I found what you wrote all very interesting, and though not "political" perhaps uber-poliical.

The way I look at it, is an awful lot of human behavior can be understood by 2 phenomena, which acount for much in art, politics, and human interaction:

One, people need attention. It's been shown that infants that are given full attention through the first months tend to grow up healthier, bigger, smarter, and better able to keep their internal balance in later years, so attention is like a food for the soul in a hugely literal sense. (Same holds true for plants and animals.) Bad art is driven by the need to get attention and little else, whereas good art might have that component, but also adds the urge to uncover and/or share something about reality.

Two, sentimentality is often a self-engineered distraction from the dictates of Conscience. You don't have to look at reality, which can be a painful thing especially when it comes to seeing our own infantile preoccupations.  When you are in the grips of emotion about one or another BIG theme (think Wagner), besides the fact that there's a payoff with sentimentality of that cloying sweet feeling you get, it's simply too much to review one's own behavior. It's a falsification of emotion, overlaid with a "logical" rationale.

It isn't so much that the truth is too hard to bear, it's that people get unwilling to pay the price for the truth. Example from my life: a Christian friend, who is good to every person she meets, supports Bush and doesn't want to even contemplate his corruption, because the price is she'd have to feel afraid if he really isn't protecting her. So she goes all sentimental when his name is brought up.

So I think you are onto something actually very important, and continued inquiry into the areas you are looking into will be fruitful for you. Just my 2 cents.