They're not exactly the vitriolic polemics one might have expected from the evangelicals of yesteryear.
"This Land Is Your Land" -- originally titled "God Blessed America" -- includes a verse that evokes an America that could not be shouted out of sight by right-wing polemics: "One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple /By the Relief Office I saw my people/As they stood hungry, I stood there wondering if /God Blessed America for me".
Jaden Smith has started modeling for Louis Vuitton's women's line without offering a corresponding polemic on what it "means" that the greater implications of one of the most famous young men in the world is now wearing dresses.
One columnist, Franz Josef Wagner in the tabloid daily Bild, contributed a prescient polemic on Monday.
But his manuscript was no apologia, even though he said of his wartime polemics, "No one told me that what I was writing was wrong, no one in the entire country".
During certain weeks this fall, as many as half of The Times's 10 best-selling nonfiction hardcover books were political polemics from one side or the other, and each, it seemed, rang nastier than the last.
Polemics concerning science and religion continue to the present, notably in the writings of Richard Dawkins (also listed by McEwan in his canon) and Sam Harris on one side, and John Polkinghorne and Francis Collins on the other.
It is to recognize polemics for what they were: the construction of absolute oppositions, where there were differences of understanding on one point, but shared understandings on others, which echoes today.
And it's hardly surprising that a good many of the last decade's commander-in-chief movies aren't really about politics at all, unless you insist on interpreting "Independence Day" as a disguised anti-immigration polemic and "Air Force One" as a serious attempt to grapple with the problem of terrorism.
