There is no patriotic obligation to help advance the career of a politician who is otherwise pursuing interests that are fundamentally antithetical to your values. That's not the call of patriotism.
The kind of pace that you want to use in a Western - just to acknowledge the land in the distance that everyone has to travel and the way things develop sort of slowly - it's almost the antithetical of what's currently going on in the movies you know.
Planning to play: that's what saving for retirement is today - and it is antithetical to the nature of play fully within the definition of work and blissfully ignorant of the reality of death.
A canon is antithetical to everything the New York art world has been about for the past 40 years during which we went from being the center of the art world to being one of many centers.
We're as clever as we think we are but we'll be a lot cleverer when we learn to use not just one brain but to pool huge numbers of brains. We're at a level technologically where we can share information and think collectively about our problems. We do it in science all the time - there's no reason why we can't do it in other endeavors.