Welcome to the New Wedge Politics: A political calculus.

Well, it's here. (Or, rather, it's back.) White, Christianist * Terrorism (yes, terrorism, since the Right has decided to use this term when it's convenient to its purposes). Charged with plotting to kill police officers and civilians and to set in motion a new American Civil War, the aims of these armed Christianist militiamen were entirely politico-religionist and ideological: they have committed treason against the United States government and its people and engaged in seditious activities. In yearning to start the next Civil War, these militiamen stand alongside the tea-bagger rank and file.

 This is a moment in which the bogusness of the Fox News Right's sham claims to consistency, moral authority and—most deliciously ironic of all—patriotism is exposed for all to see. And I mean exposed in a way that forces the old-fashioned Republican base—the suburban, upper-middle class—to confront the chaos, ugliness and violence in which all supporters of the current Republican Party have been complicit.

The wealthier households of the American suburban bourgeoisie, who have long served as the real political base of the Republican Party—and whose defection to Obama in 2008 helped cost McCain the presidency—basically only care about two things:

1. physical security for themselves and their families at all costs, and
   
   
2. low taxes (i.e.: financial security for themselves and their families at all costs).

Whichever party can scare this still-very-powerful echelon of the American citizenry into perceiving** that either (1) or (2)—in that order—or both cannot be trusted in the hands of the other party, wins.

[***]

Consider, for example, Joe Briefcase. Joe is a medium-level Big Shot in the [whatever] business and is a case study in the mentality of this socioeconomic stratum of American society. He typically—before the Iraq War, anyway—falls for, I'd say, at least 75% of neoconservative scare-mongering lies (i.e.: 'An attack on the USA is imminent if we don't do a, b, and c to stop it...') and is also especially easily flattered by Republican laissez-faire & square charm tactics (i.e.: 'You've pulled yourself up by your bootstraps and deserve to hold onto every precious penny you've earned...')... and has voted Republican ever since he graduated from [whatever] school and entered what is known colloquially as "The Real World."

Joe Briefcase doesn't give two shits about the "restoration of American values" or the "maligned legacy of state's rights" that the brainless, fat, racist, uneducated, neo-secessionist, Fox News-watching hordes seem to care so much about. The fact is that Joe Briefcase doesn't want trouble, and trouble is exactly what he has begun to see that he will get if the Republican Party manages to regain control of the country.

Three additional factors shall flesh out my hypothesis of a new electoral alignment that I believe may be a component of the Democratic Party's (and especially Obama's) electoral strategy, which I shall call the New Wedge Politics:

• All of the "tea party" shenanigans during the health care debate managed to poison the well of public discourse to such an extent that most Americans stopped caring about the content of the health care bill a long time ago and simply grew increasingly irritated by the shrill health care bill debate. And it was the Republicans who, after all, vowed over and over and over and over and over again to obstruct the passage of the bill. Thus—irrespective of most people's inclinations as regards the content of the bill (and irrespective of the likelihood that the Obama Administration shrewdly planned to allow the Republican demagogy to meander until it reached the pinnacle of outrageousness)—Obama gets all of the credit for putting the whole miserable display out of its misery with a stroke of his pen. Meet Obama, the restorer of 'law and order' from the clutches of tea-bagger-fueled chaos and anarchy.
  
  
• The Civil War. Don't forget the Civil War. It's very much on the minds—or in the hearts—of many among the tea-bagger faithful, whether they realize it or not. From incumbent Governor Rick Perry's Texas Secession Rallies to the new revelations of Far-Right paramilitary activities to the ugly racism of so much of the redneck sloganeering, the ghost of the Civil War has returned to the national subconscious in a big way. And it just so happens that Joe Briefcase's great-great grandfather fought in the Civil War. And guess whose side Great Great Grandpa Briefcase fought for? That's right, it wasn't for the Confederacy. Joe Briefcase has always taken pride in the fact that he belongs to the Party of Abraham Lincoln. He has no sympathy for protesters of any kind. He wants the secessionist rednecks to get off his TV already. He most certainly does not recognize the current Dixiecrat Shambles as His Republican Party. This 'Party of No' is not the Republican Party as he has known it.
  
  
• The Iraq War. Don't forget the impact of that war either. The minutia of the USA's continued presence in Iraq under the Obama Administration, of course, fail to capture anyone's interest. But the people of the United States have not forgotten the Iraq War, nor its costliness in lives and dollars, nor the sleazy lies that the Bush Administration told in order to sell it. This still stands as a significant betrayal of trust between the Republican Party and its erstwhile supporters.

To close, some caveats: my analysis here is intended to be hypothetical. Furthermore, it's a hypothesis about long-term political and/or electoral strategy—not a prediction of whether or not such a strategy would work. And when I say long-term, I mean that it's not about the vicissitudes of 'cable news' cycles, which Obama has made it his habit to ignore (or at least to appear to ignore)—a way of doing things that has worked well for him in the past and which furthers the impression of his being 'above the fray' of the bullshit.

Lastly, although I dislike the Republican Party something fierce, and although I'm not as critical of Obama as many others on the Left have been (not having expected him to act as a genuinely progressive president in the midst of our current political/economic conditions and ideological alignments), I'm not saying that it is necessarily a good thing that the Democratic Party might be preserving its spot at the Center by pushing the Republican Party ever-farther to the Right. I'd have much preferred it if the health care bill had been more aggressive and radical, etc., etc. And I'd certainly have preferred to see Obama actually take a firm legal position against torturers, liars and manipulators like Dick Cheney, et al.

Anyway, there you have it. If anyone's actually read this far down, I'd love for you to prove it to me by leaving a comment. Heh.

[N.B.: I updated this post (mostly grammar and formatting edits) on the morning of 3/31/10).]

* Note the distinction here, between Christians and Christianists, Christianity and Christianism, religion and Religionism. Each of these dyads comprises:

1. first, a phenomenon that is so heterogeneous and multifarious, and rooted so deeply in our history and society as to resist evaluation in one direction or another, in and of itself, and
   
   
2. second, an extreme politics that enshrouds itself in a rhetoric that has been appropriated from the first, and then manhandled and distorted to accord with tactical or strategic ends.

I am an atheist, but I consider the notion of the 'inherent evil of religion' to be both inherently childish and itself always a cloaked political gesture, every bit as much as Religionism. I suppose I could distinguish my brand of atheism from that of Sam Harris by calling him an 'atheismist,' but I won't. You get my point. (Up.)

---

** This is a not-insignificant component of the process to bear in mind. Perception, that is. Kind of a slippery concept, I know, but sometimes we forget that we're not talking about the unmediated, abstract truth of these things, but rather, the truth of people's perceptions, which—in addition to being very difficult to determine—is frequently unconscious (that is, people don't always perceive the content of their own perceptions). That's one of the reasons why polls are frequently pure garbage. (Up.)

---

*** Notice that the trick that the Republicans have pulled off over the decades—in concert with the enormous interest group it serves, namely the military-industrial complex—is to eliminate any and all cognitive dissonance between (1) and (2), despite the fact that the 'bloated government' and 'proliferating, unaccountable government bureaucracy' that the GOP claims to so oppose are nowhere more strongly in evidence than in unfunded military spending. Remember that the Bush Administration deliberately left the deficit-spending on the Iraq War off of the books! (Up.)

Knowledge is authoritarian, even in a democracy.

No one, not even the opportunist hacks of the Texas State Board of Education, can fiat this fact away.

Previously, here at Crib From This, I argued that the so-called "Believers" sitting on the Texas State Board of Education are actually nihilists. This time, I wish to demonstrate that the Texas State Board of Education curriculum overhaul reveals the inherent limits to the habitual over-inflated conservative indictment of 'big government'.

A friend of mine, whose politics are a good deal more conservative than mine, nevertheless is in complete agreement with me that the decision recently handed down by the Texas State Board of Education is embarrassing, wrong, bad for education, bad for the study of history, and bad for the students in Texas—and potentially elsewhere—who are finding themselves shat upon by a gang of anti-intellectual, self-centered and neo-secessionist spoiled brats.

Forget the Gospel of Low Taxes. The conservatives of the Texas Board subscribe to a hyper-culturally conservative brand of Dixiecrat Republicanism that has been forcing increasing numbers of middle class Republicans to look askance at the Grand Old Party of Abraham Lincoln that they thought they had known so well.

Interestingly, as one of those old-fashioned Libertarian-types—whose critique of federal government-overreach has to do with fairly subtle questions of commerce and jurisprudence, and not so much with a plot to take away his guns (especially because he doesn't have any guns)—my friend chalks the Texas folly up to of the the perils of centralized, majoritarian decree. In other words, he sees the disaster as issuing not so much from the fanaticism and ignorance of a gang of inbred would-be messiahs, but, rather, from the fact that Texas operates under a system in which a single school board has the power to make a mockery of an entire state's social studies curriculum with a snap of its Born-Again Christianist, Ayn Rand-praising fingers.* The old-fashioned GOP anti-'big government' critique.

I do have to give him credit for creativity. It is interesting to examine the connections between what Libertarians and old-fashioned economic conservatives of his type call 'Federalism' and what Alexis de Tocqueville described as the "tyranny of the majority." Tocqueville argued that, in order for the great American experiment of republican governance to be successful, the right of the minority to dissent must be protected at all costs:

Several particular circumstances combine to render the power of the majority in America not only preponderant, but irresistible. The moral authority of the majority is partly based upon the notion that there is more intelligence and wisdom in a number of men united than in a single individual, and that the number of the legislators is more important than their quality. The theory of equality is thus applied to the intellects of men; and human pride is thus assailed in its last retreat by a doctrine which the minority hesitate to admit, and to which they will but slowly assent. [...]

In my opinion, the main evil of the present democratic institutions of the United States does not arise, as is often asserted in Europe, from their weakness, but from their irresistible strength. I am not so much alarmed at the excessive liberty which reigns in that country as at the inadequate securities which one finds there against tyranny. an individual or a party is wronged in the United States, to whom can he apply for redress? If to public opinion, public opinion constitutes the majority; if to the legislature, it represents the majority and implicitly obeys it; if to the executive power, it is appointed by the majority and serves as a passive tool in its hands. The public force consists of the majority under arms; the jury is the majority invested with the right of hearing judicial cases; and in certain states even the judges are elected by the majority. However iniquitous or absurd the measure of which you complain, you must submit to it as well as you can. [...]

I do not say that there is a frequent use of tyranny in America at the present day; but I maintain that there is no sure barrier against it, and that the causes which mitigate the government there are to be found in the circumstances and the manners of the country more than in its laws. (Democracy In America, Book I, Chapter 15)

And, come to think of it, has it not been along this general line of thinking that the premise of "state's rights" has been defended?—from John Calhoun's championing of "nullification," to the South's moral justifications for Secession, to present-day slogans about the "tyranny of big government" among the Republican rank-and-file?

It would seem that the actions of the Texas Board would support this sort of critique of centralized authority, albeit viewing Texas as a microcosm of the federal government. In a way, it does. However, in another sense, it serves to undermine this very critique—or at least it points to spheres of human activity to which this critique cannot be said to apply.

The problem, as I have found myself saying recently, is that knowledge is not democratically constituted. Knowledge is, in a sense (and shall ever be), authoritarian. And, whatever it is that the Texas School Board might want the world to be, there's simply not much that can be done about that.

We cannot approach knowledge itself, for example, in the same way in which we approach law. For example, even Justice Antonin Scalia knows that you can't be a "strict interpretationist" of history. (It's ephemeral enough as a legal philosophy...)

This is not to suggest that knowledge can be linked definitively, directly or uncritically to specific human beings or organizations, or even to any specific source. The academic disciplines, for instance, are not and don't pretend to be that kind of authority. Quite to the contrary, disciplines are themselves sites of contestation and debate.

When 'experts'—whether they work for an academic institution or for the WMD Committee of the Project For A New American Century—misrepresent themselves, or misrepresent the knowledge in their field, or provide insincere, incomplete or tendentious interpretations of this knowledge, they are—to precisely the extent to which they engage in this behavior—not experts, but merely posing as experts.

In effect, in having pushed the politicization of the curriculum this far, the majority of Texas Board of Education members have exposed themselves not as pie-in-the-sky Fundamentalist Christian-idealists, nor even as Fundamentalist Christian-ideologues. They are simply hacks—up to their earlobes in the toilsome wretchedness of aimless resentment.

We bemused onlookers witness the superficiality of their understanding not only of history but of the political or ideological battles in which they believe themselves to be mired (to say nothing of the empty opportunism of their feigned interest n these subjects). They have taken caricatures of their 'opposition' with total earnestness. Moreover—and even more embarrassing than their threadbare understanding of history—is the sheer self-centeredness and self-entitlement with which they have seen fit to (mis-)interpret any and all 'inconvenient' political and educational tendencies that differ from their own.

Consider the following metaphor. In war, all factions of your opposition are united in at least one significant respect: they are all out to kill you and your fellow soldiers. For purposes of political propaganda and mobilization—the domain in which GOP-hireling Svengalis like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove so excelled—this war-style-worldview can yield some limited successes by fostering solidarity among differing factions within an alliance: the 'enemy' represents a hybrid of characteristics. It's a lowest-common-denominator enemy.

The effectiveness of this approach no longer holds, however, when you are making education policy, nor policy in any domain that deals with disciplines of knowledge and expertise. In this context, undertaking to right all the wrongs of your caricature/hybrid foe leads to disastrous consequences.

Foremost among them is that this foe does not exist.

In my next post, I shall conclude my discussion of the Texas State Board of Education's curriculum guidelines by taking up the questions: (i) Why should we even consider the board's bizarre actions to be "conservative"?, and (ii) When we tacitly accept the self-categorizations of these confused, theocratic would-be secessionists, aren't we letting them frame the debate?



___________
* The utter incompatibility of the pimple-faced-high-schooler's-simpleminded-version-of-Nietzsche pseudo-philosophy of Ayn Rand (who had zero use for god, religion and the like and said so frequently) with the tenets of Fundamentalist Christianity is an example of a phenomenon to which this post turns shortly: the caricatured/hybridized opponents that so often become invented in the course of forging such unlikely political alliances as the GOP cobbled together in the '80s, '90s and '00s. That is, before the GOP emerged, with the election of Barack Obama to the presidency, as the party of Southern Secession. Ye Olde Abe Lincoln is a-spinnin'-in-his grave. Probably Ye Olde John Brown is, too. (Return to the main text.)

You have to see it to believe it.

A couple of items concerning recent antics -- incendiary, despicable and (most of all) surreal antics -- that various portions of the Deranged Right have gotten up to recently. Everything from mean-spiritedness to mendacity to incitements to violence and paramilitary activity to -- last but not least -- calls for presidential assassination.

First, the blog PhuckPolitics shares with us a video clip taken from Fox News that depicts talking heads engaging in what appears at first glance to be their run-of-the-mill, neo-corporightist and/or crypto-racist rhetoric. Whereupon, the viewer realizes that that decrepit Aussie Rupert Murdoch's 24-hour gift to this here land has transcended itself as regards its capacity to produce reckless and shameful innuendo.

The matter-of-fact nonchalance in this instance becomes all the creepier as the viewer ascertains that the correspondent posing as a putative "healthcare expert"  -- naturally, a role delegated to a journalist on staff at the National Review -- is claiming that large-scale reforms to the present US healthcare system (which system is that, exactly?) will increase the threat to the Homeland of terrorist attacks.

And, of course, the anchorman interviewing this National Socialist Review stooge apparently sees no need to challenge -- however cursorily -- his colleague's 'hypothesis'. It's as though this bald-faced tidbit of demagogy were -- well, sir -- just plain old everyday common sense. The footage is about as offensive, twisted, wrong and evil as anything we've heretofore seen from these cynical manipulators of secessionist South fake-populism. I strongly encourage you to watch it.

Second, courtesy of an item posted by the blog DownWithTyranny, I learned a couple of new things. Apparently, the Deranged Right has become cyber-savvy. Who knew? Not many Republicans that I know are particularly skilled in the ways of the Internets, although that's probably because almost all of them are sexagenarians.

"Over the weekend," states the blogger (who I infer is an opponent of Tyranny and not Tyranny's homeboy),

a friend sent me a link for a Facebook polling [sic] asking whether President Obama should be killed. I called a friend of mine who works at the Secret Service. They were already on the case.

Whew. That's pretty damn shocking. Can you remember anybody sending around Internet surveys asking this question about the previous occupant of the Oval Office? I certainly can't. And neither I nor those who were/are inclined to circulate lame Internet surveys were exactly huge fans of that administration.

But if you think that's shocking/disgusting, DownWithTyranny follows it up with something even worse. Initially showcased by a Web site called Right Wing Watch, DWT presents an outcry

more disturbing than Joe Wilson's "You lie" screech at the Joint Session of Congress. This outbreak was from another extreme right wing Republican congressional backbencher looking for some attention, Trent Franks, whose Arizona district stretches from the suburbs west of Phoenix through Glendale and Sun City and up to the northwest corner of the state.  [...]

Franks is an angry and driven man who feels he was dealt a bad hand in life. He's filled with irrational paranoia, bigotry and hatred. And, of course, he's a birther. Normally the Republican leadership keeps him away from the cameras and microphones but this week he escaped from the reservation and found an opportunity to declare President Obama "an enemy of humanity."  [Emphasis mine - cft]

Take a look at the short video and transcript of Congressman Franks's remarks, which DWT points out was likely to have encouraged fanatics to advocate proceeding with the ouster of the current administration through the staging of a military coup:

There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America’s military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the “Obama problem.” Don’t dismiss it as unrealistic... Will the day come when patriotic general and flag officers sit down with the president, or with those who control him, and work out the national equivalent of a “family intervention,” with some form of limited, shared responsibility?

There are some scary people out there. Shouldn't more people be lambasting the Republican Party for encouraging this kind of extremism? There are probably people out there who have never quite gotten over the Civil War. Sure, in important ways, they're marginalizing themselves into their destiny of political irrelevance. But even so, don't these people have guns?

Now you'll have to excuse me as I proceed to retreat into my multi-racial, multi-ethnic Democratic-voting Chicago neighborhood and hope that, if I ignore them, these problems will go away....

Wow.

The blog Phuck Politics has brought to our attention the existence of a shocking but intelligently produced and enlightening video document of the so-called "9/12 Tea Party" protests in Washington DC. The video was created by something called New Left Media, and I'm telling you that it's worth watching.

For one thing, it's not just shocking but really really funny.



And also: infuriating. And also: sad.

One of the things that I think makes this video so excellent and informative is its tone and pacing. It has a distinct and consistent editorial voice, but this voice is not intrusive or partisan. Moreover, although ruthlessly candid, it does not go out of its way to mock or condescend to its subjects. This reflects good editorial judgment in that the subjects do a more than adequate job of hanging themselves with their own noose.

An effect of this good editorial judgment is that this piece manages to do more than simply give the viewer a headache. It actually reveals the confusion and ignorance of the vast majority of the protesters. While this doesn't necessarily make them sympathetic characters, it does leave you with a strong sense of the forces/interests that are misleading them and profiting off of their ignorance, their lack of education and their general superstitiousness.

Sure, these rednecks are dumb as rocks, but that's not what I find most frightening. What I find most frightening is that they lack common sense.

Let us talk now of Christians and of Death.

One of our valued readers has contributed some musings in response to Crib From This's offering of August 28, titled Miscellaneous Aphorisms and Observations.

Our reader has taken issue most especially with aphorism xx, which is sub-headed, "Concerning first- and second-order hypocrisy," and which I have here undertaken to reproduce in its entirety:

To the Evangelical/"Born-Again" Christian, we say: "You're a hypocrite, and the stewards of your system of purported 'belief' are the worst kinds of hypocrites in the world. How can you live with yourself?"

She responds: "Everyone's a hypocrite. You're a hypocrite too. How can you live with yourself? At least I, having recognized and renounced my own hypocrisy, am setting out to purge from this world that which is unclean, to put into place the conditions under which man will be worthy of salvation."

Here the conversation ends, because we realize that within her self-enforced ignorance (which she calls, grotesquely, her "faith") resides a second-order hypocrisy: The worship of death.

The beef has to do with Crib From This's depiction of "Christian extremists":

I don't agree that Christian extremists worship death....I think the gobbledygook the extremists espouse are [sic] props they hide behind so that they don't really have to face or accept death...

Here's why I would disagree: The use of symbols, images, totems and rituals as -- functionally and sociologically speaking -- tools with which believers attempt to stave off or conceal the inevitability of death is characteristic of traditional/mainline -- particularly Catholic, but to some extent including, for example, Lutheran -- Christian practice.

Within mainline Protestantism, Calvinist doctrine seemingly comes closest to the kind of death-worship that the aphorism aims to get at, in that Calvinism is fierce in its resistance -- even more militantly so than is Lutheranism -- to anything vaguely representing idol worship, which it denounces as heretical, etc.

But when we talk about "Christian extremists" today, surely we're not talking primarily about Catholic or mainline Protestant Christianity? Rather, we mean various -- politically, hyper-conservative -- strains of Evangelical/"Born-Again" Christianity.

It is among these Christians that are to be found those who pose the most pressing political and cultural crises of our day. They are not the ones who douse themselves with holy water and say the rosary and visit the stations of the cross and erect giant cathedrals.

When I think of a death worshiper, my mind goes to the depiction of Jim Morrison in the silly Doors movie--"kill me! Gimme some death!"

Well, naturalment, that's the first thing I think of, too. But the aphorism refers to the conservative Evangelical/"Born-Again" Christian impulse toward the purification of the world, an impulse which is indistinguishable in its content from contempt for human life. To be human is to be flawed, to make mistakes, to be unclean. Jesus was often depicted hanging out with lepers and prostitutes and the dregs of humanity.

These right-wing religionists have no patience with humanity. They pray for the coming of The Apocalypse and will do anything they can to bring it about. (Thus, the support among many of them for the most militaristic forms of Zionism, despite their loathing of Jews.) They believe that their day of vindication is the day on which the world is enveloped in a fiery inferno. Only then will the wheat be separated from the chaff and God's chosen few accepted into His Kingdom.

Thus: the worship of death.

I just like this picture.

Miscellaneous Aphorisms & Observations

Dear Reader,

Below is a collection of twenty-four aphorisms and observations. This is a bit of a Crib From This tradition (albeit an extremely occasional one): It represents Our Blogger's attempt to resuscitate a dying form (or perhaps to deal it a final death-blow). Anyway, please enjoy: Comments are especially welcome (particularly if they are written while in a state of intoxication). Until next we meet, Dear Reader, I shall undertake to remain, as ever,

Your humblest and most obedient servant,
Crib From This

i.

On the nature of outrage. Outrage can be induced only by design.

ii.

To acknowledge reality. To the extent to which we acknowledge reality, we control it.

iii.

On authoritarianism. The authoritarian impulse is produced through the coupling of egoism and moralism.

iv.

On the nature of megalomania. The megalomaniac lives in a universe in which he is necessary.

v.

Concerning the word "lazy." Be careful with the word "lazy," one of the most overused words in the English language.

vi.

On problem-solving and imagination. The central task of problem solving is to imagine a world in which the problem no longer needs solving.

vii.

A thought experiment. Try assuming you're wrong. And try assuming you don't know why you're wrong.

viii.

On declaratives. The substance of a declarative is located in the questions it implies.

ix.

On how people view consensus. Beware of those for whom consensus implies validity.

x.

On fashion. Fashion is a devil, and as such must be given its due.

xi.

On changing yourself. There is no changing yourself without falling out of comfort with who you are.

xii.

On cleverness. Cleverness can be a double-edged sword. Especially for a child.

xiii.

To render decisions arbitrarily. There can be no interesting thoughts without arbitrary decisions.

xiv.

On egotism. The egotist lives in a universe in which he is useful.

xv.

On the nature of "wish-fulfillment." "Wish-fulfillment" is an oxymoron.

xvi.

On fascism. The fascist impulse arises from the coupling of moralism and narcissism.

xvii.

On Sarah Palin. The worst of Sarah Palin is not located in the contemptible things that she says, nor is it located in the cynical causes that she represents: It is that she was tailor-made for us to hate and, sure enough, we cannot help but hate her.

xviii.

On the nature of human weakness. No one is aware of his weaknesses except in an abstract and imprecise way. Were he truly aware of his weaknesses, he wouldn't exhibit them, and they thus would not be weaknesses.

xix.

On Fake Christianity. To be a human being is to be blind: to one's pride, weaknesses, motives and subterfuge. This is precisely why Evangelical or "Born-Again" Christianity is the most cynical kind of unbelief (more cynical by far than atheism): the renunciation of humility and self-doubt.

xx.

Concerning first- and second-order hypocrisy. To the Evangelical/"Born-Again" Christian, we say: "You're a hypocrite, and the stewards of your system of purported 'belief' are the worst kinds of hypocrites in the world. How can you live with yourself?"

She responds: "Everyone's a hypocrite. You're a hypocrite too. How can you live with yourself? At least I, having recognized and renounced my own hypocrisy, am setting out to purge from this world that which is unclean, to put into place the conditions under which man will be worthy of salvation."

Here the conversation ends, because we realize that within her self-enforced ignorance (which she calls, grotesquely, her "faith") resides a second-order hypocrisy: The worship of death.

xxi.

On home-schooling. This is the inherent problem with home-schooling: It reproduces the limitations of the parent—his delusions, demons, psychoses, prejudices, vectors of self-hatred—by transmitting them, simply and baldly, to his child. Home-schooling has been called child abuse, but it's worse than that: It's incest.

xxii.

On the role of "working hard" in formal education. Anything but "work harder." If a bright kid's performance is inconsistent for any number or reasons—be they developmental, socioeconomic, biological or cultural—telling him, "work harder" does little more than restate the problem. It's not good enough.

xxiii.

Concerning the need for comfort. Everyone expends her energies working chiefly toward the end of preserving and maximizing her own comfort. Comfort and leisure are not one and the same: When they coexist, more often than not, they are placed in inverse proportion to one another. In fact, a person is comfortable only insofar as she is (1) a lackadaisical thinker and (2) possesses an incurious disposition.

xxiv.

On the nature of atheism. Atheism can't be defended any more than Christianity can be. Polemicists who frame discussions of their belief or non-belief in the form of a defense are in fact saying nothing at all about their identified subject. Rather, they are advancing a political cause, the nature of which either they are attempting to occlude from credulous readers or about which they, with their adolescent minds, are themselves entirely uncomprehending.

HYPOCRITES!! (Part I): Health care, ideology and rhetoric.

The elegantly monikered and frequently brilliant blog Phuck Politics brings to our attention a highly entertaining and singularly infuriating exercise in Far-Right talking points.

You know what talking points are, right? They're these bullet-pointed 'arguments' circulated among Far-Right activists, politicians, Fox News-"personalities" and, of course, the Brownshirts that have been doing their inbred, mouth-breathingly thuggish best to carry out the bidding of demagogues and insurance industry brass alike. Their goal?: to interrupt 'town hall meetings' that are being held by congressmen in their home districts in order to discuss health reform.

This is a phenomenon to which we may refer as "astroturfing," or perhaps with still greater accuracy as "astroweeding."

Anyway, Phuck Politics shares with us the talking points that are being advanced by something called the Liberty Counsel (sounds friendly enough: Who doesn't like liberty??!!), which is apparently the Joseph Goebbels-like misinformation-propagating arm of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University:

Sec. 59B, Pg. 170, Line 1 – Any NONRESIDENT alien is exempt from individual taxes. (Americans will pay for their health care.)

Sec. 1177, Pg. 354 – Government will RESTRICT enrollment of special needs people! “Extension of Authority of Special Needs Plans to Restrict Enrollment.”

Sec. 1233, Pg. 425, Lines 4-12 – Government mandates Advance (Death) Care Planning consultation. Think Senior Citizens and end of life. END-OF-LIFE COUNSELING. SOME IN THE ADMINISTRATION HAVE ALREADY DISCUSSED RATIONING HEALTH CARE FOR THE ELDERLY.

Sec. 2511, Pg. 992 – Government will establish school-based “health” clinics. Your children will be indoctrinated and your grandchildren may be aborted!

The late, windy Jerry "Tushy-Faced" Falwell. May he rest in piss.

The reader will observe that Phuck Politics has some astute and howlingly funny things to say about this, including an imaginative description of the type of dialogue that must have gone down among the Liberty Council staffers when they were cooking this stuff up.

I wish to weigh in specifically on the fourth item listed above, which for my money is the most ermm...side-splittingly hilarious. The idea of referring to health clinics as "health" clinics... Wow!

Let's have another look!:

Sec. 2511, Pg. 992 – Government will establish school-based “health” clinics. Your children will be indoctrinated and your grandchildren may be aborted!

This takes the idea of seeing the world through the prism of ideology to its paranoiac limits.

I mean...really. Were the (il)logic of this statement to edge a fraction-of-an-inch further in the direction of mechanical-pre-judgment of empirical reality, it would represent a brand new pathology, wherein bigotry, myopia, resentment and rank stupidity begin to chew away not only at its believer's capacity to relate to the world around him -- which clearly is already on the skids -- but at one another.

The myopia begins to resent the bigotry, the bigotry looks askance at the myopia, and all the while, the stupidity reproduces itself like a cancer, slowly reducing the entire thing into a kind of droopy incoherence.

There is something so reprehensible about this rhetoric, something so completely offensive and prejudiced and pathetic and self-serving and self-undermining and willfully dumb, that it becomes almost beautiful. The sheer absurdity of questioning the very notion that health clinics are concerned with health!

The nerve displayed in this deployment of the word "indoctrinated," which reads not so much as a shocking revelation, but as a casual aside. Like: Oh yeah, of course these supposed "health" clinics are actually no more than "indoctrination" clinics!!! Indoctrinated into what? Into viewing the practice of medicine as based upon empirical science?

And then, to top it all off with what could only be called an astonishing feat of transgression-for-transgression's-sake: "your grandchildren may be aborted"!

Round of applause, please!!!

Think about this for a moment.....while keeping in mind, of course, that it is not the sort of provocation that is designed to make people think. The fear that's being expressed here is that the reader's son's and daughter's daughter's yet-to-be-conceived-unborn child may be aborted.

This begs the question: What kind of children are the reader's sons and daughters raising? Don't they learn about abstinence at their Bible Camp??? Are America's preteen Evangelicals having wild parties with the close-dancing and the listening to that race-music?

One rather suspects that this particular exercise in Right-wing hysteria is directed against the idea of public schooling in general more than against the idea of having health clinics in those schools. Let us take a look at a few quotations on the subject of public education, from Rev. Falwell, Herr Hitler and President Jefferson:

I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be! -- Rev. Jerry Falwell

The idea of separation of Church and State was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country. -- Rev. Jerry Falwell

Secular schools can never be tolerated because such a school has no religious instruction and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith.... We need believing people. -- Adolf Hitler

Education is here placed among the articles of public care, not that it would be proposed to take its ordinary branches out of the hands of private enterprise, which manages so much better all the concerns to which it is equal; but a public institution can alone supply those sciences which, though rarely called for, are yet necessary to complete the circle, all the parts of which contribute to the improvement of the country, and some of them to its preservation. -- Thomas Jefferson

A bill for the more general diffusion of learning... proposed to divide every county into wards of five or six miles square;... to establish in each ward a free school for reading, writing and common arithmetic; to provide for the annual selection of the best subjects from these schools, who might receive at the public expense a higher degree of education at a district school; and from these district schools to select a certain number of the most promising subjects, to be completed at an University where all the useful sciences should be taught. Worth and genius would thus have been sought out from every condition of life, and completely prepared by education for defeating the competition of wealth and birth for public trusts. -- Thomas Jefferson

Hmmm... Looks like we have some disagreement here. Between Founding Father Thomas Jefferson in favor of public education and the dynamic duo of Rev. Falwell and Herr Hitler against.

But back to the talking points: Such is their unsurpassed incoherence that the only comparison I can come up with is to a black hole: the vortex at which space and time and light and matter and mass all collapse upon and within themselves. (Or something like that.....)

Come to think of it, doesn't this artist's rendition of a black hole a whole lot like the images adorning the covers of books published by weirdo Right-wing nut-job literalist Southern Evangelical religious people? You know, like one of those ultra-cheesy depictions of the Apocalypse or the Book of Revelation or whatever?

Anyway, in the second part of this discussion, to be titled "HYPOCRITES!! (Part II): Health care, Medicare Part D and generational politics," I shall explain why this ludicrous Republican rhetoric opposing health care reform is truly and deeply hypocritical: Have you considered the fact that the people objecting most strongly to health care reform are precisely those who benefit the most from Medicare?

And Medicare is the single most costly government program in existence, far exceeding anything else, including military spending?

That's right, people over the age of 65, many of whom live in the South, are the recipients of the most expensive public program in existence. The same people who are so fervently opposed to Obama's 'socialistic' proposal for a public health insurance program that would compete with the private insurers....

The expense of this government program increased by several orders of magnitude when George W. Bush signed Medicare Part D, which is the prescription drug benefit, without bothering to figure out how he was going to pay for it, and sandwiched between the two biggest tax cuts for the wealthy in American history??

This is where the real fun begins:Pay attention to the Republican Party's excuses & explanations

I think that you can tell a lot about the health of the Republican Party by observing all of the excuses that its remaining apologists devise in order to explain away what appears to be a landslide victory for Barack Obama, as well as for several Democratic congressional candidates across the country. My diagnosis of the Republican Party is that it is in big big trouble.

Here's some of the spin and blame-gaming in which the Republican Party has been engaging and in which it will continue to engage:

• the voters are 'scared' about the economy, and they don't understand the economy all that well, so they're voting Dem as an act of panic;
• the media are 'liberal' and 'biased' and were 'in the tank' for Obama,
• and they never gave Sarah Palin a 'fair chance',
• and they never inquired about Barack Obama's real connections to William Ayers, etc.;
• Democrats encouraged and engaged in voter fraud;
• Democrats failed to insist upon the showing of ID cards at the polls.

This final allegation is especially infuriating and widespread, because it is essentially an index of the extent to which the Republican Party is fast hemorrhaging the cosmopolitan and suburban portions of its base.

What's left of the Republican Party at this point is, quite frankly, the Dixiecrat portions, which it absorbed into its ranks with the advent of Goldwater and then Nixon.

And, just in case anybody here doesn't know what the Dixiecrats were all about: they were the segregationists who never forgave the Democratic Party for having passed the Civil Rights Bill. In other words: racists.

CAN THE AMERICAN PEOPLE TRUST JOHN McCAIN??? *

* Yeah, well....I mean, the answer's no, the American People can't.

All right, Hitch, you did the right thing in the end.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention that Christopher Hitchens endorsed Obama a few days ago, despite having previously -- inanely -- acted as cheerleader for the Palin/McCain freak show. For a number of years now, it has ceased to matter what Hitchens has had to say. I say that and yet, I had expressed -- in less than gentlemanly terms -- my dismay when Hitchens sleep-walked his way through a preposterous hatchet-job against Obama in a recent installment of his column in Slate. So I guess it must matter, at least a little bit.

So, I'll give credit where credit is due. Hitchens concludes his article with three paragraphs that I believe articulate the moral necessity of voting for Obama in this election, irrespective of which section of the political spectrum you occupy in normal times. Because McCain is really that unhinged, Palin is really that vapid and idiotic, and the times are not normal.

Moreover, given the interventionist economic measures pursued by our Republican White House, the huge deficits for which Bush is responsible (like his father and Reagan before him), anyone who espouses a "free market" ideology will have to look elsewhere than the Republican Party this year for their candidate. so these laissez faire types may as well line up behind such conservatives as Hitchens, David Brooks, George Will, and, satisfyingly, Christopher Buckley (son, of course, of William F., and who has, as a consequence, parted ways with the National Review, the publication his father founded), and make the only morally tenable decision available to them when they're inside the voting booth.

Anyway, here are Hitchens's concluding paragraphs, in which he doesn't mince words:

The most insulting thing that a politician can do is to compel you to ask yourself: "What does he take me for?" Precisely this question is provoked by the selection of Gov. Sarah Palin. I wrote not long ago that it was not right to condescend to her just because of her provincial roots or her piety, let alone her slight flirtatiousness, but really her conduct since then has been a national disgrace. It turns out that none of her early claims to political courage was founded in fact, and it further turns out that some of the untested rumors about her—her vindictiveness in local quarrels, her bizarre religious and political affiliations—were very well-founded, indeed. Moreover, given the nasty and lowly task of stirring up the whack-job fringe of the party's right wing and of recycling patent falsehoods about Obama's position on Afghanistan, she has drawn upon the only talent that she apparently possesses.

It therefore seems to me that the Republican Party has invited not just defeat but discredit this year, and that both its nominees for the highest offices in the land should be decisively repudiated, along with any senators, congressmen, and governors who endorse them.

I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that "issue" I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity. Obama is greatly overrated in my opinion, but the Obama-Biden ticket is not a capitulationist one, even if it does accept the support of the surrender faction, and it does show some signs of being able and willing to profit from experience. With McCain, the "experience" is subject to sharply diminishing returns, as is the rest of him, and with Palin the very word itself is a sick joke. One only wishes that the election could be over now and a proper and dignified verdict rendered, so as to spare democracy and civility the degradation to which they look like being subjected in the remaining days of a low, dishonest campaign.

Read the rest of Hitchens's endorsement, in Slate.

Bush & McCain are both Republicans: the party of lies, torture, warmongering, destruction of public infrastructure, widening gap between rich & poor.

John McCain and George W. Bush are members of the same political party.
(Let's all remind our friends, relatives, colleagues and coworkers.)

Polemic of the day, from Downbeaten Wife Contributed by Jenny Ludwig

Taking a break between loads of Tom's laundry this morning, pondering my (post?)modern femininity as I scrubbed the corners of the kitchen with my fingernails and chopped onions with the other hand, I suddenly recalled this video clip of Palin at her most pious and most stubborn, responding to questions about her stance on abortion with that perfect Miss Congeniality smile, giving the interviewer nothing but sweetness yet refusing to give an inch:



Palin responds to several successive interview question as if there were no--and indeed is not ever any--gray areain sexual politics, as if being "pro-life" were equivalent to what she calls "choosing life" (and this video dates from long before McCain picked her for duck-duck-grey duck). As she flatly refuses to even acknowledge the differences between the situations that the interviewer offers, repeating "I would choose life" with the complacency and saccharine kindness that only the self-righteous can muster, it occurred to me that, unlike other conservative thinkers that I have known--indeed, unlike even the zealots and near-Nazis that I've known--Palin actually thinks that her deeply warped ideas describe the world, that you don't need anything more than an adage and a strong will to make the world as you think it should be, and, most importantly, that if you govern the world as you would govern the world you want, that the world will come to match the government you offer. Palin has forgotten that it's the dealer's game, and the odds are with the callous world, which invariably overpowers the insufficient and brittle structures we invent. The repeated lesson of history is that reality's great gambit is to overpower and undermine attempts to contain it through description; it wins every time against the theorized, the dreamed, the written, the desired, the proclaimed, the denied, the imagined and the depicted.

What has this to do with gender politics? you ask. Amber made a great quip last night, which she meant as a kind-of serious throwaway: When I said "pro-life," she responded, "Or, as I like to say, anti-choice." This reversal of the key terms of the abortion debate reveals the degree to which (as per far too often) it is the "anti-choice" lobby that has established the terms of the debate. Who, after all, wouldn’t "choose life"? It is primarily Sarah Palin's complacency--the complacency of the chosen-—that makes me so fucking angry about her nomination, but also the way that central questions about gender politics and government are obscured by the tepid debate about Palin's gender, womanhood recast as the glory of motherhood, which makes a woman stronger rather than weaker. Palin trumps Clinton through her ever-productive womb and her mobilization of the sexual appeal of that fertility through the production of an ahistorical femininity. In this arena, a world whose changes are immaterial to the highly motivated, women’s rights (rather than her own nomination) are a kind of affirmative action; if women had been strong enough, they would never have been kept down by unchecked fecundity.

But the great power of Obama's promise is that he can roll with the punches, that he is going to look around before he decides what to do, that--in contradistinction to my vision of Palin--not just government but ethical behavior and responsible relationships with other people overall depend on the capacity to look at what is actually outside of you before you decide what to do or say. To be certain, Palin's gender has no relation to her politics whatever and it's more laughable than insulting to imagine a Hillary Clinton supporter voting for this Stalinist bitch, but she is being presented as someone who is able to cope with the modern world without giving up her value system. [NB: Palin doesn't, of course, describe herself as a feminist and as this quite elegant discussion on Slate points out, this is not what our mothers fought for--for our right to choose; to return to work the day after giving birth and to be so fucking awesome we neither want nor need any physical, household, bodily, familial or emotional help]. But, aside from the fact that--and I paraphrase from The View--you can't exchange a vagina for a vagina, even one whose fertility is unchecked, the larger point is that Sarah--and Bristol--Palin''s rights and abilities to have the children they want, to keep the babies that may not have been foreseen, to decide that motherhood is what they want, that they don't want to use birth-control or wouldn't ever terminate a pregnancy, are never and have never been in jeopardy. Pro-choice is not (as my Dad is unfortunately though occasionally wont to say) "pro-abortion"; rather, it supports the right to choose either way.

This occurs to me partly because I--like most of my peers--spent decades understanding Roe v. Wade as central to my own life. I never lived in a time or a place when I didn't know that free, safe and private advice, support, and--did I so want--an abortion were available to me. When I was seventeen (or twenty-seven), if I had gotten pregnant, I would have gotten an abortion, as most of my friends who got pregnant did. Now, however, at the grand old age of 33, when I am much less likely to make such grand mistakes than at 17, I know that I would never have an abortion. My relationship with Roe v. Wade has shifted; the rights it endows are for mychildren and grandchildren, not for me. And, of course, for Sarah Palin's three daughters.

The idea that Bristol Palin's pregnancy is related to Sarah Palin's parenting is absurd; the Christian Right finally got one thing right when they admitted that seventeen-year-old girls get pregnant all the time, in every country in the world, every state in the Union (even those that might want to secede), and even in the most evangelical of evangelical households. And, frankly, most seventeen-year olds get pregnant because they don't use birth control even when they do have sex-ed classes, curfews, moms who don't work or regale their children with stories of when they marched on Washington and piles of condoms for the taking in guidance offices and clinics.

But, Palin's "I am pro-life" goes far beyond the question of an unplanned pregnancy, elaborating a policy stance into a lifestyle choice. Her daughter, therefore,--her seventeen-year old high-school senior of a daughter--is not just having this child, she is getting married and raising that child. I'm going to show my age, but, in my day, if you didn't want to get an abortion (and in my parents, when you couldn't), you went to stay with Aunt Susy for a year, to attend a different school and get some "rest". Then you came back and finished high-school. If Bristol Palin was sacrificed for this campaign, it is not only in that her personal life was made public for her mother's benefit, nor even that she "chose" to bear this child—and I don’t think any of us believe she had any real "choice"—to ratify her mother’s ethical stance, but because she "chose" to marry and keep the child, to extend the Palin clan to a third generation. Her entire life was sacrificed for Palin’s ideals. And that, perhaps, is my point. I think Sarah Palin was lucky as hell that Bristol was the one who got knocked up. She seems like a sweet kid, but very much sculpted by her mother and bearing the brunt of the intense parental scrutiny, protectiveness and pressure that only the oldest girl in a family can feel. So, she said she'd keep the kid and marry the boy, and, frankly, she probably wasn't going to leave Wasilla anyway.

But Sarah Palin has three & daughters, and one of those daughters is going to show her, in the worst and most painful way possible, how much her ideologically-restrictive, Stalinist, depressingly provincial tight-fist rule costs. If Bristol were a slightly different child, was given a bit more or a bit less freedom, went to better or even worse schools, spent her childhood in Anchorage or Washington, was a year or too older or younger, she wouldn't have agreed to bear that child; she would have run away, or aborted it by herself or drank and smoked herself and it into oblivion; and one of Sarah Palin's daughter is going to be that child. Piper Palin may spend the next ten years of her life in Washington; it will be 2015 or so before she's thinking about sex, and we don't even know what the world will look like. But Sarah Palin, who will not let herself or is not able to imagine any kind of world that she can't control if she is given a chance, will still be laying out the same rules and the same reasons and expecting them to resound as they did before.

But doesn't that seem unlikely? Maybe Piper won't want to give up her scholarship to college or just because mom says so. Maybe one of Palin's daughters will be raped in the big city, or some older boy or relative will use her and leave her. For whatever reason, if Sarah Palin makes her two younger daughters live in a world
where sex-ed is unnecessary and abortion is illegal, one of them won't want to have the child that will inevitably be conceived. And Sarah will watch her world--the one she has constructed so painstakingly and bolstered with the center of her arrogant little soul--, along with any other worlds she could even imagine, come smashing down around her head as she watches one of her daughters bleed out on her pale-pink bathroom floor, with a hanger sticking out of her cootch, because there wasn't a single goddamn doctor or nurse in Alaska who would give her an abortion.

__________________

* A good friend of the author and of the author's husband, too. -- Ed.

Sarah Palin: not just dumb, but evil. And the embodiment of a lunatic fringe fringier & more lunatic than known previously to exist.

• When she was mayor of Alaska, Sarah Palin attempted to BAN LIBRARY BOOKS, Time, "Mayor Palin: A Rough Record":

Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. "She asked the library how she could go about banning books," he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. "The librarian was aghast." That woman, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn't be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire Baker for not giving "full support" to the mayor.

• Did you hear that? I said that Sarah Palin attempted to BAN LIBRARY BOOKS, New York Times, "Palin’s Start in Alaska: Not Politics as Usual":

Shortly after becoming mayor, former city officials and Wasilla residents said, Ms. Palin approached the town librarian about the possibility of banning some books, though she never followed through and it was unclear which books or passages were in question.

Ann Kilkenny, a Democrat who said she attended every City Council meeting in Ms. Palin’s first year in office, said Ms. Palin brought up the idea of banning some books at one meeting. “They were somehow morally or socially objectionable to her,” Ms. Kilkenny said.

The librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, pledged to “resist all efforts at censorship,” Ms. Kilkenny recalled. Ms. Palin fired Ms. Emmons shortly after taking office but changed course after residents made a strong show of support. Ms. Emmons, who left her job and Wasilla a couple of years later, declined to comment for this article.

• And, in addition to attempting to BAN BOOKS -- you know, like what they did in NAZI FUCKING GERMANY? -- Sarah Palin is a mean-spirited, vindictive, ideologically rapacious nightmarish RNC-funded opportunist who refuses to accept the idea of Christians assuming public office if they are not born-again Christians (New York Times, "Palin’s Start in Alaska: Not Politics as Usual"):

The traditional turning points that had decided municipal elections in this town of less than 7,000 people — Should we pave the dirt roads? Put in sewers? Which candidate is your hunting buddy? — seemed all but obsolete the year Ms. Palin, then 32, challenged the three-term incumbent, John C. Stein.

Anti-abortion fliers circulated. Ms. Palin played up her church work and her membership in the National Rifle Association. The state Republican Party, never involved before because city elections are nonpartisan, ran advertisements on Ms. Palin’s behalf.....Ms. Palin and her passion for Republican ideology and religious faith overtook a town known for a wide libertarian streak and for helping start the Iditarod dog sled race.

“Sarah comes in with all this ideological stuff, and I was like, ‘Whoa,’ ” said Mr. Stein, who lost the election. “But that got her elected: abortion, gun rights, term limits and the religious born-again thing. I’m not a churchgoing guy, and that was another issue: ‘We will have our first Christian mayor.’ ”

“I thought: ‘Holy cow, what’s happening here? Does that mean she thinks I’m Jewish or Islamic?’ ” recalled Mr. Stein, who was raised Lutheran, and later went to work as the administrator for the city of Sitka in southeast Alaska. “The point was that she was a born-again Christian.”

Dear Reader: I beg of you: don't let the Republicans pull this country back into a never-ending fascistic culture-war hell.

VOTE FOR BARACK OBAMA TO PUT AN END TO ALL OF THIS NONSENSE. AND CONVINCE YOUR FRIENDS TO DO SO TOO. If we don't win this one for the Constitution, the rule of law, a respect for reason, the sciences and the humanities, an understanding of the primacy of quality education as a moral and economic necessity, we are going to endure decades of listening to idiots like Sarah Palin. DON'T LET THIS HAPPEN TO OUR COUNTRY! DON'T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOUR AND MY CHILDREN. VOTE FOR BARACK OBAMA.