There's something reassuring about the fact that the flag, the old Stars and Stripes, can still kick up so much popular controversy.
Culture Watch
Danny Duncan Collum 8-01-1989
The usual rap on TV cop shows is that they trivialize real life-and-death matters into a glossy package of sanitized violence designed to sell soap and soda pop.
Danny Duncan Collum 7-01-1989
For this future cultural analyst, the legendary '60s were an after-school special.
Danny Duncan Collum 6-01-1989
Political philosophers tell us that one of the great driving forces of human history is the tension between individualism (or liberty) and community (or equality).
Danny Duncan Collum 5-01-1989
Someday in the far-distant future, some 23rd-century Mel Brooks may make a satirical film called The History of the World: Part MCXXXXVII.
Danny Duncan Collum 4-01-1989
The ad line for the new Oliver Stone-Eric Bogosian film, Talk Radio, gets my first nomination for The 1989 William Jennings Bryan "Cross of Gold" Award.
Danny Duncan Collum 2-01-1989
As this is written on November 22, 1988, the pop-cultural atmosphere is a-swamp with remembrance of things Kennedy.
Danny Duncan Collum 1-01-1989
The 1987-88 pop culture season was definitely a red-letter year. And the letter was Hawthorne's scarlet "A." That's for adultery, in case your high school lit is rusty.
Danny Duncan Collum 12-01-1988
Ronald Reagan, it is said, has run America's first cinematic presidency, often taking his ideological cues and policy prescriptions from his familiar world of the silver screen.
Danny Duncan Collum 10-01-1988
Perhaps the last thing anyone would have expected to happen during the Reagan era was a renewal of interest in the idea of legalizing drugs.
Danny Duncan Collum 8-01-1988
On the subject of drugs, as on so many others, American culture tends toward Utopian extremes of hedonism and puritanism. Twenty years ago the voluntary alteration of consciousness was celebrated by some otherwise intelligent and noteworthy Americans as a new inner frontier—the spiritual equivalent of outer space lying in wait for human exploration.
In those days, the legalization of various psychotropic chemicals was proposed as a psychic Homestead Act, opening new territory for the great American experiment in liberty and the pursuit of happiness. More traditional liberals of an ACLU bent may not have bought the drug culture's religious fervor, but many of them supported legalization as a freedom of conscience issue.
As the song says, "Those days are gone forever." And good riddance. The people who are usually wrong about the '60s are mostly right about the negative effect of the drug culture. A contemporary rock and roller and student of Americana such as Bono of the Irish rock band U2, who is usually right about the '60s, isn't far from the mark when he blames the collapse of that decade's idealistic promise on drugs in general and LSD in particular.
But now the famous pendulum has swung. These are the days of "Just Say No," when prominent persons, including the president of the United States, go about claiming to believe that the ancient human interest in blurring, sharpening, or colorizing consciousness actually can (and should) be eliminated from the culture of this particular city on a hill.
Danny Duncan Collum 7-01-1988
After the great revival of conscience-laden rock events in 1985, it might seem today that the search for good times and the common good must again be carried out at the margins.
Danny Duncan Collum 6-01-1988
Way back in the early '80s, singer-poet-activist Gil Scott Heron rang in the Reagan era with a titanically sad song called "Winter in America." As usual, Scott Heron was on the money.
Danny Duncan Collum 5-01-1988
The recent triumph of Washington Redskins quarterback Doug Williams, the first black quarterback to win the Super Bowl, points out once again the central role of sports as the forging ground of America's racial myths and symbols.
Danny Duncan Collum 4-01-1988
As the feel-good communitarians at U.S.A. Today would put it, "we" (i.e. Americans) are becoming more self-conscious and comfortable about our identity as the world's first video republic.
Danny Duncan Collum 3-01-1988
The images in Real War Stories are as strong and memorable, and sometimes as graphic, as those in its reactionary counterparts.
Danny Duncan Collum 2-01-1988
I am making an exception to trashing public television as an anti-democratic instrument for Bill Moyers.
Danny Duncan Collum 1-01-1988
These days, more and more workers in all sorts of circumstances are finding it hard to remember why anyone would have ever felt so passionately about a union affiliation.