The Round Ottoman
Growing up, we often visited my grandmother's house. She had a round ottoman in her sun room that the kids would turn on its side and roll around on. You could roll over it head first on your stomach or you could sit on it and roll around, carefully, on your butt.
It was in that room that my aunt, we'll call her Aunt B-Dog, dropped a bomb on my then 7 year old mind when she said something along the lines of "A lot of the worst human beings go to church every Sunday." Wow! She went on to explain that her point was merely that being spiritual had little to do with religion, routine or where your ass was placed on Sunday mornings. That moment lives on with me and I've adopted it as part of my personal philosophy.
If you've read enough of this site, you'll already know that my #1 pet peeve is hypocrisy. I see that hypocrisy most often in the statements of those wrapping themselves in the protections of religion. I see it most often in what has become the right wing of politics in this country. Those that lack tolerance for anyone not sexually oriented to their satisfaction, not of their race, not adhering to the same chapters and verse in the bible as they do... those are the people I can't tolerate.
So, when I now read that Bush took Harriet Miers' religion into account when choosing her, it bothers me. It bothers me a great deal. And it isn't necessarily because she's an evangelical Christian. Those folks run the bell shaped curve from deeply moral and respectful human beings to batshit crazed Pat Robertson style hypocrites. I don't know where she falls along this curve. No, what bothers me about this is who's saying this and why. See, this President is immoral and will use anything he can to further his political agenda. When he says she's religious he means, in my opinion, that she's like him. Well, that scares the shit out of me. Does he mean that she'd condone the actions this President has? Does she agree with him about the torture of prisoners or the gutting of our environmental protects under the guise of "Clean Air" and "Healthy Forests" (Initiatives that actually pollute our air and clear cut our forests, by the way.) Would she make decisions based on constitutional law or would she do whatever she thought would best politically serve the President; a man she once said was the most intelligent person she'd ever met.?
And the "why" he's saying it is just as disconcerting. He's in a pot of boiling water with his own party these days. His poll numbers are in free fall and Republican candidates across the country are running from any association with Bush. So, ask yourself, what does it mean when he has Rove go behind the scenes and tell the rightest of the right that they should trust him, wink wink, nudge nudge... What is he doing? He's effectively making a decision for the entire country based on secret information he damn well knows is only important to a fringe element of our society! The Puritans. All of us deserve to have the information he's passing along behind the scenes (certainly the Senate does) but all we'll get is the same canned bullshit we always get from this President. There isn't a truthful strand of DNA in him.
As I rolled around on that ottoman all those years ago, I had no idea that evil existed. It was a concept taught to me in terms I could then understand. We knew about a bogeyman named Satan and that he lived in a place called Hell where bad people burned forever. And the devil scared me then because I could see his picture and I could compare him to all the other monsters I saw on TV. Today I believe I understand real evil a great deal more and in an adult way. I suspect that if there is truly a Satan out there, he's pulling the puppet strings of Rove who's in turn pulling the puppet strings of George W. Bush. I wish I could go back to the days when I rolled around on my stomach unaware of real evil but I suppose one thing hasn't changed much since then, I'm still pleasantly surprised when I'm hit with intellectual honesty when I least expect it. Many thanks to Aunt B-Dog for steering me in the right direction all those years ago.
It was in that room that my aunt, we'll call her Aunt B-Dog, dropped a bomb on my then 7 year old mind when she said something along the lines of "A lot of the worst human beings go to church every Sunday." Wow! She went on to explain that her point was merely that being spiritual had little to do with religion, routine or where your ass was placed on Sunday mornings. That moment lives on with me and I've adopted it as part of my personal philosophy.
If you've read enough of this site, you'll already know that my #1 pet peeve is hypocrisy. I see that hypocrisy most often in the statements of those wrapping themselves in the protections of religion. I see it most often in what has become the right wing of politics in this country. Those that lack tolerance for anyone not sexually oriented to their satisfaction, not of their race, not adhering to the same chapters and verse in the bible as they do... those are the people I can't tolerate.
So, when I now read that Bush took Harriet Miers' religion into account when choosing her, it bothers me. It bothers me a great deal. And it isn't necessarily because she's an evangelical Christian. Those folks run the bell shaped curve from deeply moral and respectful human beings to batshit crazed Pat Robertson style hypocrites. I don't know where she falls along this curve. No, what bothers me about this is who's saying this and why. See, this President is immoral and will use anything he can to further his political agenda. When he says she's religious he means, in my opinion, that she's like him. Well, that scares the shit out of me. Does he mean that she'd condone the actions this President has? Does she agree with him about the torture of prisoners or the gutting of our environmental protects under the guise of "Clean Air" and "Healthy Forests" (Initiatives that actually pollute our air and clear cut our forests, by the way.) Would she make decisions based on constitutional law or would she do whatever she thought would best politically serve the President; a man she once said was the most intelligent person she'd ever met.?
And the "why" he's saying it is just as disconcerting. He's in a pot of boiling water with his own party these days. His poll numbers are in free fall and Republican candidates across the country are running from any association with Bush. So, ask yourself, what does it mean when he has Rove go behind the scenes and tell the rightest of the right that they should trust him, wink wink, nudge nudge... What is he doing? He's effectively making a decision for the entire country based on secret information he damn well knows is only important to a fringe element of our society! The Puritans. All of us deserve to have the information he's passing along behind the scenes (certainly the Senate does) but all we'll get is the same canned bullshit we always get from this President. There isn't a truthful strand of DNA in him.
As I rolled around on that ottoman all those years ago, I had no idea that evil existed. It was a concept taught to me in terms I could then understand. We knew about a bogeyman named Satan and that he lived in a place called Hell where bad people burned forever. And the devil scared me then because I could see his picture and I could compare him to all the other monsters I saw on TV. Today I believe I understand real evil a great deal more and in an adult way. I suspect that if there is truly a Satan out there, he's pulling the puppet strings of Rove who's in turn pulling the puppet strings of George W. Bush. I wish I could go back to the days when I rolled around on my stomach unaware of real evil but I suppose one thing hasn't changed much since then, I'm still pleasantly surprised when I'm hit with intellectual honesty when I least expect it. Many thanks to Aunt B-Dog for steering me in the right direction all those years ago.
posted by crackerdog at 2:30 PM
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