It's long past time for people to stop treating Fox-style, Malkin-style, Limbaugh-style conservatism as merely a "political" phenomenon. It may once have been, but it isn't now. As of this millennium, it's nothing but a hate movement with neckties. Protofascism with bright, patriotic logos. Stop treating it with anything but revulsion and disdain. Stop pretending for even a bare moment that they are anything more than thugs.And as I finished reading what Hunter said, I found myself wondering how these evangelicals and so-called “values voters” are dealing with the reality that Dubya has proven to be the self-serving, incompetent, unconscionable liar for which history will remember him always (with the Malkinites acting typically as the zealots acting in accordance with the dicta that comes directly from An Oval Office).
And as luck would have it, I found this column from Jim Wallis, the founder of the evangelical group Sojourners. I wanted to highlight this excerpt in particular…
Just one day after Bush secured his election in December 2000, I received a phone call inviting me to Austin to meet with him and a small group of religious leaders. The President-elect wanted to discuss his oft-stated passion for really tackling the persistent problem of poverty and to tell us about his vision for "faith-based initiatives." I had not voted for George W. Bush, and that fact was no secret to him or his staff. But he reached out to me, and to others in the faith community across the political spectrum, because we shared a common concern. I was impressed by that, and by the topic of gathering down in Austin.You know, Jim, I really wish you’d bothered to learn about Dubya before you decided to allow yourself to succumb to this whole “cult of personality” thing that ended up swaying waaay too many voters to give him and the other Repugs the metaphorical “keys to Dad’s roadster,” which they promptly drove off the cliff the first chance they got.
Those of us who had been summoned to Texas filed into a little Sunday School classroom at First Baptist, Austin, where we would meet with Bush. I had preached at the church before and knew the pastor, who told me how puzzled he was that his quite "progressive" church was chosen for the meeting. Inside the classroom, 25 of us were seated in chairs, chatting and not knowing what to expect, when Bush walked in without any great introduction. He took a seat and told us that he just wanted to listen to our concerns, to hear what we thought the solutions were for dealing with poverty in America.
And he really did listen, more than Presidents often do. He also asked questions. One sounded lofty, yet it resonated with those of us seated around the room: "How do I speak to the soul of America?" My answer to that was simple: Focus on the children. Their plight is our shame, I told him, and their promise is our future. Reach them and you reach our soul. Bush nodded in agreement. The conversation was rich and deep for more than an hour and a half.
When the discussion officially ended, Bush moved around the room, talking with us individually or in small groups for another hour. I could see that his staff was anxious to whisk him away (Cabinet appointments were being made that week and there were key departments yet to fill). Yet he lingered and continued to ask questions. At one point, he turned to me and said, with what I could only read as complete sincerity, "Jim, I don't understand poor people. I've never lived with poor people or been around poor people much. I don't understand what they think and feel about a lot of things. I'm just a white Republican guy who doesn't get it. How do I get it?"
I still recall the intense and earnest look on his face as he stared right into my eyes and asked his question. It was a moment of humility and candor that, frankly, we don't often see with Presidents.
If you’d really wanted to learn about what you were dealing with, you needed look only to The Eternal Molly Ivins (here)…
There was a telling episode in 1999 when the Department of Agriculture came out with its annual statistics on hunger, showing that once again Texas was near the top. Texas is a perennial leader in hunger because we have 43 counties in South Texas (and some in East Texas) that are like Third World countries. If our border region were a state, it would be first in poverty, first in the percentage of schoolchildren living in poverty, first in the percentage of adults without a high school diploma, 51st in income per capita, and so on.Any time any circumstance at all has occurred that affects people in this country not of privilege, and it has unfortunately run smack into Dubya’s blinkered, ideologically-twisted vision of how The United States, Inc. is supposed to operate (including SCHIP, of course), ideology always wins (I know this is hardly news to us, but it bears repeating, for now and for all time, I’m afraid).
When the 1999 hunger stats were announced, Bush (then governor, of course) threw a tantrum. He thought it was some malign Clinton plot to make his state look bad because he was running for president. "I saw the report that children in Texas are going hungry. Where?" he demanded. "No children are going to go hungry in this state. You'd think the governor would have heard if there are pockets of hunger in Texas." You would, wouldn't you? That is the point at which ignorance becomes inexcusable. In five years, Bush had never spent time with people in the colonias, South Texas' shantytowns; he had never been to a session with Valley Interfaith, a consortium of border churches and schools and the best community organization in the state. There is no excuse for a governor to be unaware of this huge reality of Texas.
Take any area -- environment, labor, education, taxes, health -- and go to the websites of public-interest groups in that field. You will find page after page of minor adjustments, quiet repeals, no-big-deal new policies, all of them cruel, destructive, and harmful. A silent change in regulations, an executive order, a funding cutoff. No headlines. Below the radar. Again and again and again. Head Start, everybody's favorite government program, is being targeted for "improvement" by leaving it to the tender mercies of Mississippi and Alabama. An AIDS program that helps refugees in Africa and Asia gets its funding cut because one of the seven groups involved once worked with the United Nations, which once worked with the Chinese government, which once supported forced abortions.
And I would say it’s long past time for those who voted for this clown, particularly in 2004, to come clean and admit the error of their ways.
As for Wallis – gee, Jim, we’ve been screaming about Dubya for years, and apparently you’re just waking up to his loathsomeness only now?
Do you still think “the left doesn’t get it?”
As we ponder this, let me point out that, in my ongoing wish to learn whether or not Philistines such as Wallis have FINALLY waken up to the reality of what they have unleashed over these last few years (talking about many of the 30-percent-or-so “dead enders” who probably still think Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11 and always will), I just filled out a membership to these people. File it under the heading of “keeping your friends close, but your enemies closer,” as that noted philosopher Michael Corleone once said.
If I find anything interesting, I’ll pass it along (and who knows how many other Email groups I may get added to as a result - a lot of the dreck these people manufacture is merely tedious repitition of the typical lies, but every once in a while they slip up and let us know what's really going on, and when they do, I'll be there for it).And don’t worry – I’ll never “go over to the dark side.”
(To be fair, though, it's nice that they wished Michelle Obama well after her auto accident, as do I and all of us I'm sure. It would have been better, though, if they'd proofread their copy.)
Update 1 10/11/07: I meant to add this earlier, but my technical difficulties have resumed - aaaarrrggghhhh!!!
Update 2 10/11/07: Our corporate media, clueless as always...
No comments:
Post a Comment