Hangover Ahead?

    He had, in fact, got everything from the church and Sunday School, except, perhaps, any longing whatever for decency and kindness and reason.
                                                                                  Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry

    Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion ... 
                                                  From  The First Amendment to the United States Constitution

    People who behave foolishly are apt to be deemed fools. People who wield power foolishly are apt to be deemed dangerous fools.
                                                                                                  Anonymous


    Mixing politics and religion adulterates both and produces an unhealthy brew. More's the pity that foes of same-sex marriage are tippling on it.
     Republican politicians woo the religious right with talk of writing God into the Constitution. Mega-preachers rail against the Supreme Court, the president, even against citizens who voted for the president. State and local officials offer religious excuses for obstruction and foot-dragging.  That old-time religion has never had so many fans.
    I'm not among them. To my ear, the voice of the far Christian right has always been a little long on judging and a little short on loving. And in any case it is a factional voice. It does not typify Christian thought, much less American public attitude.  Yet some on that side would see their favorite doctrines written into civil law, to be enforced on all comers.
    History warns against thinking to evangelize by the sword. And common sense warns against thinking to dance with the devil and come away clean.  Except perhaps to unusually obtuse children, the principle of the thing is simple. If government were empowered to favor one version of faith over others, no one's faith would be safe.
    Yet between the preachers and the pols, a fond dalliance proceeds. On both sides, temptation has worked its powerful way.
    Without a coherent vision of public policy for the country, the Republican Party is doubly open to single-issue, hot-button politics. On the religious right, a worldly appetite for political power is at work.  When candidates go a-courtin' over there, they can find the welcome warm indeed. And over there can be found a politician's dream of cohesive voter blocs ripe for sloganeering. Thus we see religion used to decorate the hoary tactic of barren politicians: demonize a minority.
    The same-sex marriage issue will burn out eventually. It is at odds with settled law and public opinion. But the mutual exploitation of preachers and pols may linger for a while. The appetite for it on the religious right is plain to see. And the GOP's problem remains. The party has little to say to the American people, and leaders who say even that much badly. Thus Republican candidates will be tempted toward the expedient of whooping up emotional issues.
    They won't succeed in turning the country into a theocracy. They will succeed in debasing the language of our politics.
 

 

Comic Politics

    No Republican presidential candidate has yet been pictured in a propeller beanie, but Donald Trump probably has trouble with hats of any sort. In kindness we might call the Republican field colorful. In candor we would call most of it dreadful.
    Parts of it may fall out this way:
    Some hothouse flowers of state politics will not do well in the great outdoors. One of these will be former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who still doesn't seem to get it: Much of the country doesn't care how they do things down yonder in the Lone Star State. His indictment will matter less than his tin ear.
    Another will be Wisconsin's bully-boy governor, Scott Walker. Even when he's not bumbling, he will struggle to he heard over cries of outrage and dismay from his own state.
    Still another will be Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who may need more than one closet to hold all his skeletons. He struts his in-your-face act with such gusto that one writer calls him Gov. Powder Keg. He will discover that blunt talk is like virginity. People admire it more in the abstract.  Close and constant national scrutiny will show him to be a poseur -- or, as his home folks are beginning to say, a phony.
     Elsewhere in the pack are long shots getting makeovers for the national audience; scolds offering a dog's breakfast of pet peeves; and wannabes who may only wanna follow the Sarah Palin pattern of celebrity, in which flamboyantly failed candidates can make a good living as political hams.
     Experts see front runners in Florida's Sen. Marco Rubio and former Florida governor Jeb Bush.  Rubio gained his Senate seat by surviving a multi-candidate election in which more people voted against him than for him. He has traveled well on youth and ethnicity, but on matters of substance has sometimes been a dim star. Does he have genuine political ability? So far we don't really know.
     Some early support migrated to Bush simply for want of attractive options. And he has not yet found a stride. Meanwhile, examinations of his past show him standing close to some shady business deals and making a living by trading on his family name. In other words, there are shadows on his character and his competence.
     Nowhere in sight is a rescuer who will say the truth about the national GOP:   The emperor is naked. The party's best talents are mediocre. Their pretense to stewardship of conservatism is a shame, and a reminder that an idea is not responsible for everyone who claims it. In the history of Western democracy, the role of authentic conservative thought has been honorable and useful. In today's American politics, the role of the Republican Party has sometimes been neither.
     The GOP needs to free itself of people who treat politics as playacting and the party as a means of hustling a buck or grinding an axe.
 
   
     
   
   


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After The Flag

                      The worst, the most corrupting lies are problems wrongly stated.
                                                                                                Georges Bernanos
                      Why, sometimes, I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
                                                                         The White Queen, in Through The Looking Glass
    As a native southerner I say this about moves against the Confederate flag:  Good riddance. It is a symbol of bigotry and, for some, a license to kill. It has no proper place in contemporary public life.
    The general applause for these moves represents an ironic turn of events.  Traditionally, on matters of race, the rest of the nation has liked to look away with scorn to Dixie.  A sordid and shameful strain in this region's history has enabled selective recollection of history in other back yards. Of segregated schools in the Northeast and upper Midwest; segregated public accommodations and even entire towns in New England;  anti-miscegenation laws in most of the lower 48 states. And so on.
    History will likely right itself in the long term. Meanwhile, we are left to deal with the realities of here and now.  One of these is the ordinary human yen to think of racism as someone else's sin. Another is the temptation to believe that we may finally have the problem on the run -- to feel good about melting the tip of an iceberg, in the case of the flag.
    Still another can he heard among politicians and commentators on the right. They are signaling that they sense in their target constituency an issue-weariness on race. After the Charleston church massacre they strained to avoid calling it what it was: A classic racial hate crime.  In a bizarre aside, the editorialists at The Wall Street Journal thought it timely to assert that institutional racism no longer exists in America.
    Without evidence that The White Queen works at The Journal, we may conclude that the editorialists don't get out much, and that their office windows do not afford them a clear view of, say, the criminal justice system.
    The politics and atmospherics of race have not been good these days. Politicians have worked openly to inhibit minority voting.  Our African-American president has been mocked and reviled in some quarters, even by some in Congress. See, for example,  the Norfolk, Nebraska parade float portraying an outhouse as the Obama Presidential Library. See the collected sayings of John Boehner, Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz. (Senator Cruz's rhetoric is best sampled when there will be time afterward to take a shower.)
        Notwithstanding White Queen commentators and pandering politicians, institutional racism is still alive. Minorities are disadvantaged in health care, even in access to grocery shopping. They have been afflicted by the banking, insurance and mortgage industries. Racial disparity is sharply increasing  in schools, especially in the urban Northeast.
       To say that we are all responsible is not to say that we are all bigots. It is, rather, to say that we are not always attentive to what is produced or permitted by the accretion of our everyday behaviors.
       Symbols matter. Rejecting a hateful symbol matters.  But symbolism can't substitute for the glamourless work of diligent citizenship: For listening when we're told that minority schools are flagging a few miles from our homes;  for remembering that the politicians passing those ugly voting laws were elected from polling places like the one down the street.