Schama on reaching across the divide:
I don't want to heal the wound, I want to scratch the damned thing until it hurts and bleeds - and then maybe we'll have what it takes to get up from the mat. Do we think the far-right Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, in the ashy dawn of his annihilation in 1964, wanted to share? Don't think so. He wanted to win; sometime. And now, by God, he has.
And on the inefficacy of technology to persuade:
For most of us purblind writers spend our days in Worldly America and think that Godly America is some sort of quaint anachronism, doomed to atrophy and disappear as the hypermodernity of the cyber age overtakes it, in whatever fastness of Kentucky or Montana it might still circle its wagons. The shock for the Worldlies is to discover that Godly America is its modernity; that so far from it withering before the advance of the blog and the zipdrive, it is actually empowered by them. The tenacity with which Godly America insists the theory of evolution is just that - a theory - with no more validity than Creationism, or that Iraqis did, in fact, bring down the twin towers, is not in any way challenged by the digital pathways of the information age. In fact, such articles of faith are expedited and reinforced by them. Holy bloggers bloviate, Pentecostalists ornament their website with a nimbus of trembling electronic radiance and, for all I know, you can download Pastor John Ashcroft singing the Praises of the Lord right to your Godpod.
I was feeling pretty blue, it being Veteran's Day and all (did you know more part-time reservists died Monday than any single day in the last year and half?), but Schama cheered me up a little (and so did my haircut).
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