Letter to the Editor

WHATEVER WORKS

Dear Bruce,

Isn't it ironic that the Republicans are pushing money into the Nader campaign in the hope that it will take votes from Kerry? Bush isn't going to even need those votes. Bush is going to win, in spite of all of the transgressions of his administration against truth, ethics, decency, law and freedom. The reason he's going to win is simple; it's because the message Bush is putting out there is just that, it's simple. The man and woman in the street can understand it; it's without subtlety, without nuance, without complexity and without thought.

That's the case because it's a religious message. The Republicans have been successful in fusing religion and politics for the first time in American history in about a hundred years since William Jennings Bryan ran. They have reversed the trend of those hundred years to keep religion and politics officially separate, even though they never have been truly separate in America. They parade their ideas about abortion, gay marriage, stem cell research, prayer in public institutions, tax money for religious based charities, and on and on. At the same time that they espouse their religious ideas they urge people to vote for them in a public election because of those ideas, which is itself a violation of the idea of separation of church and state.

I hate to say it, but the present American electorate has been moved so far to the right in the last 30 years that religion is not only talked about these days (remember when it wasn't acceptable as a topic of social conversation?), it's at the center of a Presidential campaign. How far it is from the days when it was discussed whether JFK should be a candidate for President because he's a Catholic? Bush is running on the idea that he should be elected because he's super-religious, whereas the issue with JFK was whether he'd be too religious. What a 180 degree switch.

The further irony is that Bush and his gang don't see the contradiction between their religious ideas and the ideas of the deity of the religion they profess to worship. Would Jesus be for preemptive war; for redistributing wealth from the poor to the rich; for creating an empire here on earth; for commodification of consumerism, for capital punishment, for judging people and calling them "axis of evil"? Yet, and here's the point Bruce, the people who believe the religious right's ideas, along with Bush, never even think about those contradictions. They don't think, they just let themselves be indoctrinated, first in church and then in the mainstream (read right-wing excusing) mass media.

Bush will win because he has his hand on the handle of the bullshit pump, and the majority of we the people are thirsty for absolutes, thirsty for feeling they are the good guys, thirsty for denial of the reality in which they daily live, thirsty for escape from it into simple-minded homilies that they can understand. Bush and his gang deliver them, and they will deliver the White House back to them. I hope I'm wrong, but we are not in a time of great hope, are we?

Lee Simon
Round Hill, Virginia