Sunday, October 10, 2004
WHY I’M VOTING FOR KERRY
One thing John Kerry got right in the second Presidential candidate debate was that labels don’t mean anything. I remember when it seemed as if everyone was complaining about the damned conservative press (oh, yes, they were.) Henry Luce, who was a conservative and a magazine publisher (Time among others) felt constrained to write an editorial explaining that yes, they took a position because you couldn’t tell a story without assuming a point of view. As I writer I can tell you that Henry was absolutely right about that. No point of view, no story. Now it’s the damned liberal press I hear so much about, and the complaint means just as much as it did when applied to the (exact same) media as being too conservative. It means that there are ideologues in the woodshed, or in office, or wanting to be in office, and that the press isn’t agreeing with them. Beyond that, labels don’t mean a thing, just like the Senator kept pointing out. I could write a chapter about why he kept saying that, but I digress enough, as any regular reader will agree.
The trouble with ideologues, or as I think of them, “true believers” is that they have a lot of trouble seeing outside of their ideology. The current crop of believers first got noticed during Nixon’s administration, calling themselves at that time the “moral majority.” A moot point, probably, but it got them a lot of press. They backed Reagan, who disappointed them on many fronts, but was so popular that they ended up making a virtual demigod out of him. I think it would have been polite to wait until he was dead to begin the eulogies, but Reagan airport is no better or worse than National airport was, so who really cares? (Hoover Dam was known for a couple of decades as Boulder Dam because of the ideology of Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior. It’s still holding back Lake Mead, though.)
Reagan’s man George H. W. Bush ran for and won the presidency. He talked the line from the true believers, but he didn’t run their game, and didn’t use their propaganda machine, and he lost to a trailer park kid from Arkansas. The fact that the obviously “immoral” (by their lights) Clinton remains so popular even out of office must really rankle the “neocons”, which is often a code word for “true believers”. Certainly when they chose their latest challenger to the “liberal threat to America”, as they call it, whatever “it” is, they picked a guy who would not just walk the walk, but also talk the talk, and very well. They found, in a phrase, a fellow believer. If the current President has been misled, as some have said, it is most likely by his own beliefs coloring his perception of reality, and not by the CIA or anyone else in the government.
If you want a short demonstration of the power of belief, I’ve written a humorous article about the subject that you can read here. It’s five hundred words, not political, about a true incident, and an easy read. Honest.
We’ll get through the war in Iraq. We’ll survive the threats of terrorism. We’ll survive a Kerry administration. We survived the Civil War, so what can one joker from Massachusetts possibly do to us? But we might not survive the blinders on our President placed there by his ideological stance.
George W. Bush is a man of principle. He’s most likely a good man, too. I wish him well, just in some other job. Heck, several influential companies owe him a favor by anyone’s reckoning, I’m sure he’ll do okay. If Clinton can get into the top tax bracket after he’s out of office, W. should be fine. The reason I want him to find another job is because of the nature of his principles.
The true believers in born-again Christianity are convinced that there is an end time. They believe literally in the stories in Revelations. Some of them are certain that the current troubles in the Middle East are the beginning of the end. Archeological evidence to the contrary, they see Armageddon as imminent.
Armageddon is a modern pronunciation of the name of a place in what is now Israel where many fierce battles were fought. 666 is the result of applying contemporary (to St. John) numerology to the name of Diocletian, a Roman emperor especially hated by the early Christians. I could go on, but you see the pattern. In truth, Revelations was a bitter rant about Roman tyranny, but the current fundamentalists in power take it as being about our own times. To some people, it’s a good thing to start the final battle, because then Jesus can return and laugh as the Jews in Israel all die in agony. (I am not making this up.) The result of these people having influence over the government is that funding for real science has been reduced, junk science has been glorified as legitimate, and the role of religion in the founding of this country has been badly misstated.
The founding fathers certainly believed in a god. They were deists, which means essentially that they felt the “creator” or “prime mover” had set everything up, started it running, and now sits and watches to see how it’s all going to turn out. Some of them, like Adams, were Unitarians. Some, like Jefferson, avoided religion like it was leprosy. Washington was a Congregationalist, which is about as close to Unitarian as you can get and still be a conventional Christian. Almost every one of them was a Freemason. Freemasonry, in case you’ve been bothered by the mystery, owes it’s origins to deism. In short, the founders of the United States of America scoffed at the idea of a personal god, which is the very thing the fundamentalists of today embrace whole-heartedly. Not only is belief in such a god the epitome of self-aggrandizement (I can’t imagine why any supreme being would care about me as a person. If Jesus wants to help me, then I’d ask him to find a nice girl, settle down, raise a family, and tell his followers to chill), a personal god running the country is a dangerous concept.
That’s easy enough to see: every personal view of anything is different from any other personal view. A personal god will, perforce, see the world from the point of view of the person. In church these believers are exhorted to “trust in the lord, trust in Jesus” while they listen to diatribes about the evils of the world. The “lord” and “Jesus” are represented by the preacher, the bishop, and to judge by the political ads I’ve seen lately, by “our leaders in congress.” Leaders in congress? Congress isn’t leading me anywhere, and never has. I’m glad they do the job, because somebody has to, but leaders?
Kerry talked like a Unitarian himself in the second debate when he said that he cannot impose the demands of his faith on society. That’s the essence of the establishment clause of the first amendment. For the record, and for the elucidation of school boards everywhere, anyone can pray whenever he or she wishes, in school or elsewhere. A publicly funded school can’t sponsor a prayer, because then you get into the sticky problem of just who’s god you’re praying to, and also into the issue of imposing one version of the demands of faith onto society at large. Not to belabor this point, but here it is in a simple chart form:
Praying in school or anywhere OK
A school paid for by the public sponsoring a prayer NOT OK
The fact that John Kerry can see that and W. Bush can’t is reason enough to vote for Mr. Kerry this time. But, just to be sure I’m not misquoted, here’s a summary paragraph:
The ideologues comprising a major part of the President’s base of support are blinded by their own beliefs into distorting the religious and political life of the United States and of the world in general until the picture they see and act upon reflects their beliefs rather than an objective reality. They believe wrongly that the founding fathers shared their fundamentalist Christian views, that there is an imminent end time, and that they need to help that end time unfold in order to ensure the salvation of true believers. Middle East strife is a good thing if it helps bring Jesus back sooner, according to their belief system. Further, “trust in god” and “trust in Jesus” is presented as blind trust in authority, which is not a position espoused by the founding fathers of our nation.
A quick example of the distortions caused by ideology, then I’m done. The current Republican leadership presents itself as being in favor of “States’ Rights.” Thus, the party of Lincoln, a man who promulgated the most terrible war in the history of this nation, a war that killed millions of young American men and left social scars that persist to this day, a war fought entirely against the idea of States’ Rights, claims to be for the very thing that Lincoln believed so passionately in fighting against. Only a very distorted view of reality could lead anyone to believe such claptrap.
So, I’m voting for John Kerry. I don’t really like the guy, and that’s the truth. I’d rather have a better choice, someone who combines the best of fiscal conservatism with the best of social liberalism would be a lot more to my taste, because frankly I don’t care what people do in private so long as it isn’t costing the public much of anything. But, Kerry seems to understand the reality about our government, our founding fathers, and the situation in the world in general. I doubt that I’ll agree with all of his decisions, but at least he’ll make them based on valid data.
Seventeen-hundred words to say one simple thing: Vote for John Kerry. Please.
The trouble with ideologues, or as I think of them, “true believers” is that they have a lot of trouble seeing outside of their ideology. The current crop of believers first got noticed during Nixon’s administration, calling themselves at that time the “moral majority.” A moot point, probably, but it got them a lot of press. They backed Reagan, who disappointed them on many fronts, but was so popular that they ended up making a virtual demigod out of him. I think it would have been polite to wait until he was dead to begin the eulogies, but Reagan airport is no better or worse than National airport was, so who really cares? (Hoover Dam was known for a couple of decades as Boulder Dam because of the ideology of Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior. It’s still holding back Lake Mead, though.)
Reagan’s man George H. W. Bush ran for and won the presidency. He talked the line from the true believers, but he didn’t run their game, and didn’t use their propaganda machine, and he lost to a trailer park kid from Arkansas. The fact that the obviously “immoral” (by their lights) Clinton remains so popular even out of office must really rankle the “neocons”, which is often a code word for “true believers”. Certainly when they chose their latest challenger to the “liberal threat to America”, as they call it, whatever “it” is, they picked a guy who would not just walk the walk, but also talk the talk, and very well. They found, in a phrase, a fellow believer. If the current President has been misled, as some have said, it is most likely by his own beliefs coloring his perception of reality, and not by the CIA or anyone else in the government.
If you want a short demonstration of the power of belief, I’ve written a humorous article about the subject that you can read here. It’s five hundred words, not political, about a true incident, and an easy read. Honest.
We’ll get through the war in Iraq. We’ll survive the threats of terrorism. We’ll survive a Kerry administration. We survived the Civil War, so what can one joker from Massachusetts possibly do to us? But we might not survive the blinders on our President placed there by his ideological stance.
George W. Bush is a man of principle. He’s most likely a good man, too. I wish him well, just in some other job. Heck, several influential companies owe him a favor by anyone’s reckoning, I’m sure he’ll do okay. If Clinton can get into the top tax bracket after he’s out of office, W. should be fine. The reason I want him to find another job is because of the nature of his principles.
The true believers in born-again Christianity are convinced that there is an end time. They believe literally in the stories in Revelations. Some of them are certain that the current troubles in the Middle East are the beginning of the end. Archeological evidence to the contrary, they see Armageddon as imminent.
Armageddon is a modern pronunciation of the name of a place in what is now Israel where many fierce battles were fought. 666 is the result of applying contemporary (to St. John) numerology to the name of Diocletian, a Roman emperor especially hated by the early Christians. I could go on, but you see the pattern. In truth, Revelations was a bitter rant about Roman tyranny, but the current fundamentalists in power take it as being about our own times. To some people, it’s a good thing to start the final battle, because then Jesus can return and laugh as the Jews in Israel all die in agony. (I am not making this up.) The result of these people having influence over the government is that funding for real science has been reduced, junk science has been glorified as legitimate, and the role of religion in the founding of this country has been badly misstated.
The founding fathers certainly believed in a god. They were deists, which means essentially that they felt the “creator” or “prime mover” had set everything up, started it running, and now sits and watches to see how it’s all going to turn out. Some of them, like Adams, were Unitarians. Some, like Jefferson, avoided religion like it was leprosy. Washington was a Congregationalist, which is about as close to Unitarian as you can get and still be a conventional Christian. Almost every one of them was a Freemason. Freemasonry, in case you’ve been bothered by the mystery, owes it’s origins to deism. In short, the founders of the United States of America scoffed at the idea of a personal god, which is the very thing the fundamentalists of today embrace whole-heartedly. Not only is belief in such a god the epitome of self-aggrandizement (I can’t imagine why any supreme being would care about me as a person. If Jesus wants to help me, then I’d ask him to find a nice girl, settle down, raise a family, and tell his followers to chill), a personal god running the country is a dangerous concept.
That’s easy enough to see: every personal view of anything is different from any other personal view. A personal god will, perforce, see the world from the point of view of the person. In church these believers are exhorted to “trust in the lord, trust in Jesus” while they listen to diatribes about the evils of the world. The “lord” and “Jesus” are represented by the preacher, the bishop, and to judge by the political ads I’ve seen lately, by “our leaders in congress.” Leaders in congress? Congress isn’t leading me anywhere, and never has. I’m glad they do the job, because somebody has to, but leaders?
Kerry talked like a Unitarian himself in the second debate when he said that he cannot impose the demands of his faith on society. That’s the essence of the establishment clause of the first amendment. For the record, and for the elucidation of school boards everywhere, anyone can pray whenever he or she wishes, in school or elsewhere. A publicly funded school can’t sponsor a prayer, because then you get into the sticky problem of just who’s god you’re praying to, and also into the issue of imposing one version of the demands of faith onto society at large. Not to belabor this point, but here it is in a simple chart form:
Praying in school or anywhere OK
A school paid for by the public sponsoring a prayer NOT OK
The fact that John Kerry can see that and W. Bush can’t is reason enough to vote for Mr. Kerry this time. But, just to be sure I’m not misquoted, here’s a summary paragraph:
The ideologues comprising a major part of the President’s base of support are blinded by their own beliefs into distorting the religious and political life of the United States and of the world in general until the picture they see and act upon reflects their beliefs rather than an objective reality. They believe wrongly that the founding fathers shared their fundamentalist Christian views, that there is an imminent end time, and that they need to help that end time unfold in order to ensure the salvation of true believers. Middle East strife is a good thing if it helps bring Jesus back sooner, according to their belief system. Further, “trust in god” and “trust in Jesus” is presented as blind trust in authority, which is not a position espoused by the founding fathers of our nation.
A quick example of the distortions caused by ideology, then I’m done. The current Republican leadership presents itself as being in favor of “States’ Rights.” Thus, the party of Lincoln, a man who promulgated the most terrible war in the history of this nation, a war that killed millions of young American men and left social scars that persist to this day, a war fought entirely against the idea of States’ Rights, claims to be for the very thing that Lincoln believed so passionately in fighting against. Only a very distorted view of reality could lead anyone to believe such claptrap.
So, I’m voting for John Kerry. I don’t really like the guy, and that’s the truth. I’d rather have a better choice, someone who combines the best of fiscal conservatism with the best of social liberalism would be a lot more to my taste, because frankly I don’t care what people do in private so long as it isn’t costing the public much of anything. But, Kerry seems to understand the reality about our government, our founding fathers, and the situation in the world in general. I doubt that I’ll agree with all of his decisions, but at least he’ll make them based on valid data.
Seventeen-hundred words to say one simple thing: Vote for John Kerry. Please.
