c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of “My Brother Joseph,” published by St. Martin Press.)

(UNDATED) Vice President Al Gore is not the only entity with a diffuse and confusing personality in our national life.

If you feel that everything in America is turning into everything else _ politics into entertainment and entertainment into politics, Democrats into Republicans and vice-versa, common sense into madness while lunacy rules what should be obvious judgments _ you are not the problem.

Welcome to the Blur, the condition of our times, in which, at this very moment, the summer game of baseball may be played in snow showers and ice hockey kicks off its season in a heat wave.

You are the eyewitness to these collapsing categories of millennial life and, like all eyewitnesses, you may be confused and hard pressed to describe exactly what you see in this car wreck culture in which identities merge swiftly, and sometimes explosively, like the gasoline rivulets from the entangled vehicles.

In his wonderful new book, “From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life,” Jacques Barzun notes that the artist is both jester and prophet in any culture. If we listen to the artists, we hear them both jesting with and prophesying the Blur, that merging and confounding of content and technique that document our enormous spiritual, psychological and moral problem.

In the Arts Section of a recent New York Times, Jennifer Dunning describes the Blur in the work of a contemporary dance company: “Arthur Aviles mixes hip-hop, social dancing and fairy tales in works that reflect, in part, on being gay and Puerto Rican.” The dancer explains: “I am a mix. A little bit of Taino Indian. Black slave. And Spaniard. So I am the conqueror and the victim at the same time.”

The dancer describes the way many Americans feel, and why, professing to be a conqueror and a victim in the same breath, Vice President Gore has confused so many people. He is trying to speak to the Blur, advocating risk-taking by playing it safe, generosity through selfishness, tomorrow through yesterday, and noble truth through ignoble exaggeration.

Stylish essayist Margo Jefferson writes of the difficulty in categorizing the musical “Contact.”

“Definitions mean boundaries … the boundaries we once knew are disappearing. At most, we have borders now, meant to be crossed, redrawn or erased.”

This follows a parade of similar essays.

Art is reflecting this boundary-deprived world in which everything is the same, nothing is better than anything else, and you can swallow and digest everything, from a president’s lies under oath to a Mexican taco in an identity crisis because of the diverse contents stuffed into it.

Conqueror and victim. No wonder so many Americans have heartburn. Even the drug commercials reflect the moral and spiritual Blur by reassuring you, “Eat whatever you want, and as much as you want; our pill will cure you of the consequences.”

Our possible president, Gore, summed it up under the heat of the campaign finance scandal a few years ago when he said, “There is no controlling legal authority.”

In reality, we suffer the Blur because we have lost a sense of healthy authority and, in its place, have erected this protoplasmic array that has no organizing nucleus. It can only spread, covering the moral landscape like a flood that buries both roads and road signs.

The Blur in the arts and politics reflects the blur in morality and spirituality. None of these offerings or their offerers speaks with authority, with that compelling centrality of truth uttered aloud about our experience that makes everyone turn to listen.

Perhaps that is what Pope John Paul II senses as he says the church is unique in its character and teachings, and, like it or not, its teachings cannot be merged into the Blur of the New Age faith that provides a pseudo-religion that matches the broader culture almost perfectly.

The New Age provides a sensate spirituality without any teachings, demands or adverse consequences. The Alka-Seltzer is blended into its Macbeth witches’ stew of spirituality.

One may disagree with the pope’s way of telling the world that his idea of a church does not include blurry edges. But one can understand and sympathize with his sense that the Blur in which everything is the same is the modern counterpart of the apple offered in Eden a long time ago.

DEA END RNS