SANTORUM, FAMILY, SURREALISM, ROCKWELL, SOUPAULT, WOOD, THE AMERICAN DREAM

Santorum is sinking again in the polls after Romney put up 4 million dollars worth of negative ads. Suddenly Santorum is the candidate who can't think straight. He wants his own kids to have college educations, but not ours. He wants to use birth control, but he doesn't want the rest of us to do it.

But the MSM always reduces GOP contenders to a sound bite. Herman Cain (remember him?) was the 9-9-9 fella, who harassed women. Bachman had funny hair, and it was unclear who was the boss in her house: her or her husband. Gingrich is the guy who asked his ex-wife for an open marriage while already acting as if she was ok with it.
Romney wrecks businesses and throws people out of work, but has profited immensely from it. Paul is elderly. Who's left? Oh, yes, back to Rick Santorum.

Santorum's book shows that he's a deeper and wider thinker than the MSM casts him, or than Romney casts him, but I'm only partially through his book. It Takes A Family: Conservatism and the Common Good opens with four chapters about the family as the fundamental unit of American society. Therefore, to get ahead, you need a solid family. Some ethnic groups and religious groups have this, and some don't. Santorum should have done a comparative study but he didn't. Asian Americans have the lowest divorce rates (2% have no father in the family), while African Americans have the highest (81% have no father in the family). White Americans are at about 37% (fatherless) and rising. Some groups are more likely to fit into these statistics than others. Which denominations are the least likely to be fatherless? Are the secularists (they only make up 3% of Americans) more likely to have solid families or not?

For the most part I bought Santorum's initial foray into sociology although it could use a lot of fine tuning. But then he suddenly has a chapter on "social capital" and argues that this is what distinguished America from Europe and other places. In America, we raise barns together. We work together. You can trust the mailman. You can trust the grocer. You can trust the shoe repairman. But he argues the inner city people have the lowest sense of "social capital" insofar as no one there can trust the others. But, he doesn't link this to the breakdown in families in the inner cities. Why not? His book seems jumbled. If the through thread is families, he should make families the basis of "social capital," but suddenly he turns to "society" as the answer.

Santorum discusses a book called "Bowling Alone," and says that in the 1950s there were giant bowling leagues in which many people participated, but now many people prefer to go bowling alone. This book was written by a Harvard sociology professor named Robert Putnam. Bowling leagues required all the members to show up every week. That requires a commitment and a sense of togetherness which has been lost, Santorum says. So, outside the family there were other links, links between families, that brought them together.

"In other words, society isn't an unconnected pile of sand" (55), Santorum writes.

Santorum cites Tocqueville and two other scholars -- economist Wilhelm Ropke, and sociologist Robert Nisbet, who wrote "in the spirit of Tocqueville" (55).

Meanwhile, and on a completely different trajectory, I'm reading a massive biography of surrealist Philippe Soupault (Flammarion, 2010) by a French scholar named Beatrice Mousli, who teaches at University of Southern California. The book is 450 pages in length and I'm on p. 370. Born in 1897, and living until 1990, Soupault's life spanned two world wars and several major art movements. He was one of three principle founders of the surrealist movement, and it was his money that bankrolled their initial journals and helped them all to survive in their fledgling years. Soupault's family was a major bourgeois family headquartered just south of Paris in Chaville. His uncle was Louis Renault who started the famous automobile company. His father was a famous doctor. In the summers, Soupault visited the Normandy coast and stayed in the same hotel where Marcel Proust stayed. His family ran printing businesses in Paris, and one of his brothers became an important lawyer, and another an important businessman. Soupault himself had important positions -- he ran a fleet of petroleum ships while still in his twenties, had important positions in publishing, in radio, and later at UNESCO. His several wives were important journalists from wealthy families.

Although Soupault was a serial adulterer with children from several marriages he was born into a powerful network. In the long run, this social capital catapulted him to the top of the Parisian literary pyramid where he remained for most of his ninety plus years. He knew Andre Gide, Andre Breton, Marcel Proust, Guillaume Apollinaire, and almost everyone else of importance from the time he was eighteen. As a child he spent time in London and in Germany which improved his language skills.

Soupault's family was a powerful launching pad for him.

When we return to American politics, we can see that Mitt Romney also had a powerful family which has launched him into the uppermost sphere of power. Santorum has less of this, but he has a tightly knit family, and this may be enough to propel him to the top as well. Plus, they both have significant churches behind them.

Barack Obama's father was a fly-by-night serial adulterer from Kenya who he only met once. His mother was a flibbertigibbet who wandered around the world from one multicultural husband to the next leaving her child with her parents. Obama denounced the grandmother as a racist in a famous news conference. But Obama's power came through his academic networks in Harvard and Chicago, and from his political pull in the latter town, and through groups such as ACORN who pushed his candidacy. Plus, he appears to have a tightly knit family of his own. His wife appears to come from a relatively stable family, and they attended a powerful church -- but Obama denounced the church's pastor and now wants nothing to do with him, since he sees him now as a political liability.

If family is the basis of "social capital" and American "social capital" is minted in that institution, how can this framework be fortified? Hillary looked to Africa and to the notion that "It Takes a Village," but what if it's family instead, and it's actually ASIA that we should look to, rather than Africa, for the source of our model? America is individual (the pursuit of happiness is part of our basic political DNA -- which seems to indicate an almost solipsistic pursuit). But what if true happiness can only be found in families? Or through church?

What if the real basis of strength is found neither in the individual nor in the nation, but in the family? Or through the church, founded on a deep belief in God?

The surrealist Philippe Soupault was in Tunis in WWII where he was imprisoned for high treason after the Vichy Government deemed his radio emissions (or was it his friendship with resistance members -- it was never clarified) guilty of high treason. He spent six months in prison, while his extensive network of friends and family worked to get him out. He finally did get out, and took a bus to Algeria (with his wife of the moment) where the allies had already established a beachhead (1943). From there he got to America (Roosevelt read French and had memorized several of Soupault's poems). Later, one of Soupault's poems was dropped from airplanes over France from which his children learned that he had survived the war thus far). Soupault had faith that the Americans would win because of the essential feature of American life: "pragmatisme" (he had travelled extensively in America as a correspondent in the 1930s, and had also travelled in Russia and Germany). Is it in fact "pragmatism" that is the great American strength, or is it faith? Tocqueville said it was faith.

So, what is it that drove America to the top of the world in the first half of the 20th century? Was it pragmatism? Was it our social networking? Was it the importance of family? Was it faith? Many joke about Norman Rockwell, but whatever it was, it is not too far from Rockwell. Rockwell's paintings describe a regional America united by faith and family. Grant Wood's paintings (laughed at by the secularists and their powerful media) describe a similar America. Rural, deeply versed in faith, and meaningful. Corny, perhaps, but strong. The same media laughs at Rick Santorum as if he's a stain on their abstractions. Meanwhile, from the surrealists and the abstract expressionists a new and vertiginous art has arisen that doesn't reference landscape, church, family or anything but a kind of explosion as if a plane has smashed into the American church and family and landscape and obliterated it and this art is held up as something we should revere as if it's Christ Himself on the cross. The artists that painted these pictures were generally lost and barbaric -- Pollock a drunken bum who dies in a car crash, Picasso a monster who was hated by almost everyone who knew him well. Rockwell and Wood on the other hand were well-liked, and decent. There was a kind of selfless neighborliness which was depicted in Rockwell and Wood and other regionalists such as Thomas Hart Benton that is now being lost. People more and more are out for themselves and expecting the government to help them (food stamps are now given to one out of five Americans): we now have abstractions such as the village or the government that can't be seen that are supposed to help us even if they don't love us. To hell with Mom and Dad. Let's kill the baby, as it eats up our resources. Let's sell the baby. Let's murder the baby, in fact, and throw it under the bus, and live for today!

Against this notion, Santorum argues that we need to revive and coddle the American family (which he defines as a mother and father and their babies).

Soupault felt that America would defeat Germany. Why couldn't France? France was once an important military nation. They held their own in WWI. But they were no match for Germany in WWII, or Algeria, or the Vietnamese. Now they can barely take on Greenpeace and when they do they have to blow up the Rainbow Warrior in the middle of the night in sovereign waters and create a scandal. They still produce products such as yogurt but they can't make decent cars or computers. They've become a museum. Soupault was himself not a religious man, and didn't believe in God although he had been raised a Catholic. Nazi Germany's leaders had also been raised as Catholics but they became pagans. Stalin was on his way to becoming a theologian when he opted for secular power and tried to destroy the churches. Meanwhile, there is plenty of faith in Islamic countries, but they are also basket cases. As countries go, they are among the worst. Faith is necessary but perhaps not sufficient. Weaknesses of the Islamic countries include an asymmetrical family system in which men can have many wives, and the wives are not generally speaking allowed to read or write or participate in the government or in electoral politics, much less in the economy. Moreover, there is no escape option. Islamics are locked in, and if they try to leave it's apostacy and they're killed.

Obama dimly senses that there is power in the Christian churches even though many are leaving. He wants to use them, or what's left of them, but he is not a deeply religious man. Romney is religious, although some say Mormonism is not Christian. Santorum is deeply religious. Bachman is deeply religious. Many Republicans are deeply Christian. It seems likely that religious faith is necessary to winning an American election even if the secular media laughs at the churches and spends air time day and night mocking them. But they haven't killed them, nor have they killed the family. Even God Himself is still alive. We don't like Gingrich or Cain because they were not faithful to their families. We expect Obama to at least pay lip service to his belief in God.

What IS the American dream? What is its foundation? I say it's LAND, FAMILY, and GOD. Santorum is close enough.