OAK PARK, Ill.--A Pier 1 Imports store now stands where the home of some early settlers to Oak Park once stood.  These settlers could watch men drive cattle towards Chicago to be slaughtered.  They headed west on a dirt road that would become Lake Street.

        This village about six miles from Chicago's Loop was once home to Frank Lloyd Wright and Ernest Hemingway.  In a less than charitable phrase, Hemingway described Oak Park as a community of "broad lawns and narrow minds." 

        You have to wonder how much times have changed in Oak Park.  The broad lawns are still here, but when it comes to politics, perhaps the narrow minds have become closed minds.

        Oak Park is a prosperous community.  The median income for a household in the village is about $59,200, and the median income for a family is about $81,700.  The village also has one of the highest rates of intellectuals and college faculty members of any city in Illinois.  Yet even with their above average income and education, many residents here, like elsewhere, vote from habit and unexamined ideologies. 

        It is out of their habit and ideologies that Oak Parkers "hate" President George Bush and "his" war. Talk to voters here and some will say that this is a war for oil, yet even as gas prices rise, they cannot answer the question, "So, where's the oil?"  In fact the Bush Iraq policy in the long run may have us win the war but lose the oil. 

The Slide Into Modernity

        Recently, Senator Obama gave a speech on "patriotism" and another speech on "religion" in which he proposed to expand faith based initiatives.  Then, he changed his position on the war and encouraged a "gradual" withdrawal from Iraq. 

        The few Republicans in Oak Park counter this rhetoric with a political reality of their own.  They question the "Obama phenomena."  They argue that if Senator Obama keeps speaking, then traditional religion and patriotism soon will become by rhetoric what they are not.

        How can this happen?  If there is an explanation for the "Obama Phenomena" among Oak Park residents, then it must be an explanation that considers the present day reality of voters in this suburb. This requires that we admit many voters in Oak Park are attracted to Senator Obama for all the irrational reasons voters are attracted to any candidate.  In politics a perceived reality becomes the reality.

        Besides irrational reasons, there are also rational and historical ones that explain the motives of present day Oak Park voters.  Consider first that fact that there are many churches in downtown Oak Park. The churches range from Unitarian to Roman Catholic.  The many churches of Oak Park remind us that it was out of churches like these that the abolitionists came. 

        There would have been no War Between the States without the social forces set in motion by these abolitionists.  Their convictions made them settle for nothing less than the complete abolition of slavery, even if it meant shedding blood.

        Decades after the abolitionists, Reverend Ernest Bell left Austin, a community just east of Oak Park, and rode the commuter train to downtown Chicago.  There he would lead the bloodless crusade against prostitution and "white slavery" in Chicago's Levee District. 

        From this community of churches in Oak Park also came followers of Martin Luther King, Jr.  Yet, something happened after that civil rights movement.  The religious motive was transformed into the socialist motive.  The churches in Oak Park kept their form, but seemed to have lost their content.

        Times change.  The ceremony of the Eucharist gives way to singing and preaching, and then, singing and preaching gives way to Marxism.  It was the 1960s that happened, and then in the 1970s it was Roe v. Wade that happened.

        The generation of the 1960s were the parents of many of those who now live in Oak Park.  These upper middle class parents used their wealth to educate their children.  The children, however, inherited only half a tradition. 

        After the 1960s, the loss of tradition furthered by changes in education, the protest against the war in Vietnam, a faceless modern architecture, the Civil Rights Movement. and Roe v. Wade, came together in a mosaic that saw all protest groups as equal.  Many Oak Parkers slid into modernity and embraced cultural and moral relativism.

        It was this slide into modernity that saw the religious content of protest drop out and secular liberalism take its place.  The Democrat Party became the political party of the left and in urban areas, it became the party that managed minorities. 

        In documenting this change, one observer writes, "Recently, Oak Park demographics have shifted from long-term, more conservative residents, to younger, urban, more liberal residents."

        This shift left behind the white working class and the "Reagan Democrats," who still feel uncomfortable with the Obama for President campaign.  As it happens, few of these conservative Democrats now live in Oak Park.  They cling to their guns and religion farther west in Melrose Park and elsewhere.

        It is also a blindness to corruption on the local level in Chicago and the hope for virtue on the national level that makes the Democrat Party in Oak Park a party of political schizophrenics.  They see one thing happening in Chicago but believe another thing in Oak Park.

        President Bush and Mayor Daley share a common biography.  They both came to office on the tender of their father's name, but in Oak Park the civil rights metaphor can turn this stone into bread for Democrats.

        Senator Obama's campaign to become President was born from Chicago's political corruption.  Tony Rezko, who is now in prison, could be called the stepfather of the Obama campaign.  It was Rezko money that first greased the wheels on which the bandwagon rolls.

        Voters in Oak Park know this, but they don't care.  The Trojans wanted peace, too, and never thought to look inside their trophy.  So, the Obamination of Oak Park is accomplished not by connecting the dots of reason but by playing hopscotch.

Civil Rights and Post-Americans

        Abortion on demand, the result of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, was the seed from which much of the contemporary liberal, Democrat Party politics grew.  Senator Barack Obama is one of the fruits of this harvest.  He has consistently voted in favor of abortion, even supporting partial birth abortion. 

        Radical feminism and same sex marriage also sprang from the seed of abortion on demand.  Many of the liberals of Oak Park saw all these causes as part of the expanded cause of "civil rights." 

        It is an expanded view of civil rights that has lead some Democrats in Oak Park to misunderstand the real threat Western Civilization faces from Islam.  The events of 9/11 are still given a left twist here.  The invasion of Iraq did little to clear the fog the media creates about Islam as a "peaceful religion." 

        You'd think 1,500 years of Islam's conflict with the West would be taught in the Oak Park River Forest High School, whose Classical Greek motto since 1908 is "Ta G'arista," or "those things that are best." 

        Maybe, with iPods plugged in every ear, students in Oak Park don't have to read about the aristocratic root of their motto.  They can forget about the sack of Constantinople, too. 

        Today, many students at OPRF high school are taught a curriculum that emphasizes relativism instead of the judgment of what is best.  How many of Oak Park's students believe that even if the United States never had a black man or woman as president, it still could be a great and good country? 

        Like their parents, these students are becoming what author Mark Krikorian calls "post-American."  A post-American no longer believes in American exceptionalism.  Many post-Americans no longer believe in the nation state, either.  For them, traditional patriotism is old fashioned and outmoded. 

        For post-Americans, The Declaration of Independence served its purpose, but we have to put it behind us.  France is disappearing as a nation state.  Why shouldn't the United States do likewise? 

        It is the charming relativism and globalism of Senator Obama that appeals to many Oak Park residents.  When the senator says he wants to change America, AND THE WORLD, they put aside the old belief of "American exceptionalism," and follow him into a new world order that may be more pandemonium than peace.

        Senator Obama holds out for us religion without content and patriotism without a nation.  It is the political equivalent of a shell without an egg.  The far left Democrat Party that supports him has become a shell institution, too, an institution that sociologist Anthony Giddens claims looks the same from the outside but is radically changed on the inside.

        Yet, the Democrat Left is not without a morality.  It believes the United States MUST become a secular state before it disappears as a nation state.  Senator Obama is attractive to post-Americans because he offers a mirror image of morality that reflects this secular obligation.

The Lump of History

        On lazy summer afternoons, Oak Park teenagers hang out at Tasty Dog on Lake Street.  They paint their faces with makeup, laugh, text message one another, and try out their new bodies with stuttered gestures of desire. 

        We may wonder about these teenagers the same way the poet Cavafy wondered when he wrote, "They put on bracelets with so many amethysts, and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds."  These high school students are carefree.  Their parents will take care of politics, the bills, and all that. 

        Some reports say Constantinople was so vast that when Sultan Mehmed the Second's troops breached the defensive wall on one side of the city it took days for news of the defeat to reach the other side.  Chaos and looting did not pass by the distant residents, it was just delayed. 

        Maybe it would be better if the residents of Oak Park had cynical minds instead of narrow ones.  Then, they would see that Illinois Democrats are not out for change or social justice, but simply politicians out for power.  They want to make the nation look like Chicago.  And the Republicans, well, they may want the nation to look like Elmhurst.

        Perhaps, too, there are other forces at work besides party politics that shape our future and our destiny.  These forces may make the election of Senator Obama to be president irrelevant. 

        Revisionist historians now tell us that the War Between the States could have been avoided, and the Second World War avoided, too.  These wars happened because our politicians and our politics failed us. 

        Still, the Holocaust remains an undigested lump in their understanding.  As President Lincoln reminds us, no matter how we rewrite it, we cannot escape history, even in Oak Park.

        Some of us lived through the presidency of Jimmy Carter, for better or worse.  Others will say they bore witness to the regime of President Bush.  Try as we may, we may not be able to head off Armageddon. All we may be able to do is bear witness. 

        Early on a Sunday morning in July it is quiet in Oak Park.  An SUV stops in front of the Starbucks on Lake Street.  A man gets out followed by his wife and children.  They go to buy coffee and snacks.

        Moments later, mom sips a latte as dad raises the tailgate and rearranges sleeping bags, a cooler, and backpacks.  They are heading out on vacation, but first, breakfast.

        Then, the doors of the SUV slam shut.  They drive off.  An "Obama '08" and a "Peace Now" bumper sticker are conspicuously in place above the SUV's tail lights.  The political tide rises.  Good men may be mistaken.  Follow at your own risk.