SARAH BANNED IN BOSTON?

It's been a long time since any book was banned in Boston. But Boston's Brahmin class once proudly considered their city the last bastion of good taste in America. A carry-over from the city's early Puritan days, these starchy standards seeped all the way into the first half of our 20th C under the new name Victorianism.

Strange as it may seem at first blush, this is the very culture Sarah Palin and her Fox News peers want back...!

They may not understand or say it in quite this way, but when you de-code their "bring back our America" battlecry, they're really saying we should once again be mostly small-town WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant). You know, Mayberry USA. And while millions cheer her, other millions jeer and fear her. Is such a Bostonization of America actually pending? And is this a simple either/or choice for the rest of us?

True, WASP America was neat and nice. But mostly for the America Ms Palin wants back. The America that left out most blacks, women, immigrants, gays and big cities. Palin's romanticized over-simplification of "the real America" is in many ways poisoned fruit. But on the other hand, there are some plants in that garden worth re-considering. Not the hypocritical racial/ethnic practices, but the high-toned principles that were held up as the American ideal.

Like...?

Like the best-selling novels, movies, television, and national magazines which after WWII spun a shiny tapestry of right over wrong, honor over compromise, Biblical and Lincolnian wisdoms wherever possible, and always always ending with saluting family and flag.

Sarah's simplistic siren-call today is touching some very serious cultural nerves. I could hear the hoorays from her 10-minutes-away-from-us Rosemont Auditorium appearance on May 12. Don't ask the cheering crowd that day to explain exactly why they were cheering -- they can't -- but do consider what deep-down nerves she was touching.

Those nerves don't have much to do with the actual historic practices back then. But they have everything to do with those shiny principles we believed in so passionately. Even without always practicing them. If true, here's the question -- how can the rest of us now begin salvaging the second from out of the first...?