Thursday, May 04, 2006
Speaking truth to power
I suppose everyone who cares has at least read the transcript of Stephen Colbert's "routine" at the press dinner last Saturday, with da Prez in attendance & obviously angered. Colbert was, to use a cliche, "speaking truth to power." The only possible light humor about Bush is what you see & hear from Letterman & Leno (& even Letterman clearly dislikes the man). The jokes are all based on Bush's inarticulate speech & robotic movement; laugh at the clown. But Bush is not a clown. Clowns are sometimes frightening, but there's confetti in their buckets, not poison. One cannot touch on what Bush actually does without sarcasm & bitter irony. There's nothing funny about Iraq or New Orleans viewed through the lense of the White House. Bush is enveloped by a cloud of death that is only darkened by his religious associations*, & mocked by his corruption & cronyism. So OK, mainstream journalists, let's be like a bunch of frat boy pals at a keg party. We'll laugh when he pukes, & keep on laughing when he drop kicks a stray cat, & laugh even more when he pushes a coed into the corner for a quick feel. You have to lie to make President George Bush funny.
* a peculiarity of many conservative protestants is how they take the divine "personal assurance" of their salvation & somehow extend this assurance to their decisions & actions, & their view of the world. This is the potential folly of being "born again" in the evangelical manner, that while one may from that moment of transformation occasionally be not right, one is never again wrong so long as the transformation holds. Yet, its effect is the opposite of the self-examination & renewal it actually intends. It becomes another set of shackles rather than a trusting liberation of the heart & intellect. To quote theologian Jacques Maritain out of context: "The attempts at political and social reconstruction to which the pressure of life prompts peoples will not avoid turning into brutal and ephemeral despotisms; they will produce nothing sound and stable -- unless the intelligence is restored. The movement of religious renewal appearing in the world will be lasting and truly efficacious, only if the intelligence is restored."
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
* a peculiarity of many conservative protestants is how they take the divine "personal assurance" of their salvation & somehow extend this assurance to their decisions & actions, & their view of the world. This is the potential folly of being "born again" in the evangelical manner, that while one may from that moment of transformation occasionally be not right, one is never again wrong so long as the transformation holds. Yet, its effect is the opposite of the self-examination & renewal it actually intends. It becomes another set of shackles rather than a trusting liberation of the heart & intellect. To quote theologian Jacques Maritain out of context: "The attempts at political and social reconstruction to which the pressure of life prompts peoples will not avoid turning into brutal and ephemeral despotisms; they will produce nothing sound and stable -- unless the intelligence is restored. The movement of religious renewal appearing in the world will be lasting and truly efficacious, only if the intelligence is restored."
