Orwellian

One of the great challenges in talking about politics with a diverse group of people, which America most certainly is, is the apparent lack of a common language between different factions of the political spectrum.  Even the rather opaque qualities of certain accents within the United States are nowhere near the barrier to being understood as the gulf between the average progressive’s and the average conservative’s lexicon.  I make no reservations in stating that I have my own biases on these things, but it would seem to me that conservative commentators have been far more effective in simply redefining words into meaninglessness.  It’s downright insidious how fundamentally effective the efforts have been to redefine words like care, liberty, babies, life, and family values, to name a few.

Bernie Sanders, for example, has made it a poignant part of his stump speech to point out the conservative use of the phrase “family values.” He is quite justified to heap on the sarcasm when it comes to the GOP claim that they are the party of family values.  This isn’t simply because it implies that somehow the Democrats, and progressives generally, lack family values, though that factors into it.  No, the problem here is that they have fundamentally flipped reality with this talking point, because in fact they are, broadly speaking, only in favor of a very narrow definition of families.  The “family values” they raise up are those of “Leave it to Beaver,” and there’s nothing necessarily wrong with being for that, but they are then against the family values of gay families, atheist families, immigrant families, etc.  Any family that deviates even slightly from their ideal of a nuclear, white, Christian family is to be abhorred, even as we see what family values mean to the Duggars, as a perhaps too easy example.

But even setting aside the mistreatment of gay and lesbian couples who make the responsible decision to make a home together and raise children, the Far Right has even usurped the word that usually brings thoughts of love to mind, babies.  See, a normal family has a baby, it’s a lovely child to be sure, but immigrants have something far less wholesome, an “anchor baby.”  In the same way that I find it weird to hear people talk about gay marriage, because it’s just marriage, I find it odd that this qualifier gets slapped in front of the word baby just because the parents weren’t US citizens.  Bobby Jindal’s mother was pregnant with him when she came to the US, but he doesn’t seem to think of himself as having been a lower caste of baby. Perhaps because it’s an asinine concept to begin with.

Let’s be clear, this is a problem that simply doesn’t exist in the real world.  There are certainly people who come to the US and have children, but they aren’t using their children to cut the line and become citizens.  Why?  Because for that strategy to work they have to not only have the child in an American hospital so he or she can be acknowledged to have birthright citizenship, but then wait around for over two decades without being stopped by authorities so that their kid can finally petition to have their parents’ immigration status modified.  As with all things in this presidential cycle, Mr Trump may have been the loudest in this regard, but he is by no means the only person who feels it necessary to question the motives of a newborn child.  Kudos to Marco Rubio for being one of the few people in the GOP race with common sense enough to not politicize human life…

Well that’s not entirely true, because aside from the deplorable disregard for immigrant life on the Far Right, it’s not uncommon to instead focus on the mother with scorn.  It is rare indeed these days to find a politician running for a Republican nod to acknowledge that the mother’s life is a consideration in the whole battle over abortion.  Setting aside the right of individuals to have autonomy of their own bodies, a step I don’t take lightly, let’s recognize that pregnancy carries certain health risks, and can even be tragically fatal in extreme cases.  In those circumstances, when bringing the baby to full term would likely cost the lives of both the mother and the prospective child, it would certainly be better to allow the woman to live so that she can become a mother at a different time if she is so devoted.  Just because one pregnancy is not brought to term, doesn’t mean a woman cannot adopt or find a surrogate or in any other way become a mother; except in a world where “pro-life” is redefined to mean no exceptions.

It’s at this point I want to pause and address the goodhearted people out there who believe they are pro-life, because I do understand.  The people calling for the end of abortions are doing what they think is right in defending the lives of human beings.  I do not agree with the assumptions that need to be made for this point of view, but I can recognize compassion where it exists, because the people who take up the mantle of pro-life do not do so out of hatred.  That said, life is difficult and sometimes we have to make the least bad option to save lives.  In these cases where the pregnancy can only bring death, surely it would be better to give the mother a second chance.  And for that second chance to occur that mother and her doctor need to know that abortions are legal so that they can be safe.  Because however good your intentions are, if you are not able to make these basic exceptions then you can’t honestly use the title of pro-life.

So where do these perversions of words come from?  Why is it that we talk about things in terms of pro-life verses pro-choice, why is it that the word “care” was turned into an epithet when preceded by the name of our 44th president, and why is the estate tax so often called the “death tax?”  There’s a lot of money that goes into marketing a product, whether New Coke or Neo-Con.  People like Frank Luntz make a decent living by coming up with inaccurate terms (death tax) to gin up support for some issues or un-emotive (climate change) phrases to avoid others.  It’s crucial for the debate to control the words and their definitions, because if you control that then argument can be made moot from the get go.  Amid the unity in the wake of the largest terrorist attack in US history, who is going to oppose something so PATRTIOTic?  And there are certainly liberal equivalents, but when it comes to bending words past their loosest definitions the Far Right reigns supreme.

The echoes of these think tank redefinitions are felt every time you have a discussion with someone you disagree with only to realize that you may be using the same words, but you’re using them so differently as to make them functionally from different languages.  So I didn’t choose my title lightly because it does seem too tempting these days to jump immediately to the famous names and pretend like you know what you’re talking about.  If it were merely misunderstandings that arise from people experiencing the world differently that would be one thing, but we live in a world where some group of partisans can redefine words and a large number of people will simply accept it, meaning we have to waste time and energy just working on translation to get to the meat of the issue.

To be fair, it is the nature of words to change their meanings as languages evolve.  When King James II called St Paul’s Cathedral “Amusing, Artificial, and Awful” he was paying a compliment to the skill of the builders in evoking such awe.  There’s nothing wrong per se with devoted groups giving specific meanings to words and phrases, even if it is only to suit a political agenda.  The problem arises when people don’t take even the two seconds necessary to look things up for themselves, to check for accuracy, or even to make sure that the shocking article you just read wasn’t written by The Onion.  We have the ability to find out the truth with relative ease, so we have the responsibility to be skeptical and informed.  If we can’t bring ourselves to do even that little, then perhaps we deserve to be so mislead.  After all, ignorance is strength right?

Why does the GOP Exist?

The American political system is utterly backward.  We are over a year away from the general election, yet people are already talking about 2016 as if the polling stations are warming up.  At the same time the average American is first of all not a voter and second is almost entirely unaware of what is going on in both party politics as well as what has really been going on in our government.  There are any number of metrics that demonstrate that we generally don’t know basic civics like the distribution of powers, who our elected representatives are, or even what the positions of the major parties actually are.  The last point goes quite a ways to informing the answer to the eponymous question, why does the modern Republican Party still exist?

We need to get a few things straight right off the bat, the modern Republican Party is not the center-Right party to the Democrats’ center-Left by any objective metric.  The Democrats, as a whole, are not a Left wing party, except by comparison to the GOP.  This perhaps goes to explain why Bernie Sanders may be running in the Democratic primary for president but is the longest-serving independent in congressional history.  The Democrats don’t campaign on raising taxes, but they do campaign on balancing budgets, which sometimes includes raising taxes.  In that regard they could be seen as quite conservative, because the Democratic Party values living within our means, you may remember “PAYGO” during the Clinton years as an example.  This puts them in line with many Center-Right parties in Europe and even more closely aligned with the Conservative Party of Canada.  The Republican party is another beast altogether.

The modern Republican Party has become an extremist group.  Despite the fact that we are all the descendants of immigrants in the United States, with the possible exception of Native Americans, there are popular members of the GOP that are calling for the end of all legal immigration.  Setting aside that this would simply result in a massive increase of illegal immigration, this is the worst possible thing you could do to the economy.  The fact that people come here to work hard and make us all wealthier is what makes America successful and frankly American.  Regardless of the protection that secularism provides to every person of faith in this country, nearly all Republican politicians have been pushing to make the government more theocratic in alignment with their own specific interpretations of Christianity.  People like Grover Norquist have convinced most of the leading GOP politicians to sign pledges, promising to never raise taxes under any situation.  This may instinctively feel good to people, but if you aren’t getting enough tax revenue and you’re already on the downward slump of the Laffer Curve, then you might just need to or else you drive up debt.  A powerful military is great and all, but when it gets as bloated as ours clearly is, it wastes money, it wastes lives, and it makes us less safe by getting us into conflicts against enemies that we’ve armed with our surplus weapons.

I could go on, and repeatedly have gone on, detailing the ludicrous policies that the Far-Right GOP has been pushing for: from rewriting curricula to exclude evolution and include a whitewashed history, to pushing policies that would criminalize homosexuality again.  Suffice it to say that the current GOP strategy is the same as it’s been for the last few election cycles, which is to say keep putting all your money on an increasingly shrinking demographic.  However, that’s not exactly the thrust of what I want to talk about, because in spite of the stark immorality, insanity, and ineptitude of damn near every plank of the Republican platform, there are still many people who claim to be undecided or impartial to the difference between the parties.  In an ideal world, it might be nice to have two parties that each are pushing for rational solutions, but who disagree with each other on what the best solutions are; because let’s face it there are often multiple right and wrong answers to any problem.  Sadly we don’t live in that world here in the good old US of A, but many people can’t seem to recognize the fact and I want to explore why.

It’s become almost a cliche in its own right that there is a whole class of people who consistently vote against their own economic interest, if they do end up voting at all.  It’s highlighted in the book “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”  Incidentally, in the intervening time between when that was written and the penning of this post, Kansas has only gotten more conservative economically at the expense of the vast majority of Kansans.  The central point of that book is the use of religious rhetoric to focus voters on social issues in a way that blinds them to every other issue, meaning that elections are about much more than the economy, stupid.

There’s definitely truth to this assessment, and it’s understandable why this would be the case because social issues do matter a great deal.  The problem I have with this assessment is that it doesn’t explain why so many people continue to vote for the GOP even when they realize that the Rightwing politicians are against social positions they support like treating the LGBT community as human beings or wanting to keep women’s health clinics open.  Sure issues like abortion rights are extremely important to some voters, but for most people it’s not the central issue and some Democrats are pro-life just as some Republicans are pro-choice.

The next American political cliche that often gets hit in this regard is the observation by John Steinbeck that many Americans simply don’t see themselves as poor, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.  It’s true that there is a profound sense of hope that runs through America that tells people if they work hard enough they will come out on top and join the ranks of the upper-echelon that controls the socio-economic landscape.  Our ingenuity is rooted in this strain of the American Dream that promises remuneration, and when we do win we want to be able to keep every last cent, which is why so many tolerate the rigged system we have.  Even some of the Republicans running now will admit that the system is rigged for the rich, but they play a shell game that tells people to just continue to give more money and liberty to the richest people and hope for the best.  I would think that people are too smart to always fall for that trick, so I have to hope there’s a better reason.

I think there’s a stick that goes along with the carrot that is the American Dream, and it’s the feeling that helping the very poorest in society isn’t fair to the people who work hard only to scrape by.  Our social safety net is designed to help the people who, for whatever reason, fall through the cracks and lose a job, can’t make the ends meet, need a hand to afford an education or healthcare or whatever it may be.  For people who work multiple jobs and only barely afford all of those things on their own, it’s insulting to see even a fraction of the money they work so hard for going to someone they don’t know, someone who may or may not be gaming the system.  And this is where the GOP gets in good with the lower-middle class.

The Bible points out just how blind people can be to their own problems, instead pointing out the speck of dirt in others.  This is how someone like Josh Duggar can think that it’s the gays that are going to hell, even as he has fondled his siblings and cheated on his wife.  This is also why you can see picket signs demanding that the government keeps its hands off their Social Security or else hear someone claim that they struggled on food stamps and no one gave them a handout.  But putting aside the stupidity and hypocrisy, there is a kernel of truth that it’s not fair that the government helps out some people who are struggling, but not everyone who is struggling.

The GOP has been able to make the case that their policies are fairer because they help everyone equally, which is to say not at all, though that last bit never gets brought up.  And that’s just it, the policies that the GOP are pushing may feel right in these contexts, but they are still antagonistic to the values of the vast majority of Americans.  No matter how good the packaging, eventually the word will get out and people will simply stop pulling the same lever, or at least demand some pretty dramatic change.  Even if it doesn’t, their horrendous policies are antithetical to the changing demographics and political landscape, and if they can’t make that message appeal to groups that are currently marginalized by the Far Right, then they will increasingly fall into obscurity.

Having reviewed the modern Republican Party I have come up with two possible solutions for their predicament.  The first solution would be for the leadership of the party to show some backbone and no longer give in to the worst extremists on the Far Right.  They would then put forward candidates that hold strong views on the keeping government out of people’s lives where possible, while still performing all the proper duties of a government. They would never allow their positions to become so obscene and so dedicated to pandering to the lowest common denominator in the country.  This would reclaim their image as the party of Lincoln, a party dedicated to individual liberty and the strong moral courage to stand up even when it’s against people who claim to be on your side.  That seems unlikely, because the party has so devolved into scaring voters to the polls, barring the opposition from getting to the polls, disregarding the humanity of whole swathes of the American public, and oh so many more deplorable acts.  So there is a second solution.  They could rename the party “The Aristocrats.”

Politically or Otherwise

It is altogether quite appropriate that the symbol of the Republican party is an elephant, and not just because an elephant is a large, lumbering creature, famous for dwelling on the past.  No, it’s rather fitting because like the proverbial elephant in the room their candidates for president represent many unavoidable and unfortunate facts about American politics.  Perhaps the epitome of everything wrong with the GOP is its current frontrunner, Donald Trump.  We’ve been complaining that the richest of the rich in America have had too much influence on the people in our highest offices and now Mr Trump abandons any pretense and just goes for broke.  The kicker to all this, if you look at policy positions of Trump, such as they are, compared to the majority of the other candidates running against him in this primary, he’s not the craziest or most extreme by a long shot.  We all know the deplorable things he has said about illegal immigrants, but unlike Scott Walker and Rick Santorum he still believes in legal immigration.  He has said that he is against abortion but he doesn’t want to shut down a respected provider of healthcare to attack abortions.  The same can not be said for Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, or Ted Cruz.  And irrespective of how crass his statements are, regardless of how demonstrably uninformed he is, he has held the plurality of support from prospective Republican supporters for a shocking amount of time.

Well, in an ideal world it would be shocking at any rate.  The Far-Right of American politics has been so ubiquitous for so long that even someone as ridiculous as Donald Trump looks comparably reasonable in the grand scheme of things, which in itself should be the kind of wakeup call for the GOP that gets them to put down the sauce and take the lunatics out of control of the asylum.  But even amid the mountains of misinformation, lies, and utter bullshit emanating from the GOP field there is that one grain of truth peaking out, and it’s worth examining.  One of the repeated themes in the GOP debate was the rallying cry that people are simply sick of Political Correctness or PC culture.  There is a portion of American society that simply doesn’t care how wrong the things coming out of Trump’s mouth are, just so long as they have the sense that this is his honest, unvarnished, unscripted opinion.  Perhaps it’s simply because reality TV has been in the culture too long, but people seem to have forgotten that just because someone isn’t being forced to think before they spew words from their facial orifice, it doesn’t mean what they are saying is in any sense true or even worth hearing.  Nevertheless, there is indeed something to the argument that PC culture has gotten a little out of control.

Before I continue on that point I feel it’s necessary to point out some of the simple realities that get glossed over or obscured altogether when people discuss what is PC these days.  First of all, any person who claims that they are being oppressed and censored by PC culture has no idea what they are talking about and deserve to feel bad for being so grossly ill informed.  There was a time in this country that you weren’t allowed to acknowledge, by law, that gay people existed, much less talk about them in a positive light.  There was a time when you could be deported for ever having been the member of a communist party.  This is what censorship looks like, and it was wrong then and it is no longer allowed today.  The first amendment guarantees that the government will not encroach on your right to speak and think and associate with people as you wish.  It does not, however, guarantee that everyone else will appreciate your speech, your thoughts, or your associates; just that they have no legal basis to stop you… so long as you aren’t actively trying to hurt people.

People have the right to take offense at anything that offends them.  That offense doesn’t mean they get to shut down the thing that offends them, but they have the right to no longer buy from a company or enjoy a comedian that offends them.  In many cases, I might agree that to go to that extent is pretty stupid as it’s quite easy to both disagree with people on some things and still want to talk with them or buy their products.  Indeed it might be better that people learn to grow up and learn to take things on the chin a bit better, but at the end of the day the offense of people is not the same thing as them censoring you.  I, for one, feel that it is ludicrous that Kacey Musgraves didn’t win all the awards for every single song on her album “Same Trailer Different Park,” but the crowd that otherwise enjoys country music is under no obligation to appreciate her choice of decidedly liberal lyrics.  Is this the conservative equivalent of PC culture that censors lyrics from performances?  Perhaps, but Ms Musgraves was under no obligation to play at their awards show and, most importantly, the government is not the one telling her what she can and cannot say.

All of that said, there is indeed a grain of truth in the heaping mound of untruth that is the petty attack on Political Correctness as the looming threat of democracy.  Too often the people who argue against PC culture are not doing so for the sake of the freedom of speech, as such, but because they cannot handle any negative feedback for being decidedly uncivil.  It’s hard to feel sympathy for groups that feel attacked because they get called bigots for using racial epithets, refusing to treat homosexuals as human beings, defending asinine flags and parts of our history, etc.  It’s hard, but we do have to find it in ourselves to recognize that we can go overboard in confronting bigotry, and when that happens we don’t move forward in anything resembling a constructive manner.

Don’t get me wrong, when something is incorrect, politically or otherwise, it is the duty of a person who knows better to point it out when appropriate.  When candidates say something that is demonstrably wrong, they should be called out on those points, in the same way that children should not be seen as so fragile that we can’t ever try to correct bad behavior.  It’s not for the sake of political correctness that I refuse to compromise on the position of some zealots on the Right who wish to retain the right to deny employment based on sexuality.  It’s based on their incorrect understanding that freedom of religion is a get out of jail free card for denying the rights of others.  But even though these people are so, so, so very wrong on so many issues, they still are entitled to say their peace.

People need to be able to say things we disagree with, and that includes offensive things because you never know what someone is going to be able to find offensive.  I have no delusions that the simple fact that I am gay and that I am an atheist offends some people, among many other things.  The less than charitable way I treated Mr Trump earlier in this post could, undoubtedly, be taken as offensive.  In that way it is worth discussing when and where the PC crowd have gotten overzealous in their own right.  The long list of words as forbidden is, in my opinion at least, simply wrongheaded as it only gives power to words without giving any power to the people you try to protect.  This is not to say, however, that we should be encouraging people to use language that insults others based on race, sexuality, gender, mental capabilities, social status, etc.  Still we need to be able to live with people occasionally saying things that we find offensive without shutting down all conversations.

People abuse their rights.  People who claim that entire nationalities are mostly rapists, people who picket the funerals of soldiers, people who insult others based solely on the pigmentation of their skin are using their freedom in as uncivil a way as I can imagine without ever crossing a line where I would feel comfortable shutting them down.  People say incorrect things, and on that they should be challenged and corrected, but when things get into the context of PC culture we do need to ensure that we aren’t crushing dissent, because dissent is both healthy and necessary.  Regardless, what I feel is a much larger threat to national discourse is our insistence that everything be kept to the lowest common denominator.  In that sense what I feel is ultimately more damaging about Mr Trump is not necessarily the things he says, but the fact that he says them in such a piss poor way as to demand that we all treat the reading level of a fourth grader as sufficient for a person who wants to represent us in the highest office.

Value Judgement

According to conservative sources there is a war for the very soul of this nation going on that threatens our Christian values, and on this point I must agree.  There has been a longstanding battle to destroy Christian values and replace them with something far more insidious… Biblical values.  You see, the people fighting this war against Christian values are the people who insist most dogmatically that they are the “real” Christians, i.e. the Far-Right Conservative Christians.  I’m not here to judge anyone’s faith, if for no other reason than that I am not a believer myself, but I do hold strongly to many values that I would consider to be Christian and I am sick of the degradation and usurpation of those values by people who not only would have difficulty spelling morality but who clearly have no idea how to define it.

So, let’s begin by defining our terms.  Christian values are those that stem from the teachings of Jesus Christ and by extension the efforts of those people who actually try to live out the full meaning of those teachings.  In this way Christian values can quite often parallel secular values of love, community, stewardship, etc as these values might originate independent from a conversation about Christ; however, for the purposes of this discussion it is sufficient to recognize that these values are what people tend to mean when talking about actions as the Christian thing to do.  Biblical values, on the other hand, refer to the values of those who see the entirety of the Bible as the beginning and end of knowledge and truth, when it suits their argument.  These are the values that come from laws described in the Bible, though noticeably not all of them; values that reflect a literal interpretation of the accounts of the Bible, unless it doesn’t count; and most importantly values that are quite clearly immoral, but are nonetheless justified by an obscure passages that they like.

Education gives a distinct example of the difference between the desires of these two value systems.  Christian values have given the world generations of devoted people who seek out truth so that they may better know their Lord and his creation.  Christian values produced innumerable elite universities like Boston College, University of Notre Dame, Emory University, and St Olaf College to name a few… Um Yah Yah.  Christian values give people the impetus to seek out how the heavens go and not simply how to go to heaven.  In short, education is a source of courage for those with Christian values because it allows a person to fully experience the beauty of the world as it is, as well as the skills necessary to tackle the ugliness of the world as it is.

Those with Biblical values, by contrast, see education as a source of terror, because their faith is so weak that it could not handle the stress of experiencing the world as it is.  Instead of recognizing and confronting the world on its own terms, the goal is to forcefully reject anything that does not conform with how they would like to believe the world is, in the realm of Biblical values.  Evolution must be opposed on principle because it conflicts with a literal reading of Genesis, even though there is evidence that a literal reading of Genesis is itself a very recent development in apologetics.  Climate change cannot be real because God made a covenant with Moses that he would never again flood the Earth and sealed the deal with a rainbow.  Descriptions of history must never allow us to realize that our patriarchs were fallible mortals, because then the flock might start to ask uncomfortable questions about the necessity of the current patriarch to own a private jet for his ministry.  Biblical values, therefore, prescribe that curricula be changed where possible and that students be pulled out of the school system where it isn’t.

The results of Biblical values in our schools are rather stark.  AP courses in schools have to be rewritten to make historical narratives that seek to placate rather than inform.  Creationism, or as some proponents label it “intelligent design,” are continually forced down the throats of unsuspecting students, unless or until brought before a judge, because these things never meet the Lemon Test.  Abstinence only sex education results in higher rates of teen pregnancy, which results in higher rates of abortion, not to mention unabated STIs.  Biblical values go quite a ways to explaining why America routinely underperforms on international comparisons of education systems, in spite of the money we spend on students, when we spend money on students.

Christian values heed the actual words throughout the Gospels about devotion to the poor, even at the expense of material comfort.  Biblical values see the poor as feckless and this hatred of the least among us is justified because of one verse in 2nd Thessalonians.  If you’ve ever thought to yourself how can a self-described Christian possibly follow the works of Ayn Rand as near scripture, first of all you’re not alone, but second you do not understand that the importance in these sects is on a sort of orthodoxy, correct belief, and not orthopraxy, correct conduct.  By this I mean that the adherents of Christian values work to live out their faith by trying to act like Christ, but for the Biblical believer it is only ever a matter of shouting at the world loudest that they believe.  The people I know, who hold Christian values, are devoted to doing right by their fellow human beings: they do volunteer work, they give to charities that actually help the poor, they care about abuses of justice, they try to undo the structural issues that keep the needy, needy.  Those with a firm foundation in Biblical values are far too concerned with being of the one true faith to care if a woman is at death’s door because she cannot seek a safe and legal abortion.

Again, I am no longer a Christian but I nonetheless recognize that I was raised on Christian values and so I remain a believer that we are judged by how we treat the hungry, the homeless, the imprisoned, the impoverished, those ravaged by war, famine, rape, and persecution.  Having read the Bible quite a few times I understand that it can be used to justify some truly horrendous positions.  Setting aside things like the use of the Bible to justify the enslavement of human beings, we can see today the effects of those who use the Bible as a weapon against gays, as a wall between races, and as a prod against the poor.  The Bible is used to judge everyone, save for the true believers, which is why the transgendered community can be discriminated against because of a vague fear of what happens in bathrooms, while a Duggar fears no repercussion for actually abusing a child.

Too often we conflate these two different value systems, and we do so at our own peril because the end goal for either is incredibly divergent at the political level.  In the end, Christian values promote democracy of some variation, because the individual is valued as an equal member of society, regardless of who they are.  Christian values tend to the needs of real people here on Earth, which means social welfare in some cases, environmentalism in others, and the rule of civil law in all cases.  I say civil law here, not because the Bible says that Christians should accept the governments of the world as they are (Romans 13:1), but because the value of equality extends to people of any faith, which necessitates a law divorced from any specific religion to be applicable to all.  Biblical values, on the other hand, seek theocracy in the end, which is why all the pretense at being Christian is so necessary for them.   All the talk of this being a Judeo-Christian nation seems to come from those who act the least like Christ and who demand, above all else, the destruction of every American institution that is not sufficiently Christian by their definition.

How many times have we been told that we need to return to our Christian roots?  How many attempts have there been to put the Ten Commandments in courthouses?  Our national motto used to be the unifying message “E Pluribus Unum,” out of many one, but it has since been changed to “In God We Trust.”  The Pledge of Allegiance and our currency didn’t always mention a deity, but because the show of faith is more important than actual faith to the Biblical crowd it is shoved in wherever possible.  The end goal of this is not an appeal to virtue but a push toward an ever more theocratic society that promotes the Christian values of mercy less than the Biblical values of persecution.  Perhaps the clearest evidence of this is in which presidents are remembered fondly by the Biblical crowd.

I was deeply saddened to hear that Jimmy Carter is enduring a fight with cancer, not least of all because I recently lost a family member to brain cancer.  President Carter won his election because he was a truly devoted Christian, and he continues to live out the full meaning of his faith in retirement.  He sought to make peace throughout the world, and has since won the Nobel Prize for his many efforts to make the world a better and healthier place to live.  He has not only sought to eliminate homelessness through policy, but has worked with Habitat for Humanity to ensure that it happens. He has fought for the equality of the sexes both in public and private life by refusing to go to a church that wouldn’t permit a woman to be a member of the clergy.  But President Carter is loathed by those with Biblical values, who instead deify his successor.

In nearly every state there is something named after President Reagan, why?  Is it because he sat by during the AIDS crisis and allowed Americans to die, even personal friends like Rock Hudson?  Is it because he pilfered Social Security to afford his tax cuts?  Is it because he sponsored the Mujahideen or sold weapons to the Iranians?  Is it because he opposed sanctions against Apartheid South Africa?  Is it because he stripped mental health patients of the services we once provided?  No, the reason why the adherents of Biblical values are so devoted to the cult of Reagan is because he personified the effort to be as un-Christian as possible while ending every speech with “God bless the United States of America.”

This is the ethical fight we now face in our country, between those who claim to have morals and those who actually live them out.  The battle for the soul of our country goes on every day, and it requires us to be on the lookout for the wolf in sheep’s clothing.  If defending our Christian heritage means fighting for a nation that forms a more perfect union, establishes justice, ensures domestic tranquility, provides for the common defense, promotes the general welfare, and bestows the blessings of liberty on all of us and our posterity, then I am a part of that defense.  But if we aren’t actually talking about Christian values, if we’re seeking to uphold Biblical values that make any of these goals impossible, then I stand in opposition, as should anyone who wants to keep the word Christian in greater esteem.

What’s Passed

In a world where we have constant reports of murder, rape, terrorism, famine, oppression, etc it can seem petty to focus a ton of energy mourning the departure of a late night TV show host.  Having said that, it is incredibly depressing to know that the Daily Show with Jon Stewart now belongs to the ages.  Growing up with him as a constant voice of reason amid a cacophony of, what he would label, bullshit, it became all too easy to take for granted that he would always be there to express the frustration with our current political system and perhaps more fundamentally the lack of a strong media to actually call out the stupidity of that system.  In the words of George Orwell, “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed; everything else is public relations.”  To that end Mr Stewart has been one of the very few journalists in America, and though I wish him success in whatever he does next, it’s a sad end among many sad ends that we recognize this August.

On Sunday we will mark the anniversary of Michael Brown’s death.  At the end of the month we will mark the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.  Two days ago we marked the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, while the bombing of Nagasaki shares its date with Michael Brown.  In any other context it would seem like there couldn’t be a connection between these three very different tragedies, yet as I look through the headlines I see the ominous echoes of these events looming ahead.  It’s become common wisdom that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and having now experienced the bizarre spectacle that was the first GOP primary debate, it seems that there are still many people choosing not to learn from our history.

To this day America remains the only nation to ever use nuclear weapons offensively.  With two bombs we leveled two cities and unleashed an unspeakable hell on the civilians of Japan, but we arguably also saved the lives of soldiers and civilians from many countries by bringing a swift end to the Second World War.  There is no way that President Truman could have fully grasped what he was doing to the people who lived in those cities, but he made the only decision his conscience could allow him to make and we now live in a world that is inextricably linked to that decision.  What would the Cold War have been like without the clear knowledge that these weapons could truly bring about the destruction of all involved?  Since then the nuclear arsenal of the world became only more destructive with the creation of weapons based not on fission but on fusion.  Yet the number of other countries that have access to this earth ending technology is still quite small.

Depending on who you believe, there are nine countries with some form of nuclear weapon.  All eyes are on Iran right now as they have made it quite clear that they would like to be the tenth.  In an effort to prevent that, President Obama has negotiated a deal with Iran to get inspectors on the ground and ensure, for the foreseeable future, that this doesn’t happen.  We saw how ineffective sanctions were at keeping the North Koreans from getting the bomb, but almost without exception the current slate of Republican candidates have said that they would get rid of this deal upon taking office and seek greater sanctions.  Set aside the fact that the rest of the world wouldn’t put up with this if we were the ones to renege on the deal, this would still leave Iran unmonitored and allow them to pursue nuclear weapons.  This means that short of an act of war we would have no way of stopping them, and so here we are able to see mushroom clouds on the horizon.
The visions of Americans begging for help as they sat stranded on the roofs of their houses should still be burned into our memories, as Katrina wasn’t so long ago.  I have to admit when I first heard that this was the tenth anniversary, I didn’t believe it.  I had to check the date because I can still remember going down to the Gulf to help rebuild homes in areas that still looked like third world countries more than a year after the fact.  Even though the Bush administration thoroughly bungled the response, the rest of the country picked up the slack to take in our own country’s refugees, to send volunteers and aid.  The Gulf has largely bounced back, but there’s really no going back to a world before August 2005.

In the time between then and now, America has weathered many storms and a bout of bad weather.  Setting aside hurricanes, there is the ongoing drought in the West along with seemingly endless wildfires.  2015 is on track to be the hottest year on record, a record set by 2014, which it took from 2010.  In fact of the ten hottest years, only one happened before the new Millennium and it was 1998.  The forecast for where I live is in the upper 90s and over the next week it’s going to be in the triple digits.  Here’s the thing, the hot summer temperatures do not prove climate change, for the exact same reason cold weather in winter doesn’t disprove it.  Though it should strike the climate deniers as strange that you don’t see senators making asinine points about climate change when you have a snowball’s chance in hell of finding a snowball in the contiguous US.  Individual weather events are not indicative of climate trends, but taken as an aggregate the annual statistics and global climate data show an unmistakable trend of an ever hotter climate even as winters can be ever colder in some areas.

When faced with this kind of evidence, the standard response from politicians on the Right is, “Well, I’m not a scientist.”  Strictly speaking this is an honest response, but it is used as a justification for holding beliefs that stand in the face of what we have learned from the scientific community.  So the whole field of candidates on the Right either doesn’t believe in climate change or else believes that we shouldn’t do anything about it.  The loss of human life in the wake of Hurricane Katrina should be reason enough for every single candidate to want to fight the threat of climate change that promises even worse weather than we already have, but even if that’s not enough just look at the cost.  The cleanup from that one hurricane alone is in the hundreds of billions of dollars.  The cleanup from Hurricane Sandy was at least another sixty billion dollars.  The drought in California threatens the US agriculture industry, and the loss of property from wildfires grows every day.  How many more of these events are we supposed to endure before we realize we’re talking about real money?

Black lives matter.  Hands up, don’t shoot.  I can’t breathe.  These are just a few of the rallying cries of groups trying to make sense of an America where too often the color of your skin dictates your treatment by authorities and society alike.  Instead of finding ways to give every individual and community a path out of poverty and into a more inclusive United States we are given excuses and accusations that any fate that befalls a person of color in America is their own damn fault.  Instead of seeking solutions that address specific problems we are given vague platitudes about how everyone is the same and that equality means never giving anyone special privilege or attention.  All the while there are Americans dying on a daily basis in a culture that values guns over the lives they take.  It seems both too soon to commemorate Michael Brown’s death and yet after so many stories of children being killed for holding toy guns(Tamir Rice), men being killed for possibly selling cigarettes(Eric Garner), women hanging themselves in jail(Sandra Bland), and so many more it seems like it’s been a very long year.

What are we supposed to do with all this information?  It’s one thing to recognize historical events that have vague similarities with current ones; it’s quite another to come up with a prescription for the future.  I hope that I make no pretense at knowing it all, because I don’t.  If I know anything, it’s the limits of my knowledge, but that doesn’t mean I can’t think about what I’ve learned and try to see if there’s anything useful in avoiding the same mistakes we’ve made over and over again.  Without someone like Jon Stewart on the air the onus is on us to seek out reality and demand that our representatives hold themselves to it.  Any less than that and we get the same bullshit we’ve been getting.  The price of democracy is vigilance and diligence, but if we pay that price there’s no reason we can’t stop nuclear war, there’s no reason we can’t prevent a climate catastrophe, and there’s certainly no reason we can’t break the chain of a historical iniquity.

Platitudes

Every political cynic in the world will tell you that campaigns are all about false promises of the world being handed over on a plate.  There is a sense from every person that makes this point that it is a well known fact, but if that were the case then why would it still be the case?  If everyone were really so cognizant of the fact that politicians are just saying what they think you want to hear, then you’d expect that the people would call out the politicians and the incentive to make these false promises would fall away.  No, the real problem here is not that politicians make false promises, which they undoubtedly do, but that they say the platitudes the people really believe, in spite of reality.  People are so protective of what they wish to be true that they will shun the reality of the world’s complexity such that they can still agree with the meaningless, flowery assertions that spew from the mouths of just about every politician.

Take for example the current situation with gun violence in America.  Depending on what statistics you look at, you can make virtually any point you want.  Over the years violent crime has dropped significantly, and in that time more guns than ever have been purchased while the number of gun owners has gone down.  So you can say that as the number of guns in America goes up, violent crime goes down; you could make the point also that as gun ownership goes down so too does violent crime.  Looking at states, there is a clear trend that the states with the most guns in the hands of the most people also tend to have the highest rates of violent crime.  However, cities like Chicago and Detroit remain tragic homes of violent crime, despite many attempts to legislate the problem away.  There are many, myself included, who point out that these cities are located quite close to areas where gun laws are considerably more lax, making the restrictions nearly impossible to enforce.  Suffice it to say that the situation is complex and any solution to the problem of near daily mass shootings in the US will have to address the many nuances of guns in America.

Now let’s look at the solutions actually being offered by people who want to have some sway on American politics.  Rick Perry has repeatedly claimed that we need to loosen gun laws to allow people to carry firearms everywhere, including in movie theaters.  The leader of the NRA, Wayne LaPierre, is adamant that the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.  Bobby Jindal has supported ending “so-called gun free zones” so that we can have more guns in more hands, in more places.  In fact, every Republican running for president has made statements of how the 2nd Amendment rights outlined in the Constitution will make us safe, if only we had more guns out there.  To the casual observer, who wants to be able to own a gun, this can all sound great.  Guns don’t kill people, people kill people… So let’s just get rid of people and we should be just fine.

It is impossible to have a discussion about effective solutions if people refuse to admit that there is even a problem in the first place, or at least fail to identify what could be a part of the problem.  Maybe, just maybe, putting more guns in the hands of more people isn’t a good idea, in and of itself.  I have no problem with the members of our military being armed to the teeth when they are in combat, but seeing people strapping the same weapons to themselves to go to a Chick-fil-A is a little less comforting.  We should look into our gun laws to ensure that we aren’t making stupid legislation that bans things like pistol grips for long guns, but we should also make sure that good legislation is enforced and put in place if it’s not already there.  For example we might take a look at making background checks a part of every gun purchase, without exception.

School choice is another such example of good words masking bad policy.  Sometimes people make bad decisions, even if it’s for a good reason.  Those bad decisions not only make their own lives worse, but affect their kids and the rest of the country.  I’m not even referring to parents who withhold life-saving vaccinations from their kids, though that is an important topic to bring up as well.  I’m talking about how we’ve implicitly chosen to re-segregate our schools, even if no one is willing to admit that it is for racial reasons.  “This American Life” just did a brilliant piece, outlining how dogmatically school districts segregate schools, without ever having to use the words white or black.  Poor performance schools should not become a drain on better school districts, forced bussing is imposed on communities, suburban school districts fear for their children’s safety.  None of these are explicitly racially biased ideas, but it just so happens that it’s the white schools that are fighting to keep the black students out of their district.  We saw the white flight from the cities when families chose to abandon the process of bringing the country together and that has resulted in failing schools and higher education costs in the Sisyphean task of bridging the gap.

Now there’s another push from Republican candidates to give parents more “school choice.”  With the veneer of leveling the playing field for families who would like to send their kids to better school, laws have been changed to make dollars follow students and give vouchers to families so that they can find the best fit for them.  The confounding factors here are that 1. charter schools are worse more often than they are better than public schools, 2. the funding for charter schools pulls funding away from public schools, which wouldn’t matter if only it weren’t true that 3. public schools remain the only choice for the poorest families who can’t pay the gap between where the voucher ends and the cost of a private or charter school begins.  This not to mention the fact that often we end up funding religious educations that ignore or even fight the scientific fact of evolutionary biology.  But we are assured that parents and states just make better decisions than the federal government as a point of fact.  This must be why the states that hate on public schools the most and fund their schools the least just so happen to have the worst education systems; I’m looking at you Louisiana and Nevada.

Choices in life have their consequences, and the rest of us have to live with them, but so often we are expected to just believe hard enough and enjoy the fruits of a consequence free world.  And to be fair there are platitudes said on the Left as well, which are similarly detached from reality.  Simply giving more money to schools is not sufficient in making them better, on its own.  Looking at New Jersey and Washington DC, there is ample evidence to the point that money is not the only criteria for success in schools.  On guns, the people who promote the position that we just need to ban specific types of guns or gun features are deluding themselves.  This isn’t to say that we should start making grenade launchers available for public consumption, just that it’s never going to be enough to target one type of weapon or another because no one is willing to get the ones that are already in circulation from the cold, dead hands of their owners.

The modern American political campaign is a string of ten second sound bites and stated convictions that are either true because they are so meaningless, e.g. America is great because her people are great; or else they are specific enough to be demonstrably false, e.g. the tax rates of all Americans are too high.  Yet we all implicitly accept these statements as true and meaningful because then we can believe the overarching platitude that all we need to do is elect the right person this one time and all our problems will be solved.  We do not have a dictatorship in this country, meaning that that the presidency has its limits.  In many ways the bottom of the ticket races are far more important to the implementation of any solution we might try, but we’ve become incensed with the spectacle of the current presidential race, particularly the circus in the GOP.  And seeing as people can’t be bothered to do more than show up to the polls every four years, let alone every two, we are left with campaigns that know they only need to say the bare minimum to make it seem like they are legitimate candidates with profound solutions.  Which leaves us sitting through cycle after cycle of this inane chatter without ever getting anything done.