A Shining City on the Hill

With the current dearth of prophets and wise men, it is up to the writers and the poets, to the defiant, to assholes like me, to sound the clarion: After eight years of watching our sitting President actively doing the Devil’s work, I am telling each and every one of my readers that we are individually and collectively responsible: If we elect another jingoist, tax cutting, laissez faire war monger into the Oval Office, we won’t need the wrath of God to finish us off, because He will have given us enough rope for us to do the job for Him. Let’s be objective here: interminable war, shrinking global influence, a corporate world teetering on the brink of widespread collapse, not to mention a lack of progress on any of the important issues of our day, be it global warming, a workable immigration policy, or the access to health care; it is clear the last eight years have been an abject failure. And now the same folks who foisted this disaster on the American people, all in the name of combating “global terrorism”, cutting taxes, and giving free reign to Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand, are trying to bamboozle us with their shell game, where personality replaces policy, trying to turn some tarnished son of an Admiral, another one of those guys born on third base, who has spent half of his adult life in Washington, into an outsider, the ultimate Maverick. Well I’ve got just one word to say to them: Bullshit.

And I’ve got a few words for this supposed Christian running on his ticket: you and the folks you rode in with are an embarrassment, a betrayal of your own faith, talking about the war in Iraq as “God’s work”. Well, if that’s true, then God must really have grown sick of our materialism and our perfidy, because that war has gone a long way to bringing down our economy, dividing our house, and sucking dry our resolve. Speaking of which, “resolve” is a mental concept, an abstraction; it only has meaning once you put it to use. To be resolved to end poverty, or corruption, or environmental degradation is one thing. To be “resolved” to winning a war at all costs is another. The lesson from Vietnam is not that we must be resolved to “win”, it is that sometimes it is better to take our toys and go home. Our country, our future, and our planet were a whole lot better once we took our hands out of that cookie jar, and all the right wing eggheads prattling on at the time about how the rest of Asia would then fall like dominoes turned out to be selling nothing but their own hot air.

It is time to tell these supposed Christians that they sully their faith every time they wave the flag. It is time to give them a lesson in reading their Bible:

For all the boots of the tramping warriors
and all the garments rolled in blood
shall be burned as fuel for the fire,
For a child has been born for us,
a son given to us;
authority rests upon his shoulders;
and he is named
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

These lines from Isaiah 9, announcing a future Savior for both Israel and the Gentiles that is to come out of Galilee, is one of the cornerstones of the Christian claim that Jesus Christ is indeed the Messiah. The rest of the chapter promises the wrath of God, which is to be brought down on his unrepentant people, “for those who led this people led them astray, and those who were led by them were left in confusion.”

Isaiah 10 describes their sin:
Ah, you who make iniquitous decrees,
who write oppressive statutes,
to turn aside the needy from justice
and to rob the poor of my people of their right…
To whom will you flee for help,
and where will you leave your wealth,
so as not to crouch among the prisoners
or fall among the slain?
for all this his anger has not turned away;
his hand is stretched out still.

I don’t know if I believe in “American exceptionalism”, but I do know the contemporary conservative version of it is wacked. I have family that goes back to the Mayflower, and I admit to having a soft spot in my heart for the notion of a Shining City on the Hill, one where there shall be endless peace, a world of the just who, to quote Bill and Ted, are all excellent to one another. And then there is the stunted version of this exceptionalism being promulgated by the right wing in this country, where our weapons are exceptional, our luxuries, our vanity, our arrogance, but little else. Let’s be clear: I am no big fan of liberalism, in some ways it is the back side of the same sullied coin, and a vote for Barack Obama may not be a vote for good. But I know evil when I see it, and, in this day and age, its biggest proponents are members of the Republican Party.