In the Heights
I'm here in New York with my family, looking down from the 27th floor as the city comes to life on Sunday morning. As a Hope College graduate, the view is ironic: I can see Marble Collegiate Church on Fifth Avenue, that East Coast citadel of the Reformed Church, and the statue of the late Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, who pastored the church from 1932-84. Both the church and Peale (and his wife, Ruth Stafford Peale) were major supporters of my old alma mater in Holland, Michigan. Peale wrote the best-selling, "The Power of Positive Thinking," an early self-help volume.
Peale was an old-line Republican, not the movement conservative type of Republican that controls the party today. He had veered toward an early version of that in 1960, when he infamously (as spokesman for 150 Protestant clergymen) urged a vote against John F. Kennedy for President because he was a Roman Catholic. "Faced with the election of a Catholic," Peale said, "our culture is at stake." He was widely criticized for that statement, and of course Kennedy narrowly won the Presidency. Peale then withdrew from partisan politics, other than remaining personally close to Richard Nixon and presiding at the wedding of Julie Nixon and David Eisenhower in 1968.
Peale was slow to recognize that American culture, political or otherwise, was changing rapidly. The same can be said for many politicians of both parties today who don't understand the appeal of Barack Obama to Americans, especially young Americans, tired of old white guys like Dick Cheney and Co. screwing up their lives. Given the way American politics is trending this year, Obama seems headed for a historic victory over Sen. John McCain, who seems older in every photo we see. Smart, young, urban, hip, and black/white seems destined to triumph this year over old, white, and suburban.
You could see a lot of this this Zeitgeist in a new Broadway musical, In the Heights, which we saw last night at the Richard Rodgers Theatre. The play, written by 28-year-old Lin-Manuel Miranda, is one of the best musicals I've ever seen. The music is as good or even better than that of "Rent," and the dancing is first-rate. It is ostensibly about the lives and loves of the Hispanic community in Washington Heights, a neighborhood near the top of Manhattan where the George Washington Bridge lands on the island. Yet like Obama, In the Heights transcends ethnicity to offer a story that is simply human and real, about people dealing with change. The actors received a thunderous standing ovation at the end of the show, one of the final previews before the official opening night later this week.
I don't know if Obama has been to see In the Heights. Both Hillary Clinton and John McCain (New York Times columnist Frank Rich ties them together as evil twins today) ought to, if for no other reason than to understand the cultural changes in America that seem destined to make them seem as irrelevant to the modern day as Norman Vincent Peale.