Not Really About That

I was contemplating writing about the Democratic primary and its “non-conculsion conclusion,” until a texting conversation with La Principessa reminded me that the whole thing has about the total dignity of a Survivor spinoff. I’ll spare you the laborious analogy that I concocted on the spot. Just suffice it to say that I don’t think highly enough of American politics to expend verbiage at its expense.

I suppose that Jeff Nelson might be able to construe this as a back-handed compliment to himself and his associates. Consider: if a topic, person, or thing must pass a certain “regard threshold” in order to get me to write about it, then clearly he is higher on the arbitrary totem pole of my regard than the Democratic primary, or American politics generally. And he would be right. Not that there’s a lot to get excited about in that statement. Just look at some of the things that I’ve covered in these digital pages, and you’ll see the kind of company Nelson keeps.

As if to emphasize that point, let me just mention another thing that holds my regard for long enough to write about it – albeit in parody. Stupid Christians. There are a lot of them, both Catholic and (sorry guys, but I’ve gotta say it) heretical categories. High up on my list of stupid things stupid Christians tend to believe in is The Rapture. Leaving off the invective for a moment, things Rapture-related tend to be a pretty good source of hilarity. Enter You’ve Been Left Behind, LLC. And I’ll just let you follow the link and marvel about how people use the amazing brains God has given them.

What I really wanted to talk about, though, was a brief paragraph I read in a recent post on The Sci Fi Catholic. It’s one of those things that is almost artistic in its simplicity, its directness – and it slammed into my brain with the weight of that ponderous imagery I alluded to in the first paragraph. I scoured their site for anything relating to a copyright, and found none, so I’m going to trust to the mighty strength of my attributions above to establish the fact that I’m quoting in good faith:

The great sin of pluralism, which sometimes underlies comparative religious studies, is that it will not allow the religions to be the religions. It will not allow them to stand on their own as unique institutions with distinctive theologies. The problem with Jungians like Campbell is that they will not allow the myths to be the myths, which stand on their own with their distinctive characters, narratives, and meanings.

…The point, you ask? Well, as I read the above passage for the first time, I experienced that synaptic tingling that tells me that somebody as found a clearer, shorter way of saying something that I’ve been struggling with trying to express. And pluralism in its varied forms is one of those things that annoys the literal hell out of me every time I encounter it – which is, unfortunately, pretty often. It’s not just religious pluralism and its zombie-esque seed ecumenism that rankle me…And fortunately, the above explication works, with but little modification, for another type of pluralism as well – including a kind that allows me to tie back into the topic with which I initially started this post: politics.

I would not be much of an American if I said that I hated America. I would also not be that honest, because I do not, in point of fact, hate America. As much as I work to hone my sensibilities so that I am a Catholic first and an American second, I have not ceased to be an American – and in fact, I would argue that I am a better American for being Catholic first, for the simple reason that I am better equipped to show here where she is wrong. As much as it feels like admonishing an old lady with Alzheimer’s, I feel like it’s something I have to do. It’s my duty.

The crime of political pluralism, though – and this ties in with the moral pluralism that grows out of religious pluralism – is that it makes such admonitory gestures basically impossible. Thanks to Bush, the new baseline for political dialogue is that both sides “love America.” How nice to know that we can take this, at least, as axiomatic. As far as the rest of it goes, come Communists, Nazis, fascists, theocrats, demagogues all! Somehow, I doubt that the generation of the Founders would have been tripping over themselves to see who could bring British loyalists “into the tent.” And therein lies our problem.

This country is on the way out. Whether it will precipitate a full-on collapse of civilization I cannot say. But a country that doesn’t actually know what it stands for – empty rhetoric about “freedom” and “liberty” and “prosperity” don’t count, sorry – can’t possibly have much life left in it. And a country that refuses to say that a particular system of government, of economics, or of morals is just plain wrong has effectively proclaimed that it stands for nothing. And nothing is something that is not worth writing about.

So, aside from the occasional and unavoidable epic rant when I can’t help but vent at some new and yet-ranker stupidity in the political sphere, I bid farewell to discussing that sort of thing. There are more interesting topics out there… There just have to be.