Reading notes

I’ve been soaking in Christian teaching and experience for 40+ years now, and from that I fancy I somewhat understand what Religious Right folk are hoping for by voting Republican. Many, probably most, really, truly mean well. But what’s become clear to many of us but not yet to all is that in so doing these voters are being punked: the Republican Powers That Be will never provide more than a few crumbs toward what they’re hoping for.

Meanwhile these voters are seen as having cast their lot with people like Jerry Falwell who says of terrorists, “let’s blow them all away in the name of the Lord” (CNN transcript). Given that Jesus stands firm against blowing anybody away, rather commanding us to love even our enemies instead, Falwell’s statement qualifies in my mind as bearing false witness against the aforementioned Lord himself. That can’t be good.

So I continue to think what we have here is primarily an education issue. What we have here is just a few too many people voting against their economic and moral interests — and against their Lord, for that matter — because of incomplete and erroneous knowledge. That’s fixable.

Frank proceeds brilliantly along these lines:

There’s only one problem with the storyline proclaiming that the country swung to the right on cultural issues in 2004. Like so many other narratives that immediately calcify into our 24/7 media’s conventional wisdom [“moral values”], it is fiction. Everything about the election results — and about American culture itself — confirms an inescapable reality: John Kerry’s defeat notwithstanding, it’s blue America, not red, that is inexorably winning the culture war, and by a landslide. …

It’s in the G.O.P.’s interest to pander to this far-right constituency — votes are votes — but you can be certain that a party joined at the hip to much of corporate America, Mr. Murdoch included, will take no action to curtail the blue culture these voters deplore. As Marshall Wittman, an independent-minded former associate of both Ralph Reed and John McCain, wrote before the election, “The only things the religious conservatives get are largely symbolic votes on proposals guaranteed to fail, such as the gay marriage constitutional amendment.” That amendment has never had a prayer of rounding up the two-thirds majority needed for passage and still doesn’t.

Mr. Wittman echoes Thomas Frank, the author of “What’s the Matter With Kansas?,” by common consent the year’s most prescient political book. “Values,” Mr. Frank writes, “always take a backseat to the needs of money once the elections are won.” Under this perennial “trick,” as he calls it, Republican politicians promise to stop abortion and force the culture industry “to clean up its act” — until the votes are counted. Then they return to their higher priorities, like cutting capital gains and estate taxes. …

According to [CW], the values voters the Democrats must pander to are people like Cary and Tara Leslie, archetypal Ohio evangelical “Bush votes come to life” apotheosized by The Washington Post right after Election Day. The Leslies swear by “moral absolutes,” support a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage and mostly watch Fox News. Mr. Leslie has also watched his income drop from $55,000 to $35,000 since 2001, forcing himself, his wife and his three young children into the ranks of what he calls the “working poor.” Maybe by 2008 some Democrat will figure out how to persuade him that it might be a higher moral value to worry about the future of his own family than some gay family he hasn’t even met.

I love that last line.

If Frank R. is right, then I think much of the collective despondency of the last week is unnecessary. We’re not facing an entrenched us against a diabolical them; we only think so because of propagandistic nonsense put out by people with a vested monetary interest in preserving the status quo. In reality it’s all us, and most of us already agree on more issues than we usually realize.

I’ve learned I can always be sure that anyone engaging in demonization of others is not speaking in behalf of any God I know or would care to worship.

BTW, I define “demonization of others” as something like saying we should “blow terrorists away in the name of the Lord.” Or like writing a book called Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism, an actual title of an actual book by an actual propagandistic opportunist.

In contrast, for example, saying “cutting taxes in the face of a catastrophic $multi-trillion national deficit is fiscally irresponsible” is not demonization, it’s providing a real-world example of fiscally irresponsible.

[via Markos]