- Small Town Values Are Elitist
Every election cycle we are plagued by the Republican fantasy rhetoric of the Common Man (this year, the Common Palin), which is the companion to another Republican rhetorical myth, those sacred and ever-vaunted Small Town Values.
However, in my experience, the most prevalent small town value, which cuts across everything they stand for, is elitism.
Watch a few episodes of the Andy Griffith Show, and you’ll find an obvious sense of small town snobbery running through them. A common plot device which the writers used quite frequently was to have some big city outsider come into town and, by the end of the episode, the big city outsider has either been evangelized into believing in the moral superiority of country living (and therefore stops being a criminal or a broker or whatever other ‘foolish’ big city pastime they have), or is in some way made to be embarrassed by their big city way of doing things, and they leave in a huff, with the grinning Sheriff Taylor waving goodbye in a way that says ‘don’t come back unless you’re ready to be just like us.’ Roll credits, and cut to millions of people saying to themselves, ‘gee, if only America was still like that.’
An example that I can think of right off the top of my head is this episode where some big law enforcement agency comes into town to capture a fugitive, and in the end the fugitive is caught not because of the efficient and organized work of the professional outsiders, but because country bumpkin Sheriff Taylor allows the fugitive to try and get away in his rowboat, which just happens to have a hole in it. The boat starts to sink, the fugitive is captured, and the big city cops are made to feel stupid about all their big city shenanigans.
In elections, this translates into constant talk of the ‘heartland,’ and Sarah Palin’s and others’ rhetoric about ’small town values.’ Well, having been born in the heartland, and having seen some pretty small towns in my life, I think this is a myth which needs finally and totally to be put to rest.
There is no place more snobby than a small American town. Sure, on their face, most small town people are perfectly nice and polite to strangers who are passing through, especially those strangers who stop and eat at the local restaurants, or shop at the local markets, or fill up their gas tanks at the local stations on their way to somewhere else. Oh yes, give those small town folks your money, and they’ll be nice as the day is long to you. (And they’ll also use home-spun phrases like “as the day is long” in conversation.)
But move into town, and you find something different entirely. You see that the town is full of divorced alcoholics who loudly proclaim the concept of moral virtue wherever they go. You find that underneath the folksy charm (if there even is any anymore) there lies an inherent intellectual conflict. Namely, these small towns wear their isolation as a badge of honor, but at the same time they believe that they are the only ones who still believe in ‘community.’ In other words, they have created for themselves communities of isolation - or, as we might call them, communes or compounds.
Every small town has their Mayberry Machiavellis, the person who is in the chamber of commerce, and is the president of the garden club, and is the head of their church council, and who makes it a point to have their finger in everything simply because they are a massive control freak. In fact, small towns are full of these nosy busybodies, these gossip mongers who giggle mercilessly during their weekly bridge game about the family that went through the divorce, or the girl who went away to have an abortion, and who will make you feel unwelcome at the slightest hint that your politics don’t match theirs exactly, and who will mercilessly fight you if you even remotely get in the way of their personal ambition.
And then there is the notion, which they wear as a badge of honor, that small towns are paragons of moral virtue while big cities are dens of hedonism full of homosexual communists who want to kill your babies. This is an inherently elitist attitude, and how these same people can get away with calling someone else elitist, or calling ethnically and culturally diverse cities elitist, is beyond me. It is the height of shameless and completely un-self-aware hypocrisy to imply that culturally diverse Chicago is elitist (since Barack Obama came from there), but that small town Alaska, with far fewer people and almost no cultural diversity, is not.
But far more reprehensible are the millions of Americans who have deluded themselves into believing this Mayberry mythology, that small towns are happy, friendly places with band concerts at the gazebo and picnics in the park. In fact, most people in small towns drive their gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs to the local bar to have a cheeseburger, smoke a few cigarettes, play some video poker and get drunk because that’s all there is to do in their ’superior’ little town.
I was born in a medium-size city, and I experienced a little of this when I was growing up, this fervent desire to stay in one place, to eschew anything new or different, and to mock that which you don’t understand. This is small town America, a nation of people who worship at the altar of god, football and guns, and are proud that the rest of the world doesn’t want anything to do with them. They are proud of their ignorance, their closed-mindedness and their cultural isolation.
They are fiercely proud to be Americans, but they hate America.
Here then, are your small town values voters: farmers who demand government subsidies but then complain that taxes are too high; red states that have higher divorce rates than blue states; hypocrites who complain about political correctness while feigning mock outrage at trumped-up sexism; people who loudly trumpet their own moral virtue while forgetting, I guess, about the virtue of humility.
Real small town values are cultural isolation and hypocritical moralism, a constant mix of us-against-them elitism and self-righteous self-aggrandizement. And this is exactly what we’ve seen in the White House for the last eight years, and this is exactly what we see in Sarah Palin.
The Dems are only marginally better, of course, but I’ll take Chicago over Mayberry any day, thanks.
- Sounds Like a Good Plan
I’m more than a little concerned about all of the bad news in the transportation sector recently.
I’m referring, of course, to the train wreck, plane crash and ferry sinking which have all occurred within a matter of days of each other.
To counteract my fears, I was thinking of taking a nice, calm bike ride. Or maybe a pleasant, safe walk. You know what, maybe I should just stay in my own driveway.
Okay, where does getting killed in your own driveway fit into the Almighty Deity’s plan? Seriously, Deity, I think this plan of yours needs some work.
- Three Completely Random Things
Yes, the title pretty much says it all. Here they are.
Number One:
Why is it that we talk about who stars “in” a movie, but then we talk about who’s “on” a TV show?
Movie Example: That one guy in Beerfest was funny. TV Example: She plays Starbuck on Battlestar Galactica. See what I mean? Here are two more. Kiefer Sutherland was in A Few Good Men and Kiefer Sutherland is on 24. Why the difference?
For that matter, why do people ask what’s playing “at” the theater, when they really mean to ask what’s playing “in” the theater? Related to that, why do we then ask what’s “on” TV or even “on” the radio? And furthermore, why do we park on a driveway and drive on…oh, never mind.
Number Two:
Why does a Google search for the phrase “peaceful hindu blog” return a list of results with StM as the third? Are there really no actual peaceful Hindu blogs available to fill that spot?
Number Three:
Why do foodies insist upon using bacon in everything?
- Seriously Scary Stuff
Okay, well, that was enough of a break. Back to scary religion/election-related things, like these videos and articles.
On the one hand, we send spacecraft to Mars. Good for us. On the other hand, we promote religious hysteria. Bad for us.
- And Now For Something Else
I really wanted to get a post up here about something other than Obama Jesus McCain Palin God, and Microsoft has given me just the thing.
Thank you Bill Gates.
See if you can guess which substance was being abused that led to the creation of this commercial.
- The Separation of Palin and State
Religion has been all over this election in the most schizophrenic of ways. Of course, this is no surprise given the schizophrenic nature of religious belief itself. (God created everything, but nothing created God.)
Barack Obama is still the victim of a whisper campaign that he is a secret Muslim, even though that is the punchline of a stupid joke, and even if it were true, this is supposedly a nation of religious freedom and there’s nothing in the constitution that says a Muslim cannot be president. Although there is also nothing in the constitution that says a black man or a woman cannot be President, and yet here we are talking about the first people to fit those descriptions coming close to the presidency after a long and contentious 232 years since our founding.
But then Jeremiah Wright, the pastor of Obama’s decidedly Christian church, came along and drew all of the attention he did, even though he helped show, in his unique way, that in fact Barack Obama was a Christian. But then many of those same people who were worried about Obama being a Muslim decided that it was now his particular brand of Christianity that really bothered them.
And then someone in the Catholic church tried to do to Joe Biden what was done to John Kerry four years ago, namely deny him the sacrament of the Eucharist (because he was pro-choice) in an attempt to draw media attention. For the most part, that didn’t really work.
I’ve already spoken about the Democrats’ overtly Christian convention in Denver. The daily opening and closing Christian prayers, the CEO of the convention itself being a Christian minister, their ‘values’ forums and so forth. For this they received complaints from non-theists like me, and then they were also mocked by the likes of Fox News for trying too hard.
So, if you’re a Democrat, when it comes to Christianity, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Or, from the Republicans’ point of view, you’re just damned.
On the other side, John McCain has been seen by the Christian right as not being Christian enough, to the point where even James Dobson said he wouldn’t vote for a McCain presidency, even though McCain has courted the approval and endorsement of Jerry Falwell and John Hagee. Hagee drew some muted attention after McCain actively sought his endorsement. Hagee’s views about Israel, the apocalypse, gay people and life in general are all pretty scary, but in fact, are pretty standard in many southern churches. And McCain has rightly defended himself by saying that those were Hagee’s views, not his own, even though that defense didn’t work so well for Obama.
A sad lesson here is that the corporate media really do have a right-leaning bias in their coverage of religion and culture, as the views of McCain’s several religious surrogates are largely treated as ‘normal’ while the views of Obama’s single religious surrogate are acutely and repeatedly scrutinized.
And then there is Sarah Palin. Yes, she likes to kill innocent animals for fun. Yes, the Republican delegates hooted and cheered when Fred Thompson said that she “knows how to properly field dress a moose” (funny, I don’t remember killing animals being a constitutional requirement for the presidency, either). But, if you really want to get to know her, you’ll watch this video. Okay, really, you don’t have to watch the video, I’ll just give you the highlights. In these off-the-cuff remarks recorded at her church, she espouses a belief that Yahweh (she says “god,” but we know who she’s talking about) wants a gas pipeline through Alaska, and that invading Iraq was part of Yahweh’s grand universal plan, and that she is governor because her pastor prayed for her to be. (For fun, her pastor throws in his belief that Alaska is going to be a place where refugees go after the apocalypse. Won’t that be nice for them?)
Now, until this point, when talking about religion in this election, we were almost always referring to either the religious beliefs of surrogates, or to the perception of the candidates’ religious beliefs. In fact, outside of the infamous Rick Warren forum, neither candidate has gone much beyond the sound bite when it comes to speaking about their actual beliefs. And actually, of the two candidates, Obama has spoken much more openly in the past about his religion than McCain ever has.
But now we have, at a public event, on the record, the actual religious beliefs of a candidate herself.
It’s one thing for John Hagee to spout nonsense from the guise of the pulpit, but it’d be another thing entirely if he ever actually ran for public office. But in the person of Sarah Palin, we now have the equivalent of a John Hagee or a James Dobson actually running for the highest elected office in the land; albeit, she’s actually running to be the runner-up to that position. But still, when the lead candidate is in his seventies, the potential duties of the runner-up position begin to look a lot more like those George H.W. Bush had under Ronald Reagan. Sure, Dick Cheney might be pulling the strings of the current President, but George H.W. Bush was actually handed the keys to the country many more times under Reagan (because of Reagan’s age and failing health) than Cheney has ever been.
I will now ask a stupid question. Will the right-leaning corporate media endlessly replay and parse these remarks made by the actual candidate the same way they did those of Jeremiah Wright? It’s doubtful.
However, if I was to wear only my atheist hat (to continue the Daily Show meme) and simply dismiss these off-the-cuff remarks as religious nonsense, then I would also be dismissing the larger point about religion in this and every election.
If a candidate wears their religion on their sleeve as a reason to vote for them, then we must, as voters, begin comparing and judging the candidates’ religious beliefs as well as their other qualifications when we consider choosing them.
Whereas, when we judge someone’s competency to perform most tasks, we usually look at the total combination of their education, skills and experience in some objective, measurable way. At least, that’s what we should be doing. But in fact, we also judge people very subjectively on things like their personality or ‘likeability’ (something I know very well from my problems finding a job recently).
But when we are placed in the position of having to judge their religious beliefs, what objective, measurable criteria do we use? Do we rate them on how well they know their scripture? Do we rate them on how many times they pray, or how many Jesus fishes they have on their various cars? In fact, there is no objective measurement of a person’s ‘religiosity,’ and so all we are left with is the subjective. And for most people, the subjective boils down to simply this: how much is whatever I’m judging like me?
So, when ‘judging’ the religiosity of the candidates, most people in this country are simply asking how closely the beliefs of the candidates match their own, and so the election serves not so much to choose the next President as it does to divide America into sectarian groups. And then those same religious people laughably talk about the need for unity. When it is your own insistence upon making the subjective judgement of a person’s religion a key factor in deciding if you’ll vote for them, you simply have no right to turn around in the next sentence and stupidly wonder why our nation seems to be so divided.
As an atheist, I have only ever voted for Christians. This is why I always react angrily when Rick Warren or someone like him comes along and says that they’d never vote for an atheist, and that, in fact, no one should. Such people would never be caught in public saying that Americans shouldn’t vote for a Jew or for a black man (although they might think it), because such remarks would be dismissed as callous bigotry, and would make their public lives much more difficult. In fact, I could never get away with saying that you should not vote for a Christian, even though I wouldn’t say that and don’t believe it.
So why then, do I continue to vote for Christians, even though they are outside of my group? Well, what an absurd question. The real question is, why shouldn’t I vote for a Christian? In fact, the real questions of this election are all shouldn’t questions. Why shouldn’t we all vote for a black man? Why shouldn’t we all vote for a woman?
The real reason, then, to be in favor of the separation of church and state, is the same reason we are in favor of the separation of gender and state, or ethnicity and state.
Most of us have long since decided that using skin color or gender as reasons to either automatically include or exclude someone amounts to bigotry. Religion remains, therefore, the last criteria for automatic inclusion or exclusion that, in the minds of the Christian (or otherwise religious) public, does not amount to bigotry. In fact, for them, it amounts to a sacred right to be able to judge people based solely upon religion, or to be able to decide elections based upon how closely the religious beliefs of the candidates match their own.
But if I thought like that, then I could never vote for the black man or two women in the race, since they are outside my group. And I would most certainly never vote for a Christian ever again.
Also, that would make me an insane narcissist and a bigot.
So, the factor of religion in this and all elections is just another excuse for people to vote for someone just like themselves. It is the open acceptance of closed intolerance, the last forthright refuge of the bigoted and the insanely self-centered.
Which brings me back to Sarah Palin, who believes that the Almighty Creator Of Existence wanted her to be the governor of Alaska (and also, presumably, the Vice-President). If I were to judge the Governor based upon the criteria of group membership which she and her ilk use to judge others, then I could never vote for her. Fortunately, there are all kinds of objective, secular reasons not to hand her the keys to the country, and so I don’t have to resort to bigotry to vote for her opponent.
Isn’t that an ironic statement?
I’m still waiting, then, for that same courtesy, the courtesy of using objective criteria, the courtesy of not being a bigot, to be applied to me and all Americans who are outside the Christian group; not just in elections and politics and law, but in everyday life.
I suspect I’ll be waiting a long time.
- Police State
Wow, the news about the police state being perpetrated at the Republican Convention continues to be disturbing.
What is even more disturbing, though, is the deafening silence from the corporate media about the mistreatment of lawful protesters and journalists. Here’s a lame story from CNN about how the police used something that the reporter thinks wasn’t tear gas on a crowd that, apparently, made it known to the police themselves that they intended to march to a fence. Wow, that sounds like one unruly crowd, all right.
Here are some good sources of info about the string of violent raids and unwarranted arrests that have gone on this week if you haven’t been following it yourself: Green is the New Red, Democracy Now, Glenn Greenwald at Salon. And Food Fight shares one very disturbing arrest video.
- Awesome Circus-Going Dickweed
From Josh from Herbivore’s blog.
I am still often surprised by the other ‘members’ of my gender (he said member, dude), even though I really should not be at this point in my life. I guess surprised is the wrong word, then; how about disappointed? Yes, that’s probably more accurate. I am still disappointed by the societally-driven male desire to make everything be about aggressive, physical conflict, as well as the odd fixation with the slang word for the female genitalia, and the constant competition to prove whose genitalia is bigger, and so on and so on.
And in the meantime, the elephants at the Ringling Brothers circus really are being abused (beyond simply being subjugated for entertainment, which is itself abuse) with chains and bullhooks and intensive confinement, which is all Josh and the others were trying to pass out leaflets about in the first place.
Is this prime example of the male gender, then, in favor of such abuse? And how would we even know if that were the case or not, since he seems more interested in a physical confrontation than a discussion?
And, irrespective of that, why is it considered entertainment for small children to watch captive animals perform degrading, pointless and stupid ‘tricks?’ When a prostitute performs a trick, it’s illegal, but when an elephant does it, it’s entertainment?
But if you read this, then you’re probably a pussy.
- At First I Thought They Were Talking About Monty Python
But no, not Michael Palin. I see. Too bad.
Here’s the funniest thing I’ve read about her all day:
Governor Palin is leader of a state with less people than Multnomah County.
There are all kinds of things I could say about her, but I really doubt that McCain has any real chance of winning the election, so I’ll skip it.
- Atheists and Politics
I’ve been complaining in all of my various online venues this week about the overly-religious bent to the Democratic convention.
Fortunately, I’m not the only one. Here’s a good piece in the Washington Post and here’s the AU take.
Just to be clear, lest some troll leave some ill-conceived response, I have nothing against any individual Democrats being personally religious (although, of course, I wish they weren’t). But I do have a big problem with the majority religion asserting itself into proceedings that are supposed to be about choosing the head of the secular government and, according to the Democrats themselves, are supposed to be “inclusive.” This is the ongoing problem with the Christian majority. It’s not enough that they have total religious freedom, that their churches, which are everywhere, are tax-exempt, that our entire calendar is centered around them and their sabbath and their holy days, and that they can pray, worship, proselytize and pledge themselves to “one nation under god” on their own time to their heart’s content.
And it’s also not enough, apparently, that they already control the Republican agenda.
In reality, I’m fine with the Christian majority controlling both corporate parties, since I belong to neither, and since I ultimately believe that all political parties should be abandoned in favor of a system where we either largely self-govern, or we elect individuals (real people) to represent us, not members of a corporation.
The reason I and others, then, are complaining about the Democrats’ behavior this week is because their rhetoric of inclusion does not jive with invoking the Holy Trinity as part of the official opening of their convention. If individual Democrats want to get up and talk about Jesus and Yahweh, then that’s their right. But the party itself, just like the government, should not be in the business of promoting one religion over the other. And it should definitely not be in the business of excluding the non-religious or those who practice a different religion.
There are already organizations that anyone can join which have the sole purpose of promoting Christianity: they’re called churches, and they’re increasingly desperate for money and membership. In fact, isn’t it rather funny that, in a time when church attendance and membership are generally decreasing, the influence of Christianity on the supposedly secular political party appears to be increasing?
That’s the kind of question I’ll be pondering while I twiddle my thumbs during the next convention benediction.