EDITORIALS:
O'Gara, James
EDITORIALS DISPERSE, YE REBELS! Americans approach the celebration of our nation's Bicentennial with caution. It has been argued that, since we have a bit more to be ashamed of at the moment than...
...The American Catholic Church's contribution to this re-evaluation of our national spirit is Liberty and Justice for All, a 60-page guide for a series of public hearings and grass-roots discussions meant to lead to an October 1976 national conference in Detroit and a new five-year plan of Catholic social action...
...Perhaps this generation of students can acquire a love of their country not built on illu-sions and patriotic braggadocio but on a knowledge consistent with human experience and sound theology: that nations, like individuals, sin...
...The Rose Bowl Parade displayed a flower float with the Peanuts comic strip kids as Washington's troops crossing the Delaware and Snoopy the dog as George...
...The booklet of essays and discussion questions, which has been severely criti-cized, is not all bad...
...Countless graves and cities in rubble testify to our national pride gone wrong...
...But birthdays do not go away if we pretend to skip them...
...But, we would feel more confident about the church's Bicentennial project if: the American hierarchy had a better record for listening" to its own scholars and voices from the grass roots...
...The Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus semiclimaxed with Betsy Ross on an elephant and Uncle Sam on stilts...
...Perhaps too this is the church's perfect chance to show it is really at home in a demo-cratic country...
...Mean-while, so-called "Freedom Train" whistle-stops the land, whipping cus-tomers through on a conveyor belt, letting them glimpse, for a fee, Presi-dent Ford's personal bible, the original Howdy Doody, and a film clip of Marilyn Monroe...
...If we do not have a President who inspires intel-ligent self-criticism, we can remember that in 1776 we had no President at all...
...This is a time for historians and teachers to reexam-ine our national character in the light of what we have learned from the Vietnam political and moral disaster...
...We have just survived six years with our worst Presi-dent-the one who planned to manipulate the Bicentennial to increase his already obscene power, and who came to represent the militarism, violence, paranoia, deceit and greed that characterize the distortion of the true American dream...
...we had not had fine words on social justice with no follow-up before...
...Meanwhile, in the eyes of much of the world, we have seen history come full cycle and have assumed, through our guns and giant corporations, the role of,the imperialist superpower we rebelled against...
...An enterprising Catholic publisher should get out a better one and compete...
...Per-haps a "hierarchy" is, by nature, nervous about re-calling any Revolution...
...What about Agnew's wallet and Sinatra's toupee...
...Fresh leadership will have to come from other institutions-civic groups, universities and churches-and from political spokesmen who can rearticulate what "all men are created equal" and "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" mean today...
...On one level, so many of the Bicentennial gimmicks are vulgar rip-offs...
...Voices of the American Revolution (Bantam, $1.75) and Common Sense II (Bantam, $1.45), "an alarm against today's tyrants, the giant corporations"-the discussion might really perk up...
...At a recent State Department press conference Walt Disney enterprises announced that it will develop a Bicentennial pageant, "America on Parade," with Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy as Revolutionaries...
...Usually, rebels in the church are as welcome as prophets in Jerusalem...
...Although the format is dull, with no pictures or charts, its content is in line with the social encyclicals and it asks harder questions than most Catholics have collectively faced...
...It was a policy that sprang from the dark underside of the same qualities that made us unique: our abundance, our wrestling with the frontier and our concept of Mission...
...They must face their guilt and absorb its lessons...
...there were any evidence that the church leadership was not so Tory-minded as a way of life...
...In his place we have a President who will dominate the year's festivities in his less obnoxious but uninspiring and highly political style-reminding us, spiritual descendents of the ragged militia at Concord Bridge, that we must be proud of our military clout...
...This will enable adults to see the Revolution "through the eyes of a child...
...Remember, one of George Ill's mistakes was that he didn't listen.'t listen...
...It has been argued that, since we have a bit more to be ashamed of at the moment than to celebrate, this is one birthday we could skip...
...That is how a young na-tion gains what America is said to lack-maturity...
...On a more serious level, we have just "lost" a war we never should have fought...
...Just as the riots of the '60s alerted us to the unacknowl-edged pattern of violence in our past, so should our Asian policy make us admit our economic and military imperialism...
...If read in conjunction with two lively paperbacks pub-lished by the Peoples Bicentennial Commission (1346 Connecticut Ave., Washington, D.C...
Vol. 102 • May 1975 • No. 4
