Work In Progress

It's been something like 2 weeks since the hurricane Katrina hit landfall, and I am now utterly and completely sick of politics. What we currently have is essentially a 1 party system — the Republicans. The other party is somewhere between a joke and a big group-therapy session. This is really unfortunate, because the Republicans are very far from perfect, and could really use some serious opposition on a lot of topics. Let me explain.

Many years ago, my parents attended some sort of prayer meeting at a Luthern church as part of an ecumenical outreach program between the Episcopalians (or maybe it's the Anglicans — I can never keep those two groups straight) and the Lutherans. For some reason they were using a projector, and during the meeting the light bulb in the projector burnt out. This shouldn't surprise anyone — the things typically have a rated life of like 400 hours — but apparently it did surprise the pastor who was running the service. So he came to the obvious conclusion: Satan made the bulb burn out.

And if you get to know these sort of people, that's their explanation for anything that goes wrong anywhere — Satan did it. He's kind of an omnipresent dog who thinks of everything good as homework. And you have to give these people credit; when anything good happens it's God's doing. They're consistent — they deny the existence of everything in creation which I would call "reality".

In good times, these people are amusing. Their constant cries of "Satan made that light turn red when I got to the intersection" and "please pass the potatos — praise the lord!" don't hurt anyone. Most of the time these people are perfectly productive members of society — like Calvanists and Atheists they generally don't examine their beliefs thoroughly enough to be consistent with them. They can be be fabulous company when you're amusing yourself. They can be masters of throwing a good cookout, they can have an encylopedic knowledge of whatever movies you like. They can laugh heartily at all the right jokes.

The problem isn't that they're not serious people. They often are far more serious than is healthy in a human being. As G.K. Chesterton once observed, it's not true that seriousness is a virtue. It would be wrong, but closer to the truth, to say that seriousness is a vice. The truth is that seriousness is just a necessary part of life, as is levity.

The problem with these people is simply that they're too disconnected from reality to be useful when you're not having a party.

And that's the problem with democrats today. They're almost indistinguishable from the satan-did-it crowd. Only the democrats currently in office typically call Satan, "George W. Bush". A category 4 hurricane hit something like half the gulf coast of the US, and disaster ensued in a city built below sea level, dedicated to the proposition that women bearing their breasts should recieve cheap plastic beads, and who's plan for such a disaster consisted roughly of shouting "oh no!". The Big Easy took it easy and now barely exists. If your knowledge of history and view of the world is even remotely related to reality, this is heartbreaking, but hardly surprising. The unthinkable happens with surprising regularity. The mighty empire of Rome fell to the barbarians, the Chinese were defeated by the British, a second and bigger world-wide war followed the war to end all wars, airplanes were used as missiles to destroy the twin towers on a sunny september morning...

When Katrina's damage turned out to be bad, if you paid any attention to the last four years, you knew that democrats would blame Bush. They did. It's such a pattern that you can count on it like you can count on the sun to rise. Someone lost his job, it's Bush's fault. Some country doesn't like us, it's Bush's fault. If the stock market goes down, it's Bush's fault. If the price of gasoline goes up, that's Bush's fault (nevermind that we invaded Iraq to steal its oil, which presumably would make gas cheaper). If a hurricane does damage, that's Bush's fault.

You'd think that it would bother some of these people that they only have one answer to cover everything. At least the Lutherans think that Satan is nearly all-powerful. Their explanation may be a conspiracy theory, but at least it's a big conspiracy. "Satan did it" may be as unanswerable as "the illuminati did it", but at least Satan has magical powers. George W. Bush is, by the accounts of the same people who hold him responsible for all evil in the world, just a man. Not only that, he's barely smarter than a chimpanzee. Whatever; you can make some great gags about this. It's a fabulous premise for jokes. If you want to have a good time at a party, the people who think George Bush is Satan won't run out of material all night.

And I'm just sick of this. Of course George Bush isn't perfect. Even he doesn't believe that he's perfect. You'd have to be crazy to think that he is. But when politics is framed with an expectation that he be perfect coupled with some sort of belief that he's the only person in existence — that if anything went wrong it's completely his fault — coupled with the bizarre notion that anything short of perfection is complete failure... well, there's just no point in talking. And I really believe that now. There's just no point in talking about politics any more, because one side is just fundamentally unserious, and politics is serious business.