Elephants through the Eye of a Needle

Before the 2004 election, my Uncle Mark was toying with the idea of writing an article for his local newspaper. The main thrust was going to be that you couldn’t call yourself a Christian and also vote for George Bush. I don’t know if he ever did that, but I liked the idea so much that I’ve never forgotten it.

But these days, as conservatism has spread and gotten even more extreme, it occurs to me that it might be easier for an elephant to pass through the eye of a needle than to enter the gates of heaven.

Christians believe that Jesus was their savior, and they (should) know his teachings. They should also use him as a role model. Jesus believed in taking care of the poor and the downtrodden. Republicans believe the poor and downtrodden should man-up and make it on their own, like they did. Never mind that those people probably came from a culture, if not a family, that provided them with the skills necessary for success. Oh, and almost certainly they're white.

Jesus believed that we shouldn’t judge others, that we should leave that to God. Republicans believe our current president is a foreign-born socialist who’s here to ruin our country and bears a striking resemblance to Hitler for wanting all of us to have health insurance.

The patron saint of the Republican Party these days is Ronald Reagan. In many ways he was a disastrous president, but he also offered Americans a utopian vision. “It’s morning in America,” said his campaign commercials, and he talked about how we had only just begun. His pro-American rhetoric bordered on jingoism, but he had a dream . . .

The problem is that only some of us qualified for that dream. Wealthy, white people were in his dream, but poor brown people need not have applied. Jimmy Carter recently said, and wrote in his book, that Reagan set back race relations years, and even I remember Reagan talking about “welfare queens.”

The idea was that everyone on welfare was scamming the system and pulling the wool over our eyes. They drove Cadillacs to the store to buy steaks with their welfare checks—the money they stole from hard-working Americans like YOU. When you think of this, what color is the person in that scenario? In our country, most welfare recipients are minorities. Okay, black.

Behold the patron saint the Republican party.

Bill Mahar, a comedian and political talk show host, said that not all Republicans are racist, but most racists are Republican. I think that’s more true now than ever, as the predominantly older, white conservatives get more and more angry.

What do you suppose Jesus would have thought of all this?

My father recently wrote a piece in which he differentiated the way liberals and conservatives think about the role of government in our lives by contrasting two verbs: interfere and intervene.

Because conservatives think government should be smaller and leave the people alone (the laissez-faire style of government Reagan always talked about); it should not interfere in the affairs of its people.

Liberals want the government to intervene on behalf of those in need, and protect us from harm. In the parlance of today’s debate, it should provide health care to those who can’t afford it.

The problem is that conservatives don’t always think government action is interfering, it's only when they don’t directly benefit from it or when it supports their causes. Universal health care is interference. Medicare is intervention. Welfare is interference, Social Security is intervention. Stopping abortions is intervention. Even intrusive and complicated financial regulatory reform is intervention now that conservatives have been bitten by the dog they helped to raise.

Okay, so I’ve gotten a little off track here. I started out by saying that conservatives can’t call themselves Christians because they eschew the core values of their religion, and now I’m onto “conservatives are bad people.” Guilty as charged. But I think in order to call yourself a Christian you should also at least try to be a good--and reasonable--person with pure and honest intent. So I have two more points to make. Maybe three.

1. What would happen if you told a conservative that you were a compassionate liberal? He would probably snicker and say all liberals were bleeding hearts. But for the 2000 election George W. Bush made a point of saying that he was a compassionate conservative. That was notable because sounds like an oxymoron and it flies in the face of all that is conservatism. And then he proved that it was an oxymoron by starting two completely unnecessary wars, creating energy policies that we may never recover from, giving out over a trillion dollars in tax breaks to the wealthy, and underfunding an education program called "No Child Left Behind," leaving lots of children behind.

2. Conservatives worship at the altar of wealth, but not education. One of the worst pejoratives a conservative can throw at a liberal is that he’s “elitist” or that he lives in an "ivory tower"—both of which are code for “well educated” and "they think they're better than you."

I believe there are two kinds of conservatives in this country: those who directly benefit from the pro-wealthy, pro-business agenda, and those who think with their gut and vote out of fear. They’re willing to (unknowingly) vote against their economic interests if you tell them that “them people think they’re better-n-you.”

3. Fox News is a direct response to the conservative charge that the media have a liberal bias. But what has always confused me is that no one is asking why the people whose job it is to know everything about what’s going on in the world are (supposedly) liberals. Why do the people who know all about this stuff disagree with you? Don’t they ever ask themselves that question?


Okay, I’m done rambling now. I just wanted to get that off my chest, but I reserve the right to come back here and turn this into a separate blog post that's a bit more coherent.