Tread lightly on the things of earth

Magnificent quote of the day from The Village Gate:

Ultimately, this election persists in becoming an intelligence test for the American people. It’s not only on policy matters, either. Do we still have the moral discernment to detect the difference between a total fake and a flawed but honorable and competent human being?

I think it’s also a test of Have We Learned Anything? Has our attending church all these years (for those of us who have) been for naught if we still can’t discern wheat from chaff? Wheat-sowers from weed-sowers? Fertile ground from hardpan? Figs from no figs? (Or, to go extrabiblical here, cattle from hat?)

Thanks, Allen. This is what I was trying to say, though not achieving this succinctness, in last month’s The elect on Judgment Day.

2004-09-02 update: In addition to Allen’s election-as-intelligence-test and my election-as-life-learning-test, William Saletan at Slate powerfully makes the case (in the wake of Zell Miller et al. at the RNC) that the election has become “a referendum on your right to hold the president accountable,” which, given that in a democracy the president works for us and we can fire him for poor performance, “a referendum on democracy.”