DIVINE CERTAINTIES

Gary Kamiya on Ronald Reagan's 1964 campaign speech for that other Barry:

The Speech tapped into the primordial American myth: untrammeled individuality. There must be a territory for Huck Finn to light out to, a promised land where authority--or government--does not reach. In this always-beckoning frontier, all the hindrances that drag Americans down are left behind. Businessmen can run their businesses as they like, free from the plague of do-gooder bureaucrats. White people need not carry the spurious cross of racial guilt. Unruly and ungrateful minorities--pinkos and softies and degenerates and pointy-heads and uppity women-- are shown their place. Above all, the profoundly destabilizing specter of relativism, of compromise, of moral ambiguity, is banished. No longer need Americans accommodate themselves to evil. A divine certainty stretches from sea to shining sea.

This is as much a metaphysical wish as it is a political platform. It is a sermon as much as a speech. And it is in the gap between those two things--the space between the dream of absolute freedom and the reality of a fallen world--that America forever stumbles.

[Also, fine entries from Charles Taylor, Stephanie Zacharek, and one of the best Bob Dylan one-offs, from Joshua Clover.]