes (an obligatory?) coming to terms with How Awful (and Irregular) The Trump Presidency is: and, yes, he hails the election of Dementia Joe as somehow a Great Thing (there being no limits to the Cult of the Presidency, even among self-styled progressives who should know better) and among his litany of things gone wrong we have the demonstration solar panels that President Peanut put on the White House, President Reagan subsequently rendered cost-ineffective, and President Messiah sold for scrap.  But I digress.

There's something amusing about watching a Doomsday Environmentalist have to confront the reality that public spending on Good Roads and public subsidy of tract housing via various government-supported mortgages did not produce an Awakening of Public-Spiritedness: oh, no, it created a nation of Property Owners — and in Lexington, evidently even the Enlightened Establishmentarians never got the guilts about how from the greenbelt communities to the tract houses, that ownership deepened what contemporary scolds call White Privilege.  Now, it's simpler: the station wagons gave way to the sport-utes, and the kids playing on the green gave way to bullying on social media, and the ice caps melt, or not.

I will credit Mr McKibben for recognizing an error his fellow-travellers made.  In his meditations on The Flag (which was a big deal growing up in Lexington, Mass.) he notes, page 26,  "I've always been both amazed and chagrined that many progressives willingly surrendered the flag to the Right — that in their dislike for much of what we'd become they overlooked how we begun, and in the process gave the other side its most valuable prop.  Why should the stars and stripes belong to men who believed in individualism over community, who were building new empires as oppressive as anything the British had constructed?"  He's spot on, there, and a few of his next-elders understood the value of Revolutionary-era symbolism, although that was lost amid the Vietnam War protesters carrying the Vietcong flag, assorted revolutionaries of the era burning the Stars and Stripes, and the promiscuous use of AmeriKKKa in the graffiti of the era.

The "individualism over community" concept carries over into his discussion of churches.  Mr McKibben, as a collegian, copied Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John by hand into a spiral notebook, and he might well understand how what we understand these days as the Social Gospel ought be a big part of Christian social teaching.  His E-T-T-S moment in church addresses the mainline Protestant churches losing membership to the mega-churches, which strike him, page 120, as rather un-churchlike.

Instead of placing them on a spectrum from liberal to conservative, place them on a spectrum from citizen to consumer, or of community to individual.

The next big chunk of this book — the part about the station wagon — will have a lot to say about the rise of hyper-individualism: it turns out to be the key, I think, to our political evolution (and to the fact that the Arctic ice cap is mostly melted).  But it's notable that we can see the same phenomenon playing out in our religious life.

There's always been a tension in Protestantism, of course, between the individual and the community.  The whole separation from Catholicism  — the very thing that Luther was protesting about — had to do with the "priesthood of all believers," the idea that each individual has direct access to God without any need for priests or popes.

If salvation is a consequence of faith, rather than of deeds, all those passages about the sins of being rich might be less relevant than faith and praise, and thus cometh the Prosperity Gospel of the megachurches.  I won't tangle with someone who has copied out all the Gospels over whether the establishment churches rely too heavily on the Letters of Paul as explicated by Marx, or with a Lexington tour guide over whether that right, according to the Declaration of Independence granted by the Creator to Pursue Happiness, might not be a concept to include in the liturgy along with the testimonials and the country music.  Mr McKibben is fearful, though, that the Old Time Religion will lose its hold.  At page 145 he writes, "One fears that the window cracked open by George Floyd's murder or Joe Biden's election will slam shut again before we can get done what must be done, and that this moment will pass like the moments after the Revolution, or the Civil War, or the civil rights movement."  It's already too late, I submit, as, once again, the vanguardists have overdone it, with the big cities becoming crime-ridden and now unable to serve the asylum seekers goaded by the Jarrett regency to enter the country, and the money-printing and wishful-thinking legislation will have its effect, and the real debt ceiling will bind on the Treasury, when, much like it is written, nobody will know the day or the hour.

The station wagon isn't really relevant to his concluding chapters, which are a lament for deregulation of oil exploration in the United States, the foolish fuel efficiency standards that outlawed the station wagon in favor of the minivan and the crossover or sport utility vehicle, and again, the rise of what he calls "hyper-individualism" (which might better be understood as that pursuit of happiness, but this review has gotten too long).  He ends by calling the aging Silents and hippies to the barricades one more time, as if they haven't been destructive enough already.

Cross-posted to Fifty Book Challenge.