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| A Hobby for Cynics |
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| I'm-A-Little-Hypocritical-Putting-God-In-This-AgriBill |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, June 30, 1999. People have their hobbies. Some, for example, keep track of South American bus plunge head-lines. You see them a lot: little filler notices of some bus full of villagers travelling to a distant big city, worshippers usually, plunging – always plunging – off a cliff. Hannibal Lecter, the star of Silence of the Lambs and a book devoted solely to himself this year, collects similar notifications of church collapses upon worshippers. It is proof, he says, of God’s nonexistence if the deity cruelly sends brick and mortar upon gullible people praying away in a house dedicated to himself. And you gotta admit, he has a point. I, however, collect the similar sized notifications of some religious hypocrite trying to foist his way out of a conundrum. In the Clinton years, they beggar both description and count. Today, Senator Tim Hutchinson of Arkansas, a Republican and Southern Baptist man of the cloth announced that he has filed for divorce from his wife of 29 years. Hutchinson was one of those Republicans who spoke of President Clinton as if he were a child molester or a rapist, and used Clinton as an illustrative example of what was wrong in America, our spirit and conscience. And now, Senator Hutchinson has filed for divorce. It would be too much to hope that the reason is a wife depressed and sickened by such a revolting husband, although I do not know, but it is more likely to be an admission by the hubby of an affair in the nation’s capital. We will note that not one of his Baptist friends will find fault with his actions, but will demand applause for the manly way this jerk has faced his marital difficulties. Thus he will enter that hallowed pantheon of marital immortals that includes Republican Bob Livingstone, who had to admit to numerous affairs and thus deprived us of his services as Speaker of the House, and the three times married if only once divorced in time Republican Representative Bob Barr of Louisiana, who now demands that the Ten Commandments be posted in schools so that the values which directed his life can instruct others with the same meaning and dignity. Giants, these men. And just as the Republicans now have to face the fact that Bill Clinton just ran a successful war – none more so in our history – and faced down the naysayers in his own government – and he is therefore no longer on the outs with the same military whose service they had avoided - they have to face the fact that – based on the criteria they established in their attack on President Clinton – that he is a more moral man than most, if not all, of his attackers. I need to admit, I do not know what that means, really, a "moral man," but by the superficial criteria established by these clueless creeps who are heirs to a revolting political tradition in this country. Once Democrats and Copperheads solely because they were for allowing slavery to continue. Then Dixiecrats because of Segregation, and that was the way to keep the party of Franklin Roosevelt from dismantling the Old South. And then Republican when the ultimate sleeze ball – Richard Nixon – made it okay to be a Republican again, because he wasn’t the cutting edge of social change himself. And now, these Southern Republicans – totally out of their intellectual depth in Washington – are reduced to trying to install a fake Christian morality from the top down, a morality they themselves have never lived and have no interest in living. It’s for the little people who would vote for them. Think what this hypocrisy has wrought. They should be sacrificing white goats of apology on the grave of Vince Foster, a man genuinely conflicted who took an honorable if sad way out. Led by Tom DeLay and Trent Lott, and Newt Gingrich, these horrid cesspits of ethical hypocrisy screamed with no evidence whatever that Foster had been murdered and somehow Hillary Clinton was to blame. Then, they suggested there had been an affair between the two, again with no evidence whatever. Then they tried to impeach the President, which they did, and then watched it voted down because there was no evidence of a high crime. Then, they themselves biodegrade and return to their swamps. Well, that’s my hope, anyway. To a one, all these people who claim there is a moral lapse in this country need only look to themselves for the cause, and then read history to know they are wrong. A thousand people singing hymns in the last century doesn’t mean there were a thousand people closer to God back then. It just means there wasn’t much else to do, and that lust and deceit and the fluctuations of the heart are no more prevalent now than then. We just have more ethical bean counters who don’t have any interest in tallying up their own columns. That is one penalty of the technology that has given all of us – including politicians – too much time. |
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