How to Drive a Deacon to Drink

How is it possible for the whole nation to hold its breath wondering who the Evangelical Republican Tea Party in Iowa is going to choose to be the Next Loser? The Republican caucuses in Iowa have not chosen a successful Presidential nominee in years!

But here we are, going down through the list again: Bachmann? Santorum? Parry? Paul? Romney? Cain? Gingrich? Somebody? Anybody! Help!

Gingrich? How is it possible for earnest, church-going, tea drinkers to prefer Gingrich? Does he not represent almost everything they scorn? Newt's marriage record alone might seem to cause a Dutch Reformed Deacon's moral commitments to scrunch up into a knot. Newt was thrown out of office by his own party the last time he held office. He is a mean-spirited son-of-a-gun who oozes mean comments. He advocates arresting politicians he disagrees with, and says he would refuse to follow laws he does not like.

Newt isn't running for President: he is selling books. His campaign appearances involve inscribing the books his admirers just bought. He reminds then that there are about thirty other titles in stock. He would rather not be reminded that if there is enough money involved--say, at least $13.--he will oppose what he just advocated yesterday. Actually, his fee is more like $60,000. a speech, he says.

But what boggles the mind is not Newt: it is the Evangelical Republican Tea Partiers who support him! What are they thinking? I have almost come to the conclusion that the human brain must have something like a moral corpus callosum that is supposed to communicate between two places in the brain--say the religious closet, and the swamp of politics--and that it gets severed when you enter an Evangelical Republican Tea Party caucus room. How else can you conclude that God and a lot of Iowa Church Republicans want Newt to be President?

Ah! That isn't fair! Maybe it is just that the alternatives would drive a Deacon to drink.

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The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. Even when all they wanted to do w

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there

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