Fair Warning: I know that my readers expect that every week my blog will contain profound observations about the endlessly fascinating religious landscape. Not this week, where I will make some sardonic comments about the current political scene in the U.S. This scene, which is increasingly surreal, has little to do with religion (beyond the fatuous rhetoric of American politicians). Except in one way: Politics takes place in everyday life, which is covered by the news media and which Alfred Schutz called the “paramount reality”, because its reality is so powerful that it blots out all other realities. When everyday reality begins to seem “surreal”, the idea dawns that maybe it is not as real as one thought. Perhaps there are other realities. Religion is the intuition, and indeed the hope, that this is so. Put differently, the “surreal” is, at least potentially, an antechamber of the supernatural.
On July 6, 2015, as The Boston Globe reported, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court threw out a law which prohibits the publication of false statements about a candidate for public office. A candidate had sued under that law, which the Court now deemed to be unconstitutional, because it violates the constitutional right to free speech. I took the trouble of actually reading the Court’s decision. Basically the decision said that the courts should not be asked to usurp the electorate’s right to decide what is acceptable in political controversies; if one does not like what is said in political speech, the democratic remedy is counter-speech, not recourse to judges. I am not a lawyer, but I find this argument persuasive. However, a lay person might conclude that the law now gives every political actor a constitutional license to lie. Given the legendary recklessness of American political discourse (hardly worse today than it has ever been), this may enhance the plausibility of Mark Twain’s pithy advice: “Don’t vote; it only encourages them”. It also recalls a conversation between an interviewer and H.L. Mencken, another jaundiced commentator on American life: “If you feel this way about the country, Mr. Mencken, why do you choose to live in America?” – “Why does a man go to the circus?”
So as not to be misunderstood, I will make a personal comment here: I don’t know about Mencken, but I actually chose to live in America. I didn’t choose to come here; I immigrated with my parents when I was barely eighteen; but I chose to stay here. When I had become seriously notorious, I had two plausible feelers about applying for professorships in my native Austria. It was tempting. One feeler was from Vienna; if I had successfully pursued it, I would have become a very big fish in a very small pond. There would have been a number of cultural attractions. Starbuck’s is a grotesque parody of the central-European coffee house; there are few Gothic cathedrals or Baroque palaces in America; it would be relaxing to resume citizenship in a very unimportant country of eight million, as against the most powerful country in the world country in the world with 319 million. [When I occasionally visit Austria, I open a local newspaper over breakfast. Big headline: Coalition government threatened by huge scandal in Finance Ministry. I have no idea what the scandal is. I don’t care, don’t have to care. Nobody cares. Franz Grillparzer (1791-1872), famous Austrian poet – barely known outside Austria – wrote somewhere: “Denn die Groesse ist gefaehrlich”/”For greatness is dangerous”. I have been a citizen of the United States almost of my adult life. I am supposed to care about every country from Vietnam to Venezuela—just as the Pentagon has a command for every strategically important region in the world!] But I am digressing. There are good reasons for wanting to live in America: The sturdiness of its democratic institutions (despite the crimes and follies that have marked their history). The diversity of its culture and the vitality of its intellectual life. The space it allows for individuals to re-invent themselves and to create innovative enterprises (even in bureaucratized academia). The vigor of the American language and of American humor.
Having thus re-affirmed my long-standing American patriotism, I turn to the so-called first “debate” of all the 17 Republican presidential candidates, selected by fiat of the polls, as interpreted by Fox News (frequently attacked as a mouthpiece of the Republican party, for which reason the Fox interviewers were especially aggressive in their questions, to demonstrate that their nastiness is non-partisan). The event impressed me as a sort of Hollywood remake of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale of Snow White and the 17 Dwarfs . One looks anxiously for any individual who might stand out as a credible commander-in-chief and winner in a contest with Hillary Clinton, thus far standing alone as a highly miscast Snow White against the Republican circular firing squad. The candidates were divided in accordance with their respective standings in the polls: 10 putative winners performing in a packed auditorium, 7 putative losers relegated to a virtually empty space (Fox allowed no visitors to what looked like the kiddies’ party—I would think that some court would decide that this arrangement was unconstitutional since it pre-empted the choice of the electorate). It is not for me to say here who, in this formidable array, most shows signs of adulthood. I can only say that I will not dissent from the general view (non-partisan) that Donald Trump is running as Bozo the Clown. The good news is that, if one leaves aside the predictable pieces of red meat thrown to the two (not quite overlapping) core constituencies of Tea Party and Evangelicals, no one except Bozo gets a gold medal for outright lying. Though I will mention one disappointment I had—about Mike Huckabee: I rather liked him, because he was good if accompanied by a guitar and because he was believable as a person with a genuine religious commitment. But he was decidedly out of line when he implied that Obama’s Iran deal is a collusion with the Ayatollahs to lure Israelis into a new Holocaust.
Hillary, willy-nilly the Belle of the Ball, has her own need to throw red meat to core constituencies (supposedly Methodist, she must continually re-affirm that she is for abortion without limits and for exhaustive LGBT rights), and she has her own issues that require her to skirt the truth a bit (Benghazi, huge numbers of deleted emails on her illicit servers). But her main problem is more basic: Nobody likes her—not even those who intend to vote for her. Apparently she has been advised that she must show more personal warmth. She tries, keeps talking about being a grandmother. Well, we’ll see whether this will work to erase the image of an ice-cold power junkie. Thus far there is no plausible challenger. Elizabeth Warren (her Massachusetts fans call her “our fighting Cherokee senator”) is so far to the left that she is probably un-electable; Joe Biden, if he should decide to come in, has a certain problem with gravitas and a habit of putting his foot in his mouth. Yet the most intriguing candidate running as a Democrat is Bernie Sanders, independent (party-unaffiliated) senator from Vermont. He combines one electoral plus with two electoral minuses—he is Jewish (survey data show that Jews are number one on any list of most-liked people), but he is also an avowed socialist and described as “unabashedly irreligious” (these two items almost certainly make him unelectable, except maybe in a constituency of refugees from the 1960s who moved to bucolic Vermont to work in pottery and handmade jewelry). But on August 7, 2015, Religious News Service reported that Sanders has accepted to speak in September at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, the fundamentalist institution founded by Jerry Falwell and now headed by his son. The event will be at the start of the Jewish High Holidays. Sanders explained his acceptance by saying that he wants to reach out to people with whom he disagrees on many things, and that this would make him a good president. Maybe so. Survey data have also found that more Evangelicals than Jews believe that God gave the Holy Land to his chosen people. Although I do not generally give advice to political candidates, I would suggest to Sanders to be very quiet about socialism in Lynchburg, but to attend a local or nearby synagogue ostentatiously wearing a yarmulke. (Only in America!)
On August 5, 2015 President Obama, on the eve of the Republican extravaganza, made his much-awaited speech on the nuclear deal with Iran, which has yet to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate. To say that the speech was aggressive is a gross understatement. As usually oozing with hubris, Obama asserted that this was an “interim deal”, that it would be reliably verified, and that, if Iran were to cheat, “all options remain on the table” (including resumption of sanctions and, by implication, military action). He conceded that the deal was not ideal, but that the only alternative was ”some sort of war”. I, on my part, will agree that this is a very difficult situation, and that this may well be the best deal under the circumstances. But there is good reason to be skeptical about both sides. Iran has a long history of cheating on its international commitments, including promises to allow inspections of its nuclear facilities. Obama downplayed this fact. But there is also reason to be skeptical about Obama’s reaction if Iran did not abide by the deal. After the euphoria likely to be unleashed by an agreement it would be very difficult to re-impose sanctions—not only domestically, but in terms of getting Russia and China to go along. As to the “option” of military action, this threat is empty coming from the Obama administrations overriding policy of appeasement toward Russia and China, and of “no boots on the ground” (at least not American ones) in the Middle East. No gold medals for truth-telling to the Obama administration either! In his column in The New York Times on August 7, 2015, David Brooks (who has generally been rather mild in his criticisms of Obama) wrote that there have been two previous strategic defeats of the United States in Vietnam and in Iraq—and that this “partial surrender” to Iran is the third. (I think that Brooks could have added Libya, Syria and Afghanistan to this dismal list). Brit Hume, on Fox Notes, was less restrained in characterizing the Iran speech: he called it “dishonest, partisan, insulting”. However one wants to understand the deal with Iran—perhaps the best of several bad options—it is unlikely to be the jewel in the crown of Obama’s achievements in foreign policy (not to mention the record of truth-telling transparency in his administration.
I don’t want to end on a depressing note. I continue to have confidence in the future of the American experiment in democracy. In conclusion I just want to inform my readers of two new items that might interest them: 1) Pope Francis, advised by a committee of Brazilian nuns, is composing an encyclical to gays and lesbians to assure them of his deep affection. The title of the encyclical is “Carissimi tutti frutti” – loosely translated as “Beloved Fruitcakes”. 2) After giving the matter serious thought, I have accepted the invitation to serve as national chairman of “Monica Lewinski for President”.