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.]