Politics as Holy War

    I am thinking these days about two particular friends of mine.  They are middle-aged men, professional men both.  They are family men and homeowners.  They are diligent citizens, kind and caring human beings -- just the sort we'd all be glad to have to have, say,  as neighbors.
    My two friends  are homosexual.  They have been together in a loving, monogamous relationship for 26 years. They live in a state that now permits same-sex unions, and they are about to be married.
    They are on my mind in a bittersweet way. I'm delighted that they are finally able to place upon their relationship the seal that so many of us take for granted.  But I'm sad that they have had to wait so very long to be allowed this opportunity.
    Other homosexual Americans continue waiting, as the rest of the country snarls through decisions about the posture of law and politics toward personal matters.   Our civic conversation is roiled by dubious moralizing and overcooked religiosity. Religious factions offer themselves as voting blocs, and their leaders offer themselves as power brokers. Our politicians stir the pot, as they declaim about preserving family values and protecting marriage. Some of them seem actually to believe that marriage is under attack, and that family values can be usefully framed in the vocabulary of politics. Others are only pandering.
    Toxic mixtures of religion and politics are not new.  Consider Prohibition. And one's definition of appropriate preacher behavior can depend on one's point of view. I might have favored the clergy who energized the American Revolution. I did favor the ones who energized the American civil rights movement.
    Still, it appears to me that the likes of John Hagee and Jerry Falwell have crossed into mere partisanship.  And in any case the nation does seem to have been running an especially high fever for a while.  The sanctimonious right has contorted Republican politics with a striking irony. In it, the supposed apostles of limited government labor to push government into the most intimate aspects of personal life.  Political pandering has reached such lows that a sitting president, the second President  Bush, endorsed the crackpot notion of writing a Judeo-Christian definition or marriage into the Constitution of the United States.
    It's a strong brew, this notion that some political opinions (and the people who hold them) are morally superior to other political opinions (and the people who hold those.)  Some of our leaders are bingeing on it.  Under the influence, they have turned politics into a kind of holy war across a broad front. A faction in Congress has relentlessly connived to undermine the work of a duly elected president. In one revealing extreme, they shut down the government rather than tolerate the implementation of a duly enacted law.
    And so the rest of us are subjected to the obverse of what our system of government is supposed to be about.  It is supposed to shelter and accommodate competing values.  But Washington's hotheads of the moment want to use it to enshrine some values and drive others out.  In other times and places there was a word for people who took the law into their own hands and trampled opposition down. They were called vigilantes.  The analogy is extreme, but it is not irrelevant.
    This spree of intolerance won't last, and we must hope that other politicians will then forego tit for tat. (My compatriots on the leftward side of things have shown that we are not above taking our own taste of the brew.  But that's a discussion for another time.) My particular hope is for broader recognition that  heedless commerce between religion and government is dangerously foolhardy. Preachers who want churches to elevate politics of their choosing invite politicians to think they might elevate churches of their choosing.
    Meanwhile, in one corner of the country, my two friends have finally escaped having dogma enforced upon them through civil law.  Godspeed to them, and may many others follow.

Free Lunch For You

    I dislike professional evangelists -- and not only the con artists who are in it for the money. I'm troubled also by others who may in their way be utterly and terribly sincere.  
    They are not offering free lunch, exactly, but they do advertise a kind of cheap grace. Each claims to offer a grand "Open Sesame," an ultimate password. They reduce the mysteries of spirituality to the idiom of a late-night kitchen gadget commercial:  Just follow these simple steps ...
    And -- when the preaching reaches a crescendo -- if the exhortation to follow a higher call begins to sound like an exhortation to follow me, I don't think my ears are playing tricks.
    In any case, I was predisposed to be annoyed by an article about Richard Dawkins.
    His enterprise fits the standard parameters.  He claims to know the only right view of human spirituality.  If you veer from his charted path, he says, you will go astray.  He travels to preach.  He sells books. He has a foundation and, yes, he will be glad to take your check.
    He does differ from some of his brethren in one particular: He is an atheist.  If he is not the first atheist to turn pro, he is notably enterprising.  He is a prolific author, speaker and blogger.  His website offers T-shirts, water bottles, a newsletter and a Twitter feed.
    A Google scamper through his work does not equip me for a balanced review.  However, a couple of specifics seem pertinent in considering his type and making our way to a larger point.
    He begins from a premise that reality consists only of what science can measure.  He then ventures to apply a yardstick to infinity and points out that the results are droll.
    But of course in disguising his conclusion as his premise, he simply evades the essential question altogether.  As a scientist and former Oxford professor he does, surely, know better. A first-year student of logic would be faulted in this for a lack of intellectual rigor.  In everyday language, he would be charged with shucking and jiving.
    Asked by an interviewer what he would say if he met God after his own death, Dawkins replied  "The first thing I would say is, well, which one are you? Are you Zeus?  Are you Thor? Are you Baal? Are you Mithras? Are you Yahweh? ... "
    Here he is shucking and jiving again.  He was asked how he would react if he discovered that his own beliefs were false.  An inventory of other people's beliefs does not constitute an answer of any sort.  It is a classic non-sequitur.
    And as an array of ideas, his response is the bottom of a slob's shoe closet.  It represents a jumble of religion, myth and cultic mumbo-jumbo.  It is as if Dawkins had been offered a serving of fruit, and he asked if it would include apples, doorknobs  stepladders or soup spoons.  He purports to compare concepts that are not sensibly comparable.
    If Dawkins does not know this he is remarkably ill-informed.  And again, if he does know it -- well, I need not go further toward accusing him of ignorance, flabby thinking and rhetorical sleight of hand.  A variety of his peers, including several distinguished scientists, have already done that.
    All my fun at Dawkins' expense is highly selective.  Enough of it.  The larger point is that the professional Christian and the professional atheist are in similar games.  Both deal in caricature.
    The anti-religionists peddle caricatures that are easy to ridicule. 
    The styled and blow-dried Bible-wavers peddle caricatures that are easy to swallow:  Why, grasping the ultimate truth of the universe is as easy as falling off a log.  Just praise the Lord, catch the vibe and put another dollar in the pot.
    The dissemination of spiritual junk food is not inconsequential.  The appetite for it rises, I think, from two sources.  One is an earnest inner desire of most people to know what is right and what is true.  The other is a hankering for simple answers, for quick fixes.  It is cousin to the yen that sustains a market year after year for fad diets.
    Religious hokum would be harder to peddle were it not for a widespread climate of Biblical ignorance.  This deficit is lamentable in its own right. Wholly apart from considerations of faith, Judeo-Christian scriptures are among the foundation documents of Western culture.  Yet our systems of  education routinely grant credentials of literacy to people who have never read them.
    Meanwhile, hokum milks money from the gullible, aggravates cultural divisions and infects our politics.
    
    

From North Carolina, With Chagrin

     I live in North  Carolina.
     Nowadays,  this admission is embarrassing.  You may understand if you've been watching television comics.  Among them my state has become an object of ridicule. Or perhaps you've been reading the national press.  There, my state is being described with astonishment and regret.
    These portrayals involve a certain amount of caricature.  The comedians do it for effect.  The journalists and commentators are simply using some necessary shorthand.
    So let me supply a few details from a first-hand perspective.  And as I do, let me mention with bewilderment that I knew our new governor, Pat McCrory, face-to-face for many years.  I was a working journalist. He was the long-time mayor of my home town. I knew him -- back then -- to be a bright, knowledgeable public official with an open-minded awareness of his obligation to serve all the citizens of his city.
    Gov. McCrory --  in office less than a year -- is a Republican.  Not long ago Republicans also gained control of both houses of our legislature for the first time in more than 100 years.  Together, in just a few months, they have loosed a tide of deeply conservative change in state law and policy.
    In the interest of full disclosure I should say that I find many of these changes objectionable and some of them downright appalling, especially as they afflict women, poor people and minorities.  This, however, is not the whole of my point. Perhaps one example will illustrate.
    Among the new laws is one restricting access to voting.  It sets stringent standards of photo identification for would-be voters.  The law has stirred up waves of criticism.  Gov. McCrory has stubbornly defended it and decried "scare tactics" from the "extreme left."
    This kind of language from Pat McCrory baffles and dismays me.  It goes to a level of demagoguery that should be beneath any decent man.  The fact is that this voter law has occasioned vigorous concern among people of moderate mind and informed perspective.
    To these citizens of North Carolina their governor gives the back of his hand.
    And there is the snapshot that reveals the new character of our public affairs.
    While North Carolina politics and policy have wandered left and right in modern times, the center line has remained just that.  The heart's blood of this state's civic ethic has been a kind of sleeves-up, centrist pragmatism.  Our latter-day conservative revolution is wrong because it is fundamentally and knowingly out of tune with the long-manifest outlook of the North Carolina electorate.
    So, how did that electorate come to elevate public officials who would break faith with their obligation to represent all the people?  The answer comes in two parts.
    The first part has to do with the influence of big money.  One rich man, who now holds a high office in the McCrory administration, for years systematically backed conservative causes and candidates. Eventually they prevailed in controlling numbers.
    And as Republicans mounted the march of the bag men, they were aided by a second factor at work in North Carolina.  Many of us don't vote, and many who do are not paying attention.  In this we create a vacuum for big money to fill.
    Of course Republican leaders would not agree with me.  They would deny favoring an aristocracy of wealth willing to buy power to which it is not rightly entitled.  They would deny betraying an ethical obligation to serve all the people without regard to party affiliation.  They would deny that our governor has lost his bearings, and that our legislature has sunk to whooping through jack-leg law just because it can.
    They might say they are clearing government-made debris off the road to a better future for North Carolinians.  They might say they are creating a good, conservative, business-friendly climate to help North Carolina's economy grow and its citizens prosper. I think they might say they are creating a new brand name for North Carolina as a state that is hospitable to enterprise and ripe with opportunity for all who are willing to work.
    They might ask why they should be deterred in this by coverage in the national press and the antics of a few TV jokesters.
    I would say they should be deterred because the nation can see in the press the whole truth: Much of what's happening in this state has nothing to do with government streamlining or economic stimulation.  It has to do with fat-cat manipulation, bully-boy politics and narrow-minded social attitudes that are directly at odds with the obligations of proper government to a populace of diverse needs.  With purchased political power, a band of partisans has forced their pet agenda on the rest of us.
    I say all this from a point of view that is not within a country mile of the "extreme left."  (And I say the new voter law is a high-tech poll tax.)  Nor do I think all those TV jokesters can be dismissed as mere funnymen.  Their jibes at North Carolina are a warning that our Republican bosses are indeed creating a new brand name for this state, and that it could be "Laughingstock."
    Advocates of plutocracy are not limiting their attention to North Carolina.  Some of them tried to buy the White House for Mitt Romney (who, in a little-noted voice message, urged business leaders to "explain" election issues to their employees.)
    And Americans from shore to shore belong to that vast power bloc that determines the outcome of many elections:  People who don't vote and don't bother to remain informed.
   In North Carolina, while the boodle boys were arranging for our state government to become household staff to the upper crust, many of us were looking the other way. We now have a lot of work to do to reclaim what's ours.
    Let's hope people elsewhere wake up before the same thing happens to them.
     
    

    
    

You Don't Matter

    I looked forward to the dinner.  The menu was inviting, the dining room gracious.  They suggested the meal could be a bit of an experience. I hoped so, anyway. It was part of a long-planned trip that was to be a once-in-a-lifetime thing for us.
    Not much about the fellow at a nearby table was noticeable, except that the mild disarray of his clothing suggested calculation along with carelessness. A bit of bohemian style not fully abandoned in middle age.
    He became noticeable when he began to complain roughly about his dinner and then made a show of sending it back to the kitchen.   The servers acquiesced.  The maitre d' nodded and smiled as the man declared that he was himself a chef and simply could not eat the food that had been served to him.  Apologies were made, new servings were brought, and the rest of us were able to return to our dinners without further interruption.
    On a second night the complainer repeated his performance. Those of us within earshot paused while servers hovered and the chef himself appeared.  Again apologies were made, new servings brought, and our meals permitted to continue. 
    The man was, of course, a bully.  He abused dining room workers who were in no position to fight back. He was also something else. To the other diners whose evenings he interrupted, he was extravagantly rude.
    The episodes irritated a particular nerve in me. I am by background and some aspects of attitude a southerner.  I love the lilt and resonance of the region's many accents.  I love the lyric sense that nourishes its distinguished literature. I love the gumbo of cultures and the rainbow of music, from blues and jazz to the hints of bagpipe in the Scots-Irish tunes of the Appalachians.
    And one more attitude marks me out as a southerner:  I am hyper-sensitive to considerations of courtesy.  By this I do not mean mandarin systems of etiquette. I mean simply that a person should not knowingly discomfort another.
    A lifetime of residential relocation has taught me that others may agree in principle but differ sharply in practice. 
    In the Northeast some idiom seemed quite coarse. I had to learn that it was not meant to attack or insult me. It was just a way of speaking.  I had also to learn in those regions that my own manners could seem to be a fancy pose. When as a young man I first said "sir" and "ma'am" to figures of authority or respect, some thought I was mocking them.
  When I moved to the Midwest, my new acquaintances did not view me as a southerner.  To them I was an easterner. Our conversational rhythms were very different. I thought they could take a long time to answer a simple question.  They thought I was brusque in twitching to wrap up before they had finished giving information I'd asked for.
    North, South, East, West:  Ideas of manners varied widely.
    As a guest at one family's Sunday dinner I brought the entire meal to a brief halt by putting sugar in my iced tea.  They had never seen it done. They thought my behavior was an unkind comment on the beverage they had served me.
    I came to  brace myself especially for funerals and weddings, where in my estimation accepted norms could range 
from odd to ghastly.
    Whatever the variation in particulars, two attitudes are common:
    --Rules of courtesy are quite specific.  Polite people must do certain things and must refrain from doing certain others.
    -- One's own customs are standard, and everyone else's are -- in the usual euphemism -- "different."
    The years have rigorously disabused me of that second notion.  The principle of the thing is what I care about. In my view, the effort of common courtesy is a gesture of respect for others. Failures of courtesy are thus the opposite.  They amount to saying You don't matter.
    Hence I take more than a passing interest in public displays of rudeness.  Even small ones, like that of the dawdler who queues beside a wall-mounted menu for several minutes but bothers to read it and make up his mind only when he has reached the head of the line.  Or the grocery shopper who must tidy every corner of her purse before moving on from the cashier.
    We can give these offenders benefit of the doubt.  They may be only carelessly indifferent to the interests of the people around them.
     But the boor in the dining room was one of the sort who seem to perceive some point or pleasure in throwing their weight around. He was quite clearly aware of his impact on other diners. (And he did clean up his act when they -- peers -- began to stare him down.)
    Rudeness at a focused, personal level, stirs a kind of distrust in me. If you tell me I don't matter, I take you at your word and keep my guard up even when you are all smiles.  Respect is a Humpty-Dumpty kind of thing. If it's gone, it's gone.
    And with age I have become less willing even to appear tolerant of discourtesy. I hope that I never return rudeness for rudeness.  However, I am no longer likely to smile through it -- or give leeway to those who actually announce that they mean to impinge on my time, space or comfort: I hope you don't mind if I ...
    In fact I do mind, and nowadays I probably will say so. Often this visibly surprises the advertisers, who seem to feel entitled to the sufferance of others. They expect to enjoy all their own prerogatives and some of mine, too.
    I prefer to hang on to mine ...
    Thank you very much.
    
    
    

Who Owns Marriage?

This is a true story:
    He is 71, she is 70. They have been together four years and have fashioned a shared life that is to them precious. They would have entered a conventional marriage, but for a tangle of legalistic reasons they could not. Instead, they undertook a commitment ceremony.  A clergyman heard their vows to stay together for life; he blessed their union, and he said: "I proclaim that they are united to one another in a holy covenant."
    They are thrilled.  The ceremony put a seal on what matters most to them. The difference from a conventional, legal marriage is peripheral. 
    Friends and family are thrilled as well. Notably, they are thrilled in the same way.  They agree with the clergyman's declaration that the essence of marriage is in the quality of a couple's commitment.
    One friend put it crisply: "Who cares what the government thinks?"
    Polls confirm what that quip suggests. Attitudes toward the definition of marriage are changing.  Some fear that less value is being accorded the traditional man/woman relationship, sanctioned in law, as the foundation of the traditional family. This is a view through the wrong end of the telescope. A better one is that more value is being allowed for other forms of lifelong commitment.
    This liberalization of attitude takes place amid the national debate of gay marriage. They are, of course, connected.  Yet most Americans, being heterosexual, have no direct, personal stake in the institution of gay marriage.  What, then, could have caused the tide of opinion to turn at this juncture toward a broader definition of wedlock?
    Possibly, injury to a sense of fair play and elementary justice.  Possibly, in the debate of gay marriage, the extreme right has discredited its own writ.
    Few of us would dispute the need for government to protect public health and define the parameters of taxation and property ownership.  But the epicenter of opposition to gay marriage has been located elsewhere. It has been focused in highly selective moralisms; in citations of debatable and dubiously relevant religious tradition; in silly predictions that civilization will crumble if persons of the same gender are permitted to fomalize loving relationships.
    Nor is the larger context lost on attentive observers.  Doomsaying on gay marriage comes from the same quarters that produce, on the issue of abortion, discussion of vaginal probes and "legitimate" rape.  In this, self-styled apostles of limited government have revealed a willingness for government to invade the most intimate aspects of life.
    Mean-spirited extremes against gay marriage have attracted attention to the extremes themselves.  As a dog's breakfast of bigotry and hypocrisy is offered up, many Americans are declining to partake. They may have friends or loved ones in relationships that are not less precious for lying outside traditional norms. Or they may simply feel that, if the government presumes to define love, it presumes too much.
    At a level of plain common sense that underpins American public attitudes at their best, vigilante politics on the right may have re-awakened this awareness: Politicians on every side share a defining trait.  They are glad to hold power over the rest of us. Some of them are willing to take as much of it as we'll cede.
    Scare-mongering is not leadership.  It is a herding tactic.  Scaremongering on intensely personal issues has revealed a disrespect for boundaries that protect us all.
    Appearances suggest a backlash. In any event, an attitude is emerging: Valid marital commitments are not limited to what the government of the moment has been willing to sanction.
   
   
   
   

Christian Football??

    We are selective about living up to our principles.  All of us.
    We don't judge books by their covers -- but we notice that  the man down the street wears terribly cheap clothes. His carelessness of appearance must say something about him.  Mustn't it?
    We believe that people's marital relationships are personal and private -- but we're aware that a colleague's daughter is including the word "obey" in her upcoming marriage vows. In this day and time? Really?
    We admire a willingness to question tradition and try new ways -- but the couple on the next block are so militantly avante garde in their parenting that we wonder (along with others, we learn in neighborhood chitchat) if their children are getting anything like proper guidance.
    We are selective about living up to our principles.  All of us.
     So we should be cautious of casting stones at Tim Tebow for being selective about his. Tebow is a professional football quarterback. He is also an assertively self-proclaimed Christian who plays a violent game on the Christian Sabbath for sums of money surpassing a widow's mite by tens of millions.
    When public figures make a point of calling themselves Christians, we infer purpose beyond a mere declaration of personal belief. We anticipate -- and are meant to -- evangelistic behavior and conservative views on such litmus-test social issues as abortion.
    Tebow fills this bill. He is such a vivid example that, in some circles, his name is more than one kind of household word. His posture in kneeling for prayer on the football field has been widely called "Tebowing." He finally trademarked the term. Just wanted to be sure it's "used in the right way," he said.
   Of course Tebow is not alone in dragging religion into secular venues. Nowadays we have Christian celebrities and celebrity Christians and even (may we say "heaven help us" at this juncture?) Christian politicians.
    And there's the local parson who offers up a prayer before the big high school game.  Or the mom and pop enterprise down the street that calls itself a Christian business. (My town has a Christian furniture store.)
    Want Christian sex toys?  The Internet offers dozens of sources.   How about Christian professional wrestling?  Two full-blown circuits are grappling for God.
    People who strike religious poses to sell dildos can simply be considered beneath comment.
    On other points: Appearances suggest that Tebow may be utterly and terribly sincere -- a naive young man who sees no presumption in claiming to be a brand name for prayer.  Benefit of the doubt also can be given to that local parson. He is a man of the cloth, after all, even if he sees no irony in inviting divine attention to a contest that is the antithesis of turning the other cheek.
    Perhaps that Christian merchant means only to say that he won't cheat or gouge. And no offense is meant, surely, by people who pray aloud in restaurants.  Or by cashiers who say "God bless you" to customers whose religious sensibilities they cannot know.
    By the bigshots who use celebrity to push their chosen form of religion, and by the ordinary folks who plaster muddy, tattered "Jesus saves" bumper stickers on their cars, we are reminded that even good intentions can produce bad results. A religion-on-every-corner ethic adulterates values. Casual displays of religiosity, like other rote declarations of affection, trivialize their object.
    People of faith should regret this. And others would be mistaken to consider it only an intramural matter.  When religion is trivialized, a bar is lowered. Over it step people who are willing to put a religious veneer on secular agendas. Yes, alas, a few of our politicians do seem actually to believe that God is on their side.  The rest, we may reasonably suspect, see advantage in claiming a divine mandate for their opionions. It marvelously short-circuits any obligation to deal forthrightly with differing points of view. I'm right, you're wrong, end of discussion.
    We are all diminished when the adulteration of values becomes a value in itself. And the country is sadly polarized when people -- innocently or otherwise -- confuse their personal outlook with revealed truth.




   

Uncle Barlow Meets the NRA

    I got a letter from Uncle Barlow the other day. He has become a bit of  celebrity down there where he lives in Barlow County, and that is bringing new pressures on him from his friends and neighbors.  Here's what he had to say.
    "Dear Newphew,
    "Well, I am surely in a pickle.  I think I told you that the Ladies' Genealogocial Society was doing a personal history of Barlow County. Well, wouldn't you know, while they were doing all that digging into my family history, they discovered my full, formal legal name, which I believe you probably don't know, since I have always kept pretty quiet about it.
    " I was christened Pierre Gustav Toutant Beauregard Barlow.  You see, my daddy was a Civil War Buff, and I guess this Beauregard fellow was some kind of general back then. You can probably understand why I've always just gone by plain old 'Barlow.'
    "Anyhow, when that ladies' bunch found out about it, they kind of decided that somebody named after a big general with a Frenchy-sounding name must be some sort of special deal, in genealogical terms, and they started wanting to get ever so much better acquainted with me. They started wanting me to 'participate' in their 'discussions.'
    "And that's where I made my mistake, because I said right out plain, 'Discussions of what?'  Now, the Ladies' Genealogical Society is pretty much the same bunch as the Barlow County Ladies' Civic Action Committee. About the time I said 'discussions of what?' they were going through kind of a slow spell  and looking around for something new to be active about. Some of them began talking about my family's 'military history'. Pretty soon they were wanting me to give them a talk about gun control. And durn me, I couldn't figure a way to get out of it.
     "Since I didn't know anything about gun control, I started poking around and reading about it. I got mighty confused mighty quick, let me tell you. I read all this stuff about how sportsmen and hunters needed to be concerned because the gun-controllers wanted to come and take their guns away. I do a little deer hunting from time to time, so I figured maybe I needed to be concerned, too.
    "But then I read on some more and, near as I can tell, mostly the kind of thing that the gun-control  folks want to regulate is fake combat rifles and great big high-capacity magazines -- 20 shots and more, some of them.
    "Now, I don't know much about gun control, but I do know something about hunting, and I am here to tell you this: If you can get a deer to stand still while you shoot at it 20 times, you don't need a gun of any kind. You could hunt that sucker with a baseball bat.
    "Being thoroughly confused, which I was, I thought I should stop looking at secondary sources. (Millie over at the library calls them that.)  I thought I should go directly to the horse's mouth, so to speak.  I started looking first-hand at the stuff put out by the National Rifle Association.
    "Now, the first thing that got my attention was their head man, the one who looks like he just sat bare-assed on a hair brush.  Wayne LaPierre is his name. Some of the stuff he had to say was so nutty, I wondered for a minute if I'd messed up and stumbled across some comedian.  But no, there he was, right in all the official stuff the NRA puts out.
    "By this time I was a country mile beyond confusion. I went over to the library and asked Millie to help me out.
    "Millie told me hell no he's not a comedian. He's serious as a heart attack.  She waved a paper at me and said I had to read it. Said it was an article he'd written somewhere. 
   " In the article he said the president's financial policies could lead to a great big national breakdown:  'Nobody knows if or when the fiscal collapse will come, but if the country is broke there likely won't be enough money to pay for police protection.  And the American people know it.
   " ' Hurricanes. Tornadoes.  Riots.  Terrorists.   Gangs.  Lone criminals.  These are the perils we are sure to face -- not just maybe.  It is not paranoia to buy a gun. It's survival.'
    "Millie said, 'If he believes that bafflegab, he's a fool, and if he doesn't believe it, he's a con man.'  I kind of asked her which one she thought he was, since I hadn't had much luck making heads or tails of him any which way.
    "She said, 'Keep reading the claptrap.'   She pointed to a place farther in down in the article where he said the only way to keep the country from going straight to the dickens was to strengthen the NRA. He asked for donations of $20 or $50 or even $1,000. He said he and his bunch were going to work hard to recruit a lot more members.  He called them 'lovers of freedom.'
    "Millie said 'Lovers of freedom, hell!'  ( She gets kind of salty when she gets worked up.) 'He wants to collect more dues.  That's his message:  The sky is falling! Send me money! It's a wonder he doesn't offer a free bottle of snake oil with every membership. And we've got members of Congress who listen to that guy.'
    "Well, I just have to say, I don't know why anybody would listen to him, much less send him money. And so I still don't know what to say to that ladies' bunch about all this gun control argument, except that they might get themselves about the same grade of discussion in the secure wing over at the home.
    "Maybe I can talk them into being interested in something else. And in the meantime, I guess I'll just have to hope they don't find out that NRA fellow has a Frenchy-sounding name.

                                                                                                            "Sincerely,
                                                                                                            "Your Uncle Barlow"
   

Gun Nuts

    When we Americans crank up our gun control fights, we display a marked capacity for cockeyed behavior.  Hear U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell in an email to constituents (we will return later to the salutation's veiled insinuation):
    "Dear Patriot,
    "You and I are literally surrounded.  The gun grabbers in the Senate are about to launch an all-out assault on the Second Amendment.  On your rights.
    "On Your freedom.
    "Just the other night President Obama urged them to act.  And then he went one step further, spelling out 23 executive orders he will take to get your guns."
    The message continues in this vein.  Even by the standards of fear-mongering, this is gamy stuff.  President Obama and his legislative allies have not offered to "grab" anything.  If fair-minded people may consider some particulars debatable -- and some do -- the president's agenda is not extreme. It displays not a whit of contempt for the Constitution. It is a measured attempt to address problems of gun violence.
    Sen.  McConnell, who may face a re-election challenge from the right, has extra reasons for choosing to incite his constituents rather than lead them.  But he is far from being alone in going for red-meat rhetoric on this issue. Images of jack-booted government are common coin among opponents of gun control.
    What prompts these extremes of language and attitude?
     Greed, in some instances.
    Assuming for the sake of argument that the average family has no pressing need of an imitation combat rifle, it is reasonable to ask: Who has a vested interest in protecting the manufacture and sale of imitation combat rifles -- and Saturday night specials, and other dubious weaponry?
    It is reasonable to answer:  People who manufacture and sell dubious weaponry.
    Enter the National Rifle Association, a gun industry lobby posing as a guardian of citizen's rights. Lobbyists who want to keep their jobs must demonstrate clout. The NRA shrinks from no opportunity, however bizarre. Not long ago it buffaloed the Wisconsin legislature away from a proposal to ban loaded firearms from the public galleries of the legislative chambers.
    The NRA is loud and clever on behalf of gun manufacturers. But it also is openly ruthless and, from time to time, downright absurd. (Its website contains an enemies list that includes the YWCA and Pam Dawber, an aging alumna of the '70s TV sitcom Mork and Mindy).  All this for a business that is -- in its sales to civilian markets -- a very small player in the American economy.
    How can one rogue organization command the attention of the whole  country on behalf of a fringe industry?
    It doesn't.  Quite apart from the ranting of the NRA, gun control propsals strike their own chords among Americans.  They raise questions of privacy and property rights in parts of the country where gun ownership is an ordinary and harmless feature of the common culture.
    And they call to mind of one of government's lower habits. Unable -- or unwilling -- to do what they should, officials may simply do whatever they can and pronounce the result sufficient.  Sensible people may conclude that some gun control proposals fit this pattern all too neatly: Unabe to control or deter the violent few, the government settles for the expedient of encumbering the innocent many.  Few of us require an explanation of the old gibe, "Close enough for government work."
     Even so, reasonable and promising gun control measures are available for the taking.  They may suffer in public debate precisely to the degree that they are not extreme. Measured voices are difficult to hear in a storm of shouting.
    Nowadays, wild-eyed gun advocates are gladly sheltering in the larger right-wing assault on Obama administration policies and on President Obama personally.  (The NRA sponsored an ad calling the president "elitist" and caricaturing the protective measures required by law for his young daughters.)
    In this lamentable context, Sen. McConnell sets out to lather up the home folks.  He and those who agree with him are "patriots."  People who disagree with him are -- well, something else.
    We may be reminded of the 18th Century sage Samuel Johnson.  He said:
    "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."
   
   
   
   

Who Kidnapped The Real Republicans?

    I got a letter from Uncle Barlow the other day. He's had some time on his hands since the Ladies' Auxiliary of the First Barlow Church discovered he did a little bootlegging in his youth.  He's been mostly staying home and out of sight, because whenever he goes out in public they try to save him from his sins.  He's used the time to give some extra thought to political trends.  Here's what he had to say:
    "Dear Nephew,
    "Well, darned if we don't have ourselves a big political mixup here in Barlow County.  The way Millie over at the library says it, the tides are changing.
    "You see, the Buncombe brothers decided to set up a drag race out on the old bypass.  Sheriff Poole got wind of it and figured he'd go out there and shut them down. Ordinarily he wouldn't have paid it any mind, but it was an election year, and he had a young fella giving him some competition. Sheriff Poole thought he ought to put on some extra show.
    "Trouble is, the Buncombe brothers are better drivers than he is, and they have faster cars. When they saw him coming, they just lit out.  They took him through a hairpin turn on the back side of Barlow's Knob, and he lost control of his cruiser and landed in the low end of Lester Hobgood's hog pen.  The muck in that pen was so deep, the sheriff's car fetched up short and sharp, and the plastic Jesus flew off his dashboard and gave him a shiner.
    "Now, the sheriff felt a little self-conscious about campaigning with a shiner he got from a plastic Jesus in a hog pen.  So, some of the old money boys around here told him not to bother too much, just  to relax -- said they'd buy him some extra advertising, even  some TV time,  and he'd cruise right in.
    But he didn't.  The young fella beat him, and now he and the old money boys are trying to figure out what the heck happened to them.
        "Kind of reminds me of those Republican folks up there in Washington, since they lost the presidential election, and some seats in Congress,  and a good deal of their strut.   Every time I turn on the TV, I see something about them thrashing around and trying to figure out what to do now.  Mostly, it looks like to me, they cause trouble, especially over there in the U.S. House of Representatives.  That Speaker fellow, Boehner, has his hands full just trying to maintain an appearance that the inmates are not in charge of the asylum.
     "Now, I think some of those folks have a lot of brass even calling themselves Republicans at all.  I mean, I could call myself a Chinaman, but that wouldn't make me one.  I'm thinking about the real Republicans -- the kind we used to have.  We need to have them back again.
    "I say this even though I'm a Democrat. Always have been. I kind of like the way Democrats think that folks should get a helping hand if they need one. Of course the bad news about the Democrats has always been that they can get pretty frisky with taxes.
    "The good thing about the Republicans was that they were apt to be a little more careful about taxing other people's money. The bad news about them was that if you fell down, they might be a little bit too apt just to leave you where you landed.
    "It used to be that if you put the Republicans and the Democrats in together, and they each got to have a little say about how they government should run, they  sort of balanced each other out, and the government went along pretty well for the most part, over the longer time.
    "But nowadays, when it comes to getting the government to run on more or less the right track, it looks to me like some of  these so-called Republicans have been about as useful as tits on a bull, if you will forgive my language.
    "About half the time, even with all the big problems that need to be talked about, they keep getting hung up on religion and sex and what women should be allowed to do with their private parts. (If they start offering to make rules about what I can do with my Johnson, I'm going to be peeved, let me tell you.)
    "The other half of the time they are trying to make President Obama look bad.  It's like they don't really care that the people elected him.  The other day that senator from Kentucky, that McConnell fellow, got so twisted around trying to make the president look bad that he wound up talking against his own bill.  I'm not sure I understand how that happened.  But come to think of it, neither did Senator McConnell, apparently, so I guess I shouldn't feel so bad.
    "I just don't understand how some of these so-called Republicans can hate the president so bad. They seem to think everything is just personally about him.  I swear, I hope the Almighty doesn't choose President Obama to announce the time of the second coming. Those Republicans over there in the House of Representatives will vote to change the schedule.
    "I decided I would take it up with Millie over at the library.  She understands some of these things a lot better.  And I'm going to tell what she said just the way she said it. Millie has more words than I do.


    "I said: 'Millie, how come some of these Republicans hate the president so bad?'
    "And Millie said:  'Well, partly it's because they're confused and alarmed, maybe even a little afraid.  The times and the attitudes of the electorate are changing in ways that seem threatening to some of them.  They don't like the message, so they're attacking the messenger.
    " 'And then you have bunches of extremists who are bent on having their way even if a majority don't want it -- and even if the consequences don't square with what they claim are their principles. Take a look at the fine print of some of the legislation that got passed during all the blathering over the so-called fiscal cliff. Republicans stuck in some language authorizing continued spending -- which is already in the millions -- on courtroom defenses of the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act.  That act already is in deep trouble in the courts, and is being abandoned politically even by some who initially voted for it. But the Republican extremists won't let go. Talk about wasteful spending.  Talk about piling hypocrisy on top of stupidity.
    " 'We are likely to see more of this in the fight over raising the debt ceiling.  Some in Congress are saying they won't raise the ceiling unless the White House agrees to certain policies they want.  Of course, if they don't raise the ceiling, the government will default on its credit obligations -- obligations that legally apply to Republicans as well as Democrats -- an the whole country will be harmed. Republican extremists are threatening to damage the welfare of the American people if the President won't give them policy concessions they can't win by appropriate legislative means.
    " 'It's a damn poor show. Officials who have accepted a sworn obligation to govern in the interests of all the people are trying to sabotage the work of a duly elected president. I suppose they will eventually learn they can't turn back the tide by shouting at it. But in the meantime they seem ready to do a lot of damage.'

    "Well, that's how Millie sees it, and I have to say I think she's got some pretty good points.  The kind of Republicans we used to have -- the kind who had some thougtful and useful things to say -- have gotten to be about as welcome up there in Washington as ex-wives at a family reunion.
    "I have to go now. I promised to go over and play some checkers with Sheriff Poole. (We still call him that. It's kind of a courtesy.)  He needs some company and maybe a little Dutch Uncle advice.  He just can't stand the notion that the people turned him out. He's begun to talk a little crazy. He's saying the young fella beat him by promising to treat poor folks the same way he'd treat the big money boys -- as if there was something wrong with that. And he's started muttering about how maybe the young fella isn't really even a legal resident of Barlow County.
    "On the other hand, maybe with a little time, he'll mend.  He did put the plastic Jesus back on his dashboard."

                                                                                                "Sincerely,
                                                                                                "Your Uncle Barlow"