I watched Countdown last Monday night, knowing that the one guy on TV News who says what many feel needs to be said about Bush. He’s talked to Joseph Wilson and others, and they’re all saying “Bush considers himself above the law”.
(I know, I said I wouldn’t say much more, but this is what I hope will be their last big goof in defense of their corrupt administration.)
These people are, and always have been , pretenders. Frauds. They have no interest in the kind of country to which they pay lip service. They are money launderers for the schemes of greedy people, and are delivering their clients what they promised, with the aid of a gullible public, being spoon fed neocon-spun distortions of such as Fox News.
As one who has grown seriously jaded with appeals to patriotism and “what America means”, longing for some mythical time long ago when “things that are self-evident” , I remain astounded at how far this group has been allowed to come. The arguments employed against them have relied upon false hopes in an ideology that deifies an “America” that we can be proud of. The left appeals to a set of “ideals” which are articulated in a language of “freedoms and self-evident truths”, but end up leaving us at the mercy of capitalistic forces which are defended as a “requirement of true freedom”. I find myself feeling extremely shortchanged listening to liberals and progressives articulate what our problems are, which usually boils down to “who’s in charge” and the “decisions they’ve made” and how that “makes a mockery of what the founding fathers intended”. I tend to be rather cynical of “what the founding fathers intended”, since they consisted of a relatively small group of “articulators” of the “revolutionaries” who were revolting against a political and economic model which disadvantaged them, and whose “framing” of the sacred documents set up their alternatives to the “tyranny” they saw with the system which set up an alternative with them at the top. All of the talk of “freedom” and “equality” rings hollow when recognizing what should be a rather revealing , inconvenient fact: they owned slaves too. So much discussion of how we “recognize” the “dilemmas” they had does not quite satisfy me that they really had much freedom in mind for those outside of their circle.
To the extent that this ideal “America” exists alongside the only real Kingdom as a contrast from “what the world (REALLY) needs now”, I am tired of the constant appeal to “ideals of America”. Sop much so that the whole narrative is something I want to avoid. Sure, there IS a set of “better alternatives” that actually do or would represent an “America” a Christian could find worth defending, but to articulate such an America would call into question most of the elements of “what America stands for”. Actually, “what America stands for” is only important when we are addressing the subject of our “national consciousness” and sense of “citizenry”. The prominent “what we stand for” is the call of the God to be the Body of Christ.
But what can we “expect” from those who operate apart from this “call”? How do we articulate an agreement as to how we should best order ourselves as a nation? Do we have no place in this? Are we without opinion? Are we better off not getting disturbed about things that are obviously being done out of economic and political power? Is our “being disturbed” not to be shared , or are we just casting pearls before swine? And are there levels of “swine-i-ness” that allows some to better grasp where we are coming from as citizens of a nation that “stands for” things which question the legitimacy of various claims of “what America stands for”?
