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Abortion, funding for the arts, womens rights, gay rights, court-packingthe list of controversies that divide our nation runs long and each one cuts deep. Professor Hunters book,Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, shows that these issues are not isolated from one another but are, in fact, part of a fabric of conflict which constitutes nothing short of a struggle over the meaning of America. Unlike the religious and cultural conflict that historically divided the nation, the contemporary culture war is fought along new and, in many ways, unfamiliar lines. Its foundation is a profound realignment in American culture which cuts across established moral and religious communities.

Culture Warspresents a riveting account of how Christian fundamentalist, Orthodox Jews, and conservative Catholics have joined forces in a fierce battle against their progressive counterpartssecularist, reform Jews, liberal Catholics and Protestantsas each side struggles to gain control over such fields of conflict as the family, art, education, law, and politics. Not since the Civil War has there been such fundamental disagreement over basic assumptions about truth, freedom, and our national identity.

Robert Coles, author ofThe Spiritual Life of Children, reviewed the book, saying, An extraordinary intellectual achievementa careful and immensely constructive analysis of the sources of the moral and cultural conflicts which continue to confront us in late twentieth-century America. And Christopher Lasch, author ofThe Culture of Narcissism, saying, Hunters careful study removes any lingering doubt about the depth of the ideological divisions in American society [A] valuable corrective to the perceived wisdom that America is a classless society united by a broad middle-class consensus. As well as Peter L. Berger, director of the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture at Boston University, saying, Hunter gives a careful overview of the cultural conflicts in America today and makes some modest proposals on how they might be resolved.

Reviews Andrew M. Greeleys review, With God on Their Sides, in theNew York Times Peter Steinfels review, Beliefs, in theNew York Times Read an archived version of Thomas Brynce Edsallsreviewfrom theWashington Monthly

Awards 1992 Critics-Choice Award (Christianity Today) Finalist 1992 L.A. Times Book Prize Selected as an alternate in the Book of the Month Club, the History Book Club,and the Quality Paperback Book Club Honorable Mention, Phi Beta Kappa Book Competition

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Culture Wars James Davison Hunter

Garum has been bringing the umami flavor for centuries.

Jenny LunaJul. 23, 2017 6:00 AM

During the early morning hours at the ports of the Mediterranean, circa 50 A.D, fishermen would haul hundreds of anchovies, mackerel, and tuna back to shore, gut the carcasses, and leave them on the docks. As the sun heated the day, the fish entrails began to ferment. Its not exactly the most appetizing scene to imagine, but it was the way thatearly chefs concocted one of the most highly sought-after sauce in ancient Rome: garum.

[People] would move the fish outside of the city because it created such a stench, says Tom Nealon, an antique cookbook collector and the author ofFood Fights & Culture Wars: A Secret History of Taste. On the latest episode ofBite,we talked toNealon about his attempt to recreate an ancient recipe that incorporated garum (sneak preview: It didnt go very well). The interview with Nealon begins at 11:15:

Garum, orcolatura di alici,wasnt unlike South Asian fish sauce, a condiment that gives Thai and Vietnamese food its distinctive umami flavor. In ancient Rome, the highest-quality garum was saved for elites, the lower quality for slaves.

Engraving of fisherman, 18th Century

Wellcome Library, London/ Courtesy of The Overlook Press

But Garum brought more than a distinctive flavor to 3rd and 4th century cuisineit also helped historians put a precise date on the fall of Pompeii. According to Pompeiis Applied Research Laboratory, when leftover jars of rotten fish bones and entrails were discoveredat the site of one of the ancient citys producers, they were referenced against written accounts to confirm the eruption of Mount Vesuvius on August 24 of 79 A.D.

If youre hungry for a taste from the past, its not too late to get a robustly savory dish made with garum. Companies in Italys Amalfi Coast still honor tradition and produce the sauce, and US restaurantslikeAva Genes in Portland now import bottles.

To hear more from Nealon and discover other ancient recipes inspired by Season 7 ofGame of Thrones,listen to our latest episode ofBite.

Jenny Luna is a Ben Bagdikian fellow at Mother Jones. She covers education and immigration and her work has appeared in the Miami Herald, WNYC, and the Wilson Quarterly. Follow her on Twitter @J2theLuna or email her at jluna@motherjones.com.

Mother Jones is a nonprofit, and stories like this are made possible by readers like you. Donate or subscribe to help fund independent journalism.

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How a Smelly Fish Sauce Helped Solve One of Ancient Rome's Mysteries - Mother Jones

A scene from Christopher Nolans Dunkirk. Photograph: Bros/Kobal/Rex/Shutterstock

Christopher Nolans film Dunkirk landed this week, and parts of the right did their best to turn it into another episode in the culture wars. They were clearly expecting that the cultural left would get much more upset about a big war movie depicting the travails of cis white men. The fact that this didnt happen led to some unintentional comedy. Meanwhile, some of them didnt get what they expected from the movie. Its Saving Private Ryan, and some conservatives found it to be too grim, and too much like actual war to count as a celebration of it.

Publication: Breitbart

Author: James Delingpole made his name as a climate change troll across the pond. Now he has free rein to take whatever comes into his head and smear it all over Breitbart.

Why you should read it: The right is itching for a culture war over Dunkirk. Wouldnt it be fantastic if the left got upset about a celebrated moment in the second world war the op-eds would write themselves! Sadly, no one has really come to the party. Delingpoles misfire here is launched on the basis of a single, ambiguous sentence in a straightforward, complimentary USA Today review, which notes that some might be upset by the lack of women and people of color in the cast. This casual statement of fact is amplified by Delingpole, and others, into a full-throated PC attack on the tommies on the beach. But you wonder, as you read, whether their heart is in this stuff any more.

Extract: Yes, its true that Dunkirks leading roles are indeed dominated by white European males. But one possible reason for this is that Dunkirk was an actual historical event which director Christopher Nolan has gone to considerable trouble to re-create as accurately as possible.

Publication: National Review

Author: Kyle Smith

Why you should read it: Smith cant help but admire Nolans technical achievement, but its all a little too close, for his tastes, to the catalogue of misery of real war. He wishes Nolan had injected a little more sentimentality. One wouldnt want to draw too much from a movie review, but you do begin to wonder, reading a review like this: how much of the highbrow rights habitual appreciation for martial glory is derived from its Hollywood depictions, and how much from reality?

Extract: Patriotic declarations, too, are such war-movie staples that Nolan studiously avoids the usual approach, presenting perhaps the greatest speech of the 20th century in the least grandiose way imaginable. In my book, that makes the power of the words all the more effective, but so grueling is the journey upon which Nolan has taken us that we require more relief than he gives us more payoff, as the studio suits would say, more catharsis, more (if you like) tear-jerking.

Publication: The Spectator

Author: Deborah Ross is not anyones idea of a rightwing ideologue, but in the Daily Mail and the Spectator she produces reviews for those publications rightwing audiences.

Why you should read it: The complaint here is similar to National Reviews the technical side is stunning but there is no heart behind the unremitting bleakness. Nolans own politics have been criticised in the past as rightwing, even crypto-fascist, on the basis of films like The Dark Knight Rises. Perhaps there was an expectation of something more jingoistic, rousing or frankly rightwing.

Extract: But mostly you must understand that Nolan wants us to come at events as they happened, which means this isnt about individual heroism, or any kind of character development. (No one carries a letter from a beloved in their inside pocket, for example.) It is brave, and even admirable, but if you are fond of an emotional core? Then you will sorely feel the lack of it.

Publication: Washington Examiner

Author: Tom Rogan pumps out acres of conservative commentary for the Washington Examiner. He has worked previously at a range of places, and prominently at National Review. He is not camera-shy, and shows up frequently on Fox News.

Why you should read it: Rogan, too, tries to make something out of some innocuous remarks, and historical ambiguities, in reviews from outlets like USA Today and Rolling Stone. Somehow, he takes these reviews of a film about a British defeat and makes them the basis of an affirmation of middle America and Donald Trump. I guess this is why he gets the big bucks.

Extract: Of course, it was those of Trumps America middle America that formed the forces that saved the world from the Nazis and imperial Japan. Those young men, like my grandfather from Fishers Island, New York, knew nothing of European history. But like their brothers at Dunkirk and in the skies over Britain (like my other grandfather), they saved it anyway.

Publication: The Wall Street Journal

Author: Dorothy Rabinowitz is a Wall Street Journal editorial board member, who has been noted for years as an antagonist of radical crazies and [the] fascist left. Oddly, she seems to have pegged Christopher Nolan as one of them.

Why you should read it: Rabinowitz sees Nolans decision to centre everything on the action on the beaches, and to leave the larger political situation in the background, as not only a dumbing-down, but perhaps as something even more sinister. By leaving Churchill out, she thinks, Nolan moves the whole thing away from great men to collectivism.

Extract: When an event in history has become, in the mind of a writer, universal, its a tipoff the warning bell that were about to lose most of the important facts of that history, and that the storytelling will be a special kind - a sort that obscures all specifics that run counter to the noble vision of the universalist.

No wonder those German Stukas and Heinkels bombarding the British can barely be identified as such. Then there is Mr Nolans avoidance of Churchill lest audiences get bogged down in politics a strange term for Churchills concerns during those dark days of May 1940. One so much less attractive, in its hint of the ignoble and the corrupt, than communal and universal words throbbing with goodness. Nothing old-fashioned about them either, especially universal - a model of socio-babble for all occasions.

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Dunkirk: the film that has rightwing writers itching for a culture war - The Guardian

The name of William Woodward (Hootie) Johnson, who died last week at 86, is not likely to be widely familiar. He was the scion of a South Carolina banking dynasty, and something of a civil-rights pioneer in his home state: Recruiter of African-Americans in the family firms and local politics; supporter of integration in South Carolina's schools and colleges; the first white Southerner to serve on the board of directors of the Urban League. He was also an avid golfer, and chairman of the Augusta National club, home of the Masters tournament, between 1998 and 2006.

It was that last association that transformed Johnson into an involuntary recruit in the culture warsand revealed the potentially corrosive, and corrupting, power of the press.

In 2002, a left-wing gadfly and publicist named Martha Burk, head of the National Council of Women's Organizations, wrote a letter to Johnson, noting the fact that the famously exclusive and expensive Augusta National had no female members. Burk, of course, did not write to Johnson to inform him of a fact he already knew. Her letter, which was simultaneously delivered to the media, contained an ill-disguised threat: "We urge you to review your policies and practices in this regard," she said, "and open your membership to women now, so that this is not an issue when the [Masters] tournament is staged next year."

If Johnson had been, say, the president of Yale, and not chairman of Augusta National, he would have moved swiftly to appease Burk and prevent what any public-relations counselor would have warned to be bad publicity. But Johnson's response was complicated by the fact that the New York Times, edited at the time by Howell Raines, took up Burk's cause as its own.Therein lies a lesson, and the reason why Hootie Johnson's gothic family nickname briefly became a household term.

Howell Raines was, and remains, a left-wing southerner with something of a reputation as a newsroom zealot and bully. In his brief, volatile reign as the Times's executive editor (2001-03)he was brought down by misconduct in the Jayson Blair scandalhis politics and temperament inspired a special vehemence about certain genteel institutions in the South: Augusta National and Southern Living magazine, among others. He was also famous for employing a sports analogy"flooding the zone"to describe his professional instinct to harass targets, splash stories, and hector readers.

Prompted by his ideological comrade-in-arms, Martha Burk, Raines proceeded to flood the zone around Augusta National. In the next few months, the New York Times published literally dozens of stories on the subject (many on the newspaper's front page) and deployed his newsroom consigliere, the late Gerald M. Boyd, to scratch publication of dissenting arguments from Times sports columnists.

For his part, Johnson proved equal to the challenge. He answered Burk's extortionate terms with a polite, but pointed, message. He understood, of course, that Burk would "attempt to depict the members of our club as insensitive bigots and coerce the sponsors of the Masters to disassociate themselves under threatreal or impliedof boycotts and other economic pressures." But he also reminded her, and Raines, of the right of free association in America, and the perils of a powerful, and capriciously politicized, media.

Johnson assumed that the Masters' corporate sponsors would surrender to the threat of political pressure and unwelcome coverage but he also knew that Augusta National's affluent membership was uniquely prepared, and largely disposed, to resist coercion: "There may well come a day when women will be invited to join our membership," he wrote, "but that timetable will be ours and not at the point of a bayonet."

In the meantime, the Times-abetted spectacle played itself out. For a couple of pleasant seasons, the Masters was broadcast on television without commercials, as Augusta National opted to dispense with ads rather than put sponsors in a difficult position. The Times endeavored regularly to paint Johnson as an unreconstructed bigot, and when Burk arrived in Augusta in 2003 to stage a public demonstration, the protesters were heavily outnumbered by reporters. That was the same year Raines lost his job, and the Times dropped the story, moving on to other crusades.

All of which leads to two instructive postscripts. Five years ago, with Hootie Johnson as sponsor, Augusta National welcomed its first female members, one of whom is former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. And last week, Johnson died. It is worth noting that his New York Times obituary"Hootie Johnson, 86; Fought Admission of Women at Masters Site"was not just churlish in tone (see above headline) but devoid of any mention of the Times's leading role in the farce.

And of course the Times gave Burk the last word on Johnson: "'I think history will remember him as the Lester Maddox of golf,' referring to the segregationist governor of Georgia who refused to serve blacks in restaurants." In truth, of course, in the civil rights-era South, Hootie Johnson was the exact opposite of Lester Maddoxas Burk and the Times well know, just as the Times failed to mention the party affiliation of the "segregationist governor."

Philip Terzian is a senior editor of The Weekly Standard.

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Remembering Hootie Johnson, Survivor of the Culture Wars - The Weekly Standard

Eleven-year-old Lizzie Goldberg-Jones is a big fan of watching SpongeBob. Shes also a good kid. So because her little brother Petey loves watching Dusty, a giant, purple, animated dustball that airs on public television, she cheerfully enters a contest to have her family featured on Dustys award-winning television program.

TV matters. It matters to everyone, Lizzie says in her video entry, which wins the prize.

But when Lizzie and Petey turn out to have two proud, married daddies, Dusty and his creators find themselves in hot water with the White House, where the newly-appointed Presidents Special Counsel on Children and Child Welfare wants to yank the programs federal funding and stop the episode from airing.

At the Marthas Vineyard Playhouse through July 29, Cusi Crams political comedy Dusty and the Big Bad World is a fast-paced and funny take on the culture wars of the last Republican administration, sparing neither the right nor the left as both sides struggle over Dustys survival.

Kevin Cirone and Zada Clarke. MJ Bruder Munafo

Entering to the strains of Hail to the Chief, Charlotte Booker plays incoming special counsel Marianne, so in love with her new job that she rapturously sniffs a box of pencils as she plans to make public television more public by defunding shows like Dusty that give air time to gay families.

Ms. Booker, who originated the role in its 2008 world premiere, plays Marianne with vigor and self-confidence.

The people have spoken again, and here we are, she trills to her assistant Karen, played with hilarious awkwardness by Zada Clarke.

Wobbling anxiously in her office pumps and trying not to look at the large portrait of George W. Bush on the wall, Karen is wary of her new boss. Still, deeply grateful to have any kind of job, she gradually allows Marianne to befriend her. But when she gets wind of Mariannes intention to give Dusty the sack, Karen rebels and starts digging into her bosss past, sharing the dirt Deep Throat-style with Dustys writer Nathan (Kevin Cirone), whos already up to his eyeballs in paranoia.

Caught between the panicking Nathan and threats from the head of the Public Broadcasting System who happens to be a sorority sister of Mariannes is Dustys producer Jessica, powerfully played by Victoria Adams-Zischke.

At first, unable to believe that a show with seven Emmys and a Peabody could be canceled over a single episode, Jessica comes to realize that there is nothing you do with great love that wont at some point punch you in the stomach.

Charlotte Booker (left) originated the role of Marianne in 2008 production. MJ Bruder Munafo

And then theres young Lizzie, arguably the most level-headed of the lot, who joins forces with Nathan to invade Mariannes office and demand that Dusty be spared.

I have no idea how they got in here, Karen gasps to her boss. One of my dads founded ACT UP, thats how, Lizzie retorts.

But while Dustys defenders think they have Marianne cornered, shes still got some tricks in her political playbook.

Playhouse artistic and executive director MJ Bruder Munafo directs the excellent cast, which includes two local actors sharing the role of Lizzie. Nina Moore and Kaya Seiman, both of Oak Bluffs, are alternating performances in what Ms. Bruder Munafo said is a common practice with child actors on Broadway, but a first for a playhouse production.

Lisa Pegnatos elegantly simple set encapsulates the two worlds that clash in Ms. Crams play. To the audiences left are the offices where Jessica and Nathan labor in adjoining cubicles at WGBH in Boston. On the right of course is Mariannes office with its view of the Capitol. Center stage is the Union Station coffee shop where Karen and Nathan plot to bring the special counsel down.

Island musician and educator Brian Weiland wrote the Dusty theme song, with words by Ms. Bruder Munafo. The play has two acts with a 15-minute intermission and a total running time of about two hours. The show continues through July 29.

For tickets and information, visit mvplayhouse.org.

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Dusty and the Big Bad World Adds Levity to the Culture Wars - The Vineyard Gazette - Martha's Vineyard News