A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.
I'm a driver I'm a winner, things are gonna change I can feel it
-Beck, "Loser"
Wandering the paper to take one's mind off of one's troubles is not such a good plan at the end of March, 2022.
I called my father yesterday to tell him his brother was dead. The stream of vitriol, of grievances maintained and repeated for decades, shocked me a little, but I guess it should not have, given what I already know about the man.
Then at the end he called me up short. "He will never be forgiven for what he's done, and neither will I."
I was puzzled. "Not sure about the theology behind that one, Dad. Why do you say that?"
"I believe what I believe."
Well, isn't that our present moment in a nutshell? My poor mad father quoting the burning bush almost word-for-word, but with a modern twist. "I AM what I AM" represents an ontological statement of being, of a reality perhaps beyond speech. But it's reality all the same. "I believe what I believe" is exactly what I'd expect from an old man sitting for ten hours a day watching Fox News, where the line between belief and existential reality, between opinion and truth, blurs into nothingness. We live in a vast buffet of reality, spoken not lived, and we simply choose something under the sneeze guard, then buy a bumper sticker and matching hat to proclaim our blinkered understanding to anyone we encounter. Our belief/reality/truth is just as valid as anyone else's, after all.
This morning I ran across an article suggesting something anyone with a modicum of religious training and historical knowledge understands at some level: American evangelical "patriots" know next to nothing about religion's role in our history and institutions.
My favorite line in the piece:
Perry and his colleagues found that people who scored lower on the brief American history quiz tended to be more supportive of Christian nationalism. Interestingly, when they removed “I don’t know” responses from their analysis, the researchers found that the negative relationship between historical knowledge and Christian nationalism strengthened, suggesting that support for Christian nationalism is associated with “intentionally affirming factually incorrect statements.”
So, those are your neighbors, the parents you see at the ballfields, the guy behind you in line at the grocery store. Willfully ignorant, wrapped in a warm blanket of stupid with the rest of his or her tribe.
Which explains why this headline should, for those of us who've been alive for a few decades, serve as a harbinger of the end for this country:
For those of you too young to remember, an 18 1/2 minute gap in the tapes of a past president's Oval Office conversations led to the downfall of his presidency, and his resignation in disgrace.
Now we have a president who figuratively hit the delete button on an entire day's worth of phone calls just as he was inciting an armed insurrection against the country whose constitution he swore to uphold and defend. And apparently it was not an accident that there is no accountability or record now--his underlings report that the use of "burner phones", the untraceable communication device favored by drug dealers, were an intentional part of orchestrating that day's disaster.
And yet, not only is he not chained to a wall in a dungeon at Gitmo--he's the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party in the 2024 election. To quote Judge Smails in Caddyshack, I weep for the future.
Meanwhile, the spouse of a no-kidding Supreme Court justice was apparently actively involved in the coup attempt, intimating in texts that she'd shared her deranged thoughts with her "best friend":
That "best friend" would be the Justice, in case you missed it. A member of the bench, the very highest bench, engaging in pillow talk with his insurrectionist wife, even as the Court on which he sits is asked to consider matters in which she's not only a witness, but a suspect. How can this be?
Well, if your response is "I believe what I believe," the answer is pretty simple. Fake news. Or maybe it just doesn't matter, because we're owning the libtards. Once we've banned abortion and forced risible Protestant evangelical prayer in schools (say it with me, "Father God, we just want to . . . " whatever.) and kept those lazy dark-skinned folks from voting, you'll see just how great things can be. Sort of like Putin's Russia. Only dumber.
Not that the left is much better. Ross Douhat, a writer for the NYT with whom I have sharp disagreements even as I admire his disciplined thought and writing style, mused this morning on whether we're living Huntington's "clash of civilizations" predicted some twenty-five years ago.
Douhat covers a lot of ground, surveying and dismissing a number of frameworks for understanding this global moment. His best observation, though, is with regard to what's reflected in the liberal left's preoccupation with deconstructing race and western culture:
[I]t’s clearly tailored to an age of perceived American decline, offering a program of moral and spiritual renewal on the one hand, but also a way to justify a certain mediocrity and torpor, because after all too much focus on excellence or competition smacks of white supremacy.
So, we're in decline as a country, but we should turn away from objective "excellence or competition" because it's somehow racist. A slap in the face to my non-white friends and colleagues who've worked hard and succeeded, sometimes against incredible odds.
If one accepts the premise that we as a country are in fact engaged in a global competition, that it's baked into the genetic code of humanity, none of this bodes well. Half the country, or maybe more, lives in a subjective reality where all that matters is power, an Orwellian mental state that seems to lead only to autocracy, where anything can be rationalized or justified so long as our tribe wins. Meanwhile on the other side we find a solipsistic renting of garments and reframing this whole American adventure together as nothing but a racist, sexist fraud. Neither seems very patriotic to me, and I believe what I believe.
Back in my fighter pilot days, we recognized a four ship of Eagles was only as effective as the least competent pilot. That guy could get you killed, especially if he evinced a belief in his own efficacy that found no empirical support in his daily performance. We actually tailored how we would solve a tactical problem to take into account the fact that Blue 4 might be an out-of-shape lieutenant colonel who'd just come off of a staff tour and only flew maybe eight hours a month.
I can't imagine how we'd solve the problem of three out of four of those air pirates not only lacking proficiency, but believing either on the one hand that they were the next Bubi Hartmann because the Bible told them so, or on the other hand that their incompetence shouldn't matter much because their ancestors were repressed and the country owed them the chance to get the rest of us killed in the name of social justice. And the consequence of failure was, in fact, ceasing to exist in the most objective sense.
That's where our country seems to find itself, sitting on the couch with Dad living a fantasy while some hungry entrepreneur in Shanghai or determined autocrat in Delhi exploits the space we've left as we turn inward, always to our disadvantage. Human existence is competition, is struggle. We can't wish it away.
Okay, enough of all this. A busy day today of stomping out fires at work before leaving for the firm retreat in the morning. The radar shows a massive line of vicious thunderstorms out west that should drape itself across our route of flight tomorrow. Of course. But that's objective reality, and P and I will just have to deal with it.
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