In an election where pilots face off against lawyers, one major
party thinks we citizens are gifted, and the other thinks we are
afflicted.
Consider the commentary rising like marsh gas from the swamps of
Salon, where Cintra Wilson harbors a visceral dislike for
any Christian to the right of her former colleague, Anne Lamott.
Conservative pundits have noticed the operatic disdain with which
Wilson barbers on about Sarah Palin, but too few remember that
Palin is only the latest to feel the lash from the lily pad where
Wilson has been trying to work frog princess alchemy on a
pedestrian collection of hatreds since the Clinton
administration.
After honeymooning in Hawaii ten years ago, Wilson filed a
column that trashed singer Israel
Kamakawiwo’ole, known to his fans as “Bruddah Iz.” Wilson wrote
shortly after Bruddah Iz had passed away from complications related
to obesity, but a decent respect to the opinions of mankind did not
stop her from speculating about his sex life, or slamming his
Christianity:
“Kauai is beautiful,” Wilson conceded. “It is infused with aloha
spirit. It also loves the daylights out of Jesus, which is another
reason [people there] love Iz — Iz loved him a big fat plate of
Jesus. Little mall girls who aren’t walking around in Iz shirts
walk around in powder-blue tank tops with the initials ‘W.W.J.D.?’
Which is actually a clothing brand, the initials standing for “What
Would Jesus Do?”
Big fat plate of Jesus? That’s a twofer from the
amateur anthropologist, and par for the course in her writing.
Where other people would appreciate the grace of teenaged surfers,
Wilson spikes her appreciation with self-pity, telling the rest of
us that she “felt like a rodent dislocating itself in a glue trap”
for most of her own adolescence.
Ten years later, Wilson is still lost in some progressive
karaoke bar, lip synching to the same song, and lacking even the
manners she might have absorbed from watching Born Free or
Gorillas in the Mist with an open mind. She describes Sarah Palin as “a Christian Stepford
wife” and an “opportunistic anti-female” whose morality is “fixed,
predictable, and inflexible.” Stick-waving of this kind is not
usually mistaken for literary riposte, but it wins applause from
Andrew Sullivan, who frequents the same club when he’s not banging
a shoe on the podium over at the Atlantic to shout that Sarah Palin is a “dangerous,
vindictive Christianist cipher.”
NOTE HOW the epithets of choice for both progressives are
religious: “Stepford Wife” might not be vile enough, so Wilson
tries to amplify the insult by adding “Christian” to it, and never
mind any malarkey about how her team trades in nuanced thought: If
nuanced thought were a progressive birthright rather than a
political construct aborted in its third trimester, Sullivan would
not be taking “Christianist” for another lap around the track. He
used to worry about Islamists, but these days he worries more about
parallel structure, and “Christianist” is the term he deploys
whenever he thinks he hears the hoof beats of an approaching
theocracy.
Sullivan does not seem to realize that Christianity is a bulwark
of freedom rather than a cancer upon it. Not for him the tolerant
wisdom of Brother Cadfael, the honesty of Flannery O’Connor, or the
breezy fiction of Ray Blackston, where Presbyterians argue about
whether Jesus would drink beer on the beach. Sullivan insists on
finding fascism among the dust bunnies in the sacristy, and his
fevered imaginings are abetted not just by Cintra Wilson but also
by Juan Cole, who writes that lipstick is the only difference
between Sarah Palin and fundamentalist Muslims.
Anyone who didn’t know better, or who looked for news in
Huffington Post stories with headlines like “Palin’s Church May
Have Shaped Controversial Worldview,” might suppose that it was the
governor of Alaska who listened to the “prophetic” rants of a
professional grievance-monger for 20 years.
In the Democratic catechism, support for abortion on demand
trumps religious affiliation, which is why self-described
progressives fret more about Christian Republicans than about
Christian Democrats, and why more stories are written about George
W. Bush’s faith than about Hillary Clinton’s, even though both
politicians are Methodists.
Beyond the gravitational pull of abortion and the existential
challenge posed by a vice-presidential nominee whose family and
choices are living refutations of the Democratic Party line,
anti-Christian animus among Democrats fits with an outlook that
says it is our country rather than our government that needs
fixing. Recall how Thomas Frank made a splash in 2004 with a book
titled What’s the Matter With Kansas? You can’t write a
book like that without assuming that Kansas needs fixing, and we’ve
already seen Cintra Wilson consign Hawaii to the emergency room.
Next thing you know, Alaska and Arizona will be coming down with —
oh never mind, they already did.
BUT SOME OF US like what we see now from the Republicans.
We’re gifted, not afflicted. We wear tee shirts from Mission San
Juan Capistrano or bracelets that say WWJD without worrying about
the separation of church and state. We’re grateful for the reminder that children with Down syndrome and
old people who can’t do shoulder presses are as good as anybody
else. We’re bemused by circuit riders who claim that their own election will initiate
planetary healing, especially if they seem to think that leadership
means having lots of “Facebook” friends.
We think the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge represents an
opportunity to reduce dependence on foreign oil rather than a
nettlesome stretch of tundra that must be protected from the
incursions of rapacious capitalists at any cost.
We pray for guidance, and ask blessings on our meals.
We love the irony of hearing New York Times grandees
dismiss a politician as inexperienced while running four different hit pieces against
her on the same Sunday (“Caribou Barbie” got to ya, did she
now?).
We thinks it’s funny to see people who praised the
Godfather movies and The Sopranos discomfited by
a real woman who is both a Feminist for Life and a lifetime member
of the National Rifle Association.
We do not interpret willingness to question librarians,
sympathize with “Intelligent Design” arguments, or fire police
superintendents as omens portending The Fall of the Republic.
And when Shakespeare says “ambition should be made of sterner
stuff,” we say amen, because Sarah Palin and John McCain have
already shown us sterner stuff.
