By John Ballard
(I just spent a few minutes putting together a comment for another thread which now becomes a post.)
We are witnessing the proliferation of previously non-political people getting into politics. Like geezers in bathing suits, they are as unembarrassed by their ignorance as old men and women in swimwear sporting a lifetime of wrinkles, age spots, thin hair and raspy voices. They are sadly oblivious to political realities, but those who point, criticize and malign them are forgetting that the targets of their snide remarks also vote.
I watched a Christine O'Donnell video by "anna missed". Innocent viewers who just came from Sunday School, knowing none of the back story about this woman, will have nothing but a positive reaction to what she says. Never mind that along with Beck, Palin and the rest of the crowd she is blowing smoke. Just because the words are as devoid of content as cotton candy it is a mistake to mock and point at those who buy them. There is a market for cotton candy, too, you know.
She's telegenic, speaks without profanity and uses all the right images, knowing instinctively how to push the right buttons and wave the right flags. Anybody trying to follow this video (or other rhetorical fluff) with hit pieces will only succeed in looking vindictive. The point was made in a comment aimed at me by one of their number just yesterday. Closed minds are as durable as epoxy.
I live in a place where Glenn Beck is cited in sermons as a courageous man and a spokesperson for God. When a certain population of sincere Christians look up from the pages of their bibles they may not understand what they have read, but their minds and opinions are as malleable as those of children. They have been taught from childhood to hear and respect their leaders.
This kind of spinning on the part of church leaders has been going on from the time the New Testament was formally canonized. Check this link to 2 Peter 3:15�18 to see how precisely the writer of this book (written after Paul was safely dead) spins the words and actions of the Apostle Paul to fit what is historically called the Petrine doctrine. Notice how carefully the writer evaluates Paul, noting how "the ignorant and unstable twist [Paul's words] to their own destruction." Knowing this the reader must "take care that you are not carried away with the error of lawless people and lose your own stability."
Notice how Paul himself escapes criticism and the problem lies not with him but others aiming to deceive the faithful.
We can play this game all afternoon, but in the end we are worse off than when we started. There is no way that knowledge will ever trump belief systems. Those who think these people are nothing but a bunch of kooks who will soon go away do so at their political peril. Group think and peer pressure are never on the side of progress. History is filled with examples of kooks (and worse) in charge.
"There is no way that knowledge will ever trump belief systems."
ReplyDeleteGosh, I certainly hope you're wrong about that. It's been my contention that the tea party thing is good because it heightens the (political) contrasts into stark relief. Running against a "believer" candidate like O'Donnell forces the issues because what they are advocating is fundamentally anti-constitutional in that they want to erase the separation between church and state. The reconstructionist/dominionist religious agenda driving many tea party types opens its belief system up to criticism precisely because they want their personal religious beliefs legislated into the law for all. This then puts the (political) ideological preferences they pine for in profound contradiction with their religious agenda. You can't really reconcile personal freedom under the foot of statist religious edicts, any more than you can inspire innovation through a hatred of science. Hopefully, the choice between the tea partyists and the alternatives becomes a clear choice between a cobbled together contradictory set of ill founded beliefs and a rational and empirically grounded set of possibilities.
All you say is abundantly clear and I want that kind of reasoning to prevail more than you know. Moreover, I so want to be wrong about that belief versus knowledge tension.
ReplyDeleteBut look at the hot topics: reproductive rights, LGBT issues including marriage, school prayer, textbooks, End Times thinking, undocumented brown people, etc. And that's before we get to the good stuff like taxes, big government, socialist trends and "supporting the military." All these and more are grist for the right wing noise machine which grinds out deliberately misleading, well-crafted belief-oriented messages with just enough facts to sound valid. The end product is the equivalent of veggie-burgers -- yummy and maybe good for you... but without meat.
Heavy on emotion but light on reason.
And the product is selling like crazy.
Remember, we tried prohibition to discover it didn't work as advertised. And I see today's political boil as a recapitulation of Prohibition writ large.