Happy birthday, America.

Well, you made it. Damn, girl, 233 years old. And you don’t look a day over 150.

Now that was quite a birthday, wasn’t it? 1926. That was the year Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll launched their radio show, “Sam ‘n’ Henry,” which, it turned out, was the precursor to another show those two white guys did, the ever-popular “Amos ‘n’ Andy.”

Franco took over Spain that year, and Reza Khan started the Pahlavi dynasty as the Shah of Iran. It was the year of the first television weather map, and the first liquid fuel rocket. Gene Tunney became heavyweight boxing champ, and Harry Houdini died on Halloween. Route 66 was established, and my dad was born. So were Alan Greenspan, Harper Lee, Andy Griffith, Miles Davis, Allen Ginsberg, Marilyn Monroe, Fidel Castro, Chuck Berry, John Coltrane, Ralph David Abernathy, Hugh Hefner and Queen Elizabeth.

Yeah, that was some year, America. It was an exciting time. Broadway was hoppin’, fashion was changing. True, Valentino died that year –the 1920s equivalent of Michael Jackson’s death — but movies were about to speak. And other heroes were flying aircraft over the North Pole. AIG had its American debut that year as American International Underwriters, and Henry Ford invented the weekend when he established the 5-day work week.

Right-wing radio was invented that year too, by a Detroit bigot who was also a priest. Charles Edward Coughlin broadcast his racist and sexist bullshit for nearly 20 years. But all was not lost — Freida Carter invented miniature golf that year in Tennessee, and the St. Louis Cardinals beat the Yankees in 7 games to win the World Series.

But somewhere around that time, we became embroiled in our very first culture war as the old rural-based America ran smack up against the new urban-based America. And not too long after that, the Great Depression crushed a lot of spirits, especially rural ones, preparing the way for America to present a more metropolitan, sophisticated face to the world.

And then we went to war — with guns and blood and death — again and again and again. And even during those few brief moments when we weren’t at war, there was always the threat of war, the threat of certain destruction at the hands of our Enemies, who were, of course, Out to Destroy Our Way of Life.

That culture war reared its ugly head again in the 1960s, although it was tied to a global culture war, that between our obviously superior capitalist way of life and the clearly inferior and nefarious communist way of life.  The idea of “if you’re not with us, you’re against us” took on its current shape around then when the dirty hippie communists began protesting the Vietnam war, not to mention all those not-in-blackface black people for whom a Constitutional amendment granting the right to vote was not enough to guarantee that they could actually vote, thus necessitating a Voting Rights Act that still doesn’t quite do the trick. But that’s another rant.

In the following decade, the Republican party launched its campaign to discredit the mainstream news media, a plot that later succeeded beyond the party’s wildest dreams when the media began to discredit itself, allowing the party operatives in charge of the operation to sit back and relax.

The less said about the ’80s the better. But in the ’90s some really serious shit came down. After 12 glorious years of the systematic dismantling of everything decent about America, a Democrat was elected president. Now, this Democrat was a bit of  a slimebag, and he wasn’t much more liberal than than any moderate Republican (if at all), but the Republicans went into overdrive to portray Bill Clinton as the most liberal, anti-American thing to come down the pike since, well, communism, which was by that time breathing its dying breaths in Europe, thus necessitating a new evil.

Enter Pat Buchanan. Buchanan tried and failed to unseat George H.W. Bush as the GOP’s nominee for president in 1992, but he did get a prime speaking gig at the Republican National Convention, where he launched yet another version of the Culture War. But this time, the enemy was everything that was Not Right Wing, like “environmental extremists” and “radical feminism.”

There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.

…

The agenda [Bill] Clinton and [Hillary] Clinton would impose on America — abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat — that’s change, all right. But it is not the kind of change America wants. It is not the kind of change America needs. And it is not the kind of change we can tolerate in a nation that we still call God’s country.

Buchanan kept it up too, railing against abortion and gays and people who objected to the Confederate battle flag flying over state capitols and taxpayer-funded art. But Bill Clinton won anyway, and Buchanan launched another run for the Republican nomination in 1996.

I will use the bully pulpit of the Presidency of the United States, to the full extent of my power and ability, to defend American traditions and the values of faith, family, and country, from any and all directions. And, together, we will chase the purveyors of sex and violence back beneath the rocks whence they came.

He lost then too, and so did the eventual Republican nominee, Bob Dole.

And even though the Supreme Court put an end-timer into the White House in 2000, Buchanan still didn’t let up in his campaign against immorality. Gay civil unions and the “crudity of the MTV crowd” proved his point, he wrote in 2004.

Well, he may actually have had a point about the MTV crowd.

But anyway, the decline of America, in Pat Buchanan’s world, was all our fault.

Who is in your face here? Who started this? Who is on the offensive? Who is pushing the envelope? The answer is obvious. A radical Left aided by a cultural elite that detests Christianity and finds Christian moral tenets reactionary and repressive is hell-bent on pushing its amoral values and imposing its ideology on our nation. The unwisdom of what the Hollywood and the Left are about should be transparent to all.

Now, you and I know that “in your face” actually means “living on the same planet.” But here we are now in 2009, and we don’t even need Pat Buchanan anymore. We have 52 percent of voters in California to carry on his legacy, not to mention every smiling face on Fox “News” and a whole bunch of folks who have faces made only for radio.

The culture war is on, people, and thanks to folks like Buchanan and Limbaugh and Beck and Savage, it’s been brought full circle, back to finish up a little unfinished business from around America’s 150th birthday, back when America’s “cultural elite” took over the country’s image from the god-fearin’ man who worked with his hands and helped shape this country whole out of dirt he and his friends stole from the folks who were already living here. But that’s another rant too.

Yes, the culture war is on, full bore. But this time, it’s personal. This time, it’s about you and me and our lives, our livelihoods. It’s about our friends, our neighbors and people we’ve never met and never will meet all the way across the country.

America, you’ve not changed all that much since 1926, but where you have changed, it’s been a hard row to hoe for people dedicated to living life frozen in time.

And it’s getting harder. Everything they hold dear is at risk — or so they think. They’ve been told for decades that those of us who don’t think like they do are bound and determined to force them to think as we do.

We’re not. Time will take care of that for us. All we’re asking is for them to step aside and stop hindering the steady march of progress.

That’s nearly impossible, though, and so they’ve taken up arms — some of them literally — to put a stop to this dire threat their way of life faces.

What they don’t realize, of course, is that even if they kill us all, even if we all strangely disappeared from the face of the earth tomorrow, their way of life is nearly done.

Even though their leaders have made us the enemy, we’re not. If it can be said that there is one, it’s time, progress — or really their own recalcitrant attitudes.

So happy birthday, America. Bitterly divided America,  your 233-year-old promise strained almost to the breaking point by this second American revolution, this war of thought and ideas.

How strange that those who fight change most ferociously now claim the mantle of that promise — a promise designed with the flexibility to allow change to take place as the country matures.

And it’s a shame that we have to fight this battle while the real enemies — corruption, fear, greed — run rampant, because every minute we spend defending ourselves from personal cultural assault is another minute the true enemies spend solidifying their stranglehold on the seats of power.

But that’s the root of this culture war, the one that broke to the surface around America’s 150th birthday. The one defined by Those Who Have, but fought by Those Who Have Not against Those Who Have Less because they believe what little they do have is threatened.

It is, but not by those of us who have less — less rights, less access to health care, less access to education, less opportunity, less safety and security. It’s threatened by Those Who Have and who always want more.

That’s not the promise of America. It wasn’t 233 years ago, it wasn’t in 1926 and it isn’t now. When they tell you otherwise, they are lying.

The promise of America is liberty and justice for all. All. Everyone.

It’s really not that hard.