Over at Hullabaloo, digby has a nice little piece on the coded identity politics of the Republican Party, courtesy of Mark Schmitt and The American Prospect. This is one of the serendipitous moments in life, or perhaps synchronistic moments (although, not being a Jungian, I'm not really sure I believe that kind of stuff). In any event, I am currently reading, for the umpteenth time, Parke Godwin's Waiting For The Galactic Bus, a science fiction tale in which hides a wonderful parable. In this slim book, Godwin manages to skewer religious dogmatism, American politics and culture, our strange and horrible attraction/repulsion in regards to all things sexual, and even manages to make John Wilkes Booth and Judas Iscariot heroes of a sort.
Godwin's little book, now twenty years old, is the tale of two brothers, marooned on Pleistocene Earth. They give the hominids they encounter an evolutionary boot in the butt, and the results they try to manage over the ensuing five million years, with only marginal success. A pivot point arrives in the form of a young couple, Charity Stovall and Roy Stride, unemployed, angry, envious of all those who have while they do not, using the symbols of fundamentalist Christianity and racist identity politics as a vehicle for channeling their frustrations. Roy, not very bright, is quite up front about his plans. Charity, far more intelligent but blinkered by a culture and society that does not see any value in a woman on the socio-economic margins, is no less hide-bound, but willing to entertain alternatives, if presented a certain way.
The brothers, faced with the horrid possibilities of a child emanating from this couple - intelligent but bitter, "weaned on hate" as Godwin writes - decide to stack the deck, and do A Divine Comedy with some twists and turns through a German Expressionist Hell, the high-rise district for the damned, and the bureaucratic headquarters for Below Stairs which has an attached bar and brothel, as well as staged murderous raids on supposed Jewish and black neighborhoods for those who perished without grace. Charity sees it all and realizes that awaking from her nightmare is the only sane choice in an indifferent universe. Roy cannot face the reality that the universe will not endorse his petty visions of slaughter (even as it will not necessarily condemn his murderous impulses; it is exactly here that we realize that our moral code is a creation of our mind, not something embedded in the fabric of the Universe). He accepts death and damnation with the proviso that he never remember that he is the equivalent of a squished turd on the shoe of reality. Charity chooses real life, with all its struggles (and with her other friend, Woody Barnes), over the now-dead dreams of salvation and justice endorsed from on high.
This little snippet hardly does the book justice. It is filled with wonderful little tid-bits, laugh-out-loud chapter titles, scenes of both comedy and horror, and the reminder that, while death isn't so bad, life is far preferable. It is synchronous because Godwin is quite clear that the kind of identity politics described by Schmitt and taken up by digby is at the heart of much of our current political malaise. This is not to disparage the frustrations of the marginal classes, or to deny the reality in which those frustrations are rooted. It is, rather, to point out that much of the anger and bitterness we see on the right manifests itself (the Rev. Hagee is a great example) in lofty dreams of Armageddon not so much out of a careful exegesis of the Bible, but a more complex hermeneutic rooted in the social psychology of the marginalized. In a society that only seems to ratify those ideas that are broadcast abroad, via television, radio, and the internet (the the ubiquity of blogs!), the marginalization of those left behind by our society is compounded by the refusal to take their anger seriously.
This is the Republican base. I am not making fun, being condescending or otherwise dismissing the bitterness on display. I am saying that, with so much intellectual and political energy spent dismissing the frustrations and limitations of men and women who live on the fringes of American society (remember the line about "dragging a twenty dollar bill through a trailer park"? real nice), we have a horrid witches brew simmering that needs to be addressed. The biggest lie is not that racist identity politics, carefully coded and sold with a grammar of symbols and discreet hinting, is a solution to our problems. The far bigger lie is that meaning and affirmation lie at the heart of the structure of the world, and that this affirmation will be forthcoming through a bloody and vengeful purge of those who deny it. It isn't about religion, or science, or rationality, or race identity, or heritage, or who is and is not a real American. It's about confronting head on the truth that we create our own meaning, and it is always a struggle to get from where we are to where we want to be.
Virtual Tin Cup
