God is Everywhere

In the Republican primary campaign, at least. First we had Ted Cruz tell us that all our great presidents "started every day on their knees, asking God for guidance."

Even FDR, Ted? You sure about that?

Now we have Marco Rubio: "Our rights come from God." Let's parse that just a bit.

All our rights come from God. How's she do that?
Does everybody get the same rights, or does God play favorites?
If everybody gets the same rights, how does that work for, say, girls in Afghanistan? Muslims in Myanmar? Do they have the same rights as I do, or don't they?

Now say I am a 70 year-old guy in the USA. Does that work for me?
Okay, how about a 70 year-old black guy in the USA? I was about nine when Brown vs Board of Education was decided. Is that when I got the right to an equal access to education? 'Splain that, in reference to God.
Okay, then: what about the famous "three-fifths" compromise, in the Constitution? You know, the one that apportioned the House of Representatives according to each state's population, adding to the number of free persons, three-fifths of the number of "other persons" in each state. When that provision was overturned, by the amendments of the 1860s, how did that happen, God-wise?

I guess the question comes down to this: Does God change her mind, every so often, or finally get the memo, or what?
Can't God manage to get it right the first time? Perhaps Noah might have said, maybe not. But what does Marco Rubio say?

God Has a Lot to Answer For

I'll be brief.

There are a lot of people who, when confronted with an unimaginable disaster, comfort themselves, and attempt to comfort others, by saying, in effect, that it's all part of God's Plan, and we humans can't understand how it's all for the best, but it is.

There are a lot of people who, when justifying their political opinions (especially if those opinions have to do with interfering with other people undertaking private behaviors like being gay or having abortions), say that they are doing what God told them, personally, to do.

Trouble is, often these are the same people.

So how, on one hand, do they argue that God's intentions are inscrutable, and, on the other, that they themselves have an intimate pipeline* to God's intentions?

This is Fop, goddammit.


*'Scuse the imagery.

Muslims Riot

In some of the more desperately poor countries in the world, I read that followers of Islam have rioted in protest against the cartoons of Charlie Hebdo. I think their war cry is something like, "Stop making fun of a prophet who died fifteen centuries ago! We want to get back to kidnapping our children and selling them into slavery!"

Having their fun

In the early '60s, I dated a girl named Jane; she used to mock her name --you know, "Plain Jane," and that sort of thing. It was the era when folk singers were reaching tha national stage after generations in the dusty background, when Folkways Records became prominent. Jane's father once told me, in discussing the craze for folk music, "we used to think about this music, 'well, let the poor people have their fun.'" His was a wry comment, recognizing at once his generation's being sort of bemused by the current fad as well as being, in some fashion, passé.

Nowadays, this same reaction could be applied to a certain strain of political opinion --I almost said "politcal thought," but that would be to misuse a good English noun. We have a subspecies of Americana which is reaping the rewards of generations of deliberate dumbing-down, which all groups have enthusiastically supported. This is the animus of what my brother calls "flyover country," the places that don't count in our political culture, no matter how they are patronizingly enthused about in the social culture.

I mean the "Don't mess with Texas" syndrome, the aggrieved reaction of rural and less-cosmopolitan places against the perceived (and real) cultural ethos of a bicoastal elite. On one hand, we have celebrities appearing at NASCAR events, to show their genuine American-ness. On the other, we have the ridicule --let's face it, that's what it is-- of rural and small-town values and cultural ignorance, which has been met with defiant acceptance, if I can call it that: "Yes, we're ignorant, and we're proud of it, because we are real people, and you are phonies interested in proving your superiority."

I don't know how this cultural split will end. There was a time when it was not irreversible, when people in the provinces aspired to sophistication. The radio exposed them not just ot the Farm Report before morning chores ("Chicago hogs, forty-seven and three-eighths"), but to Don MacNeil's Breakfast Club, from "high atop the Allerton Hotel in Chicago." My granparents drove to Chicago for the '33 World's Fair, loved it, and returned to their peaceful Kansas town gratefully: Chicago was all right for the people who lived there, and fun to visit; but they didn't know how good we have it here in the country. I think that was a healthy attitude. City mouse and Country mouse had something to offer one another, and, more or less, each one recognized it.

Skip ahead three generations or so. Now we have aggressive Know-Nothingism on one side, and on the other, well, let's be honest: those of us in the Big Blue places think of those rural provinces with pity, when we are being kind, and derision when we are not. No matter that they get the same global CNN that we do; that they can watch, if they choose, Al Jazeera USA just like we can; that the New York Times and the Huffington Post are just as available to them as, every morning in Chicago, they are to me. We look down on them. Maybe at first it was only a slight; we didn't really think about it.

But they felt it, more and more. We didn't just disregard them, we despised them, in some ways. they didn't know how to ride a subway; didn't have panhandlers or traffic jams. They didn't, in some fundamental way, understand the world. Although we could find nobility in villagers in Africa --no matter that they practiced female genital mutilation-- we found villagers in the US, who had cable TV and encouraged education in their children even as they mourned their departure to the big city, pathetic because they sang old Lawrence Welk songs for fun.

And reconstruction didn't end in the 1880s; it just took a break; it came back in the 1960s with a bang, disrupting ways of life and trampling on commonly-held assumptions. No matter that those ways and those assumptions needed updating; the process was seriously disruptive, and it was resented.

So the villagers struck back; and because of the unique characteristics of our polity, they found powerful adherents, organizations who could encourage their sense of marginalization and mobilize it for political purposes. We may only have 3 million people in Oklahoma, but we have as many votes as New York in the United States Senate.

Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy" catered openly to racial resentment. Its adherents mobilized a constellation of views: the South's tradition of militarism, glorified by the Civil War (which, for reasons unclear to me, is still called, in those places, "the War Between the States") and all the more powerful a metaphor because of the devastating loss, like the Serbian reverence for a 13th century battle that they lost. But also the notion, generated by Reconstruction, of a purified time and place --mostly a place-- being defiled by the impositions of outsiders from an inferior, but inexplicably more powerful, place. It is the resentment generated by this, I think, that is most in play today.

But the Civil War was over 150 years ago; resentments need fresh fuel. And so those who saw a political opportunity invented some: let's emphasize and assert, aggressively, our differences: we have religious purity, while you are godless, symbolized by the cultural issues of abortion, gay marriage, and the like. Cultural domination, in the all-knowingness of the "east coast liberals" and the big-city sophisticates. As a defensive measure, being unsophisticated became a sort of a badge of honor, and that had become the supreme test of political virtue: being just a simple guy, not a Washington insider, and so forth. "Common Sense" has become a badge: the less you actually know about something, the greater your virtue, and the more your opinion is "genuine." And this has spread, dangerously, to a world view that despises all experts, be they diplomats or scientists. Resentment has changed into self-righteousness; and the righteous, we know, cannot be wrong whatever they do, or how they do it.

So here we are. We choose our views based on who else holds them. This has reached its apeothesis in the hatred of a black President, who, let's tell the truth here, because he is black, cannot be a legitimate president; and the things he says or does, regardless of whether they are identical to the sayings or doings of his immediate predecessor ("God in the White House," as GWB was styled in some quarters, as he led us into two endless wars), are to be bitterly opposed. And so a fairly conservative president, whose signature accomplishment has been to enable the adoption of a program designed by the Heritage Foundation and previewed by a Republican governor in a northern state, is considered a tyrant who should be assassinated. The faint echoes of the poisoned views, published in Texas in November 1963, of a previous northern democrat in the White House, are hard to overlook.

Well, the poor people are having their fun; it's fun, after all, to be united in a desperate fight against --well, against anything, right? especially if we are doomed to defeat, and unfairly because we are in the Right. This worldview has been encouraged during the entire Obama administration by the Republican Party, which now finds itself out of control and in danger of ceasing to be a national party, to the detriment of us all.

Fun's fun; but we need some responsible leadership on the Right. And it will have to start with telling the truth to the troops. That's going to be hard, because the potential leaders long ago stopped telling themselves the truth. And the Truth is, no one has a trademark on virtue, or on being right, or on patriotism or good sense. And sometimes we have to do what's best for us all, even if it may not, today, be best for me.

Thanks, Mike!

Of course, the commentary in the blogosphere yesterday and today is all about the events in Newtown, Connecticut and the implications for guns in America. And there are lots of opinions. The ones I tend to find persuasive are those that go like this:

"Now, will we finally have a serious conversation about guns in America?"

"No."

I admit, I can't say exactly why this conclusion sounds so appropriate to me. Or, at least, I couldn't, until I read the comments of Mike Huckabee.

‘When we ask why there is violence in our schools, but we've systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools have become a place for carnage because we've made it a place where we don't want to talk about eternity, life, responsibility, accountability? 

'That we're not just going to have to be accountable to the police, if they catch us. But one day, we will stand in judgment before God. If we don't believe that, we don't fear that.’

Huckabee is a righteous man, of course: former governor, a minister of some sort, and, even more importantly, a commentator on Fox: could there be any better credentials? And he's already told us that we don't have a gun problem in America, "we have a sin problem." See, if no one sinned, then there'd be no mass murders. Or shoplifting.

It's hard to argue with that.

Probably the "sin problem" is what is responsible for the fact that Arkansas, where Huckabee was governor, experiences crime on occasion. But we won't ascribe that to the inadequacy of the governor's diagnosis. We know, because Huckabee has effectively informed us, that the god who governs all things human, has either permitted, or perhaps instigated (Huckabee is vague on the mechanism, here) the slaughter of kindergartners where their school, following another federal law, does not permit organized worship in between classes on creationism and so forth.

My own state, Illinois, coincidentally is faced with the necessity of coming up with a law to permit "concealed carry" of firearms, because Judge Richard Posner, ruling for the majority in a 3-judge panel of the 7th Circuit Court of (federal) Appeals, has found that the state's absolute ban on the practice violates the Second Amendment to the Constitution.

Ted & Joe

Am I the only one to see the resemblance ... ?

     

Am I the Only One ...?

... who sees that Michael Medved's pieces in The Daily Beast are, well, stupid, badly reasoned, and generally silly?

Recent examples:

• He thinks that people are getting older, and that older people are more conservative than younger people, and so a Republican resurgence is imminent.
• He believes that John McCain was a charismatic presidential candidate, and offers as proof the fact that he outpolled Republicans seeking congressional seats, in 2008.

There are many more: instances in which Medved looks at a piece of information, then draws conclusions that ignore the history, the context, or an important countervailing factor. I expect him, any day now, to point out that average temperatures have plunged since last August, disproving all the claims about "Global Warming."