Political Ditches
27/August/2008 10:26 Filed in: Weekly Column
Volume 10, Issue 34
PDF copy
A few weeks ago I was reading one of my daily news and commentary emails. The author set the path before us, stating the fact that now that he had the nomination Barack Obama was moving to the center from the political left. In contrast John McCain was moving to the right to try and encourage the conservative base of the Republican Party. The conclusion drawn by the author was essentially, isn’t this American two party system grand. The two party system is what made America the greatest country in history.
That was pretty poor logic. I would long to vote for someone for President (or other political office) that I thought really believed in something, which wasn't created spin, tested in focus groups, or run through the political machine.
I watched about 30 seconds of Michelle Obama’s speech Monday night in Denver. What I got out of it was that the words were carefully and professionally crafted not to say anything that anyone might find offensive, anywhere. Secondly she wasn’t very good at reading a teleprompter, and finally the height of the podium was absurd. It wasn’t high enough to lend her a semblance of authority, nor was it low enough or small enough to connect with the people.
Hello! Is there a real person up there, or a robot just going through the motions? From just her every day demeanor, Michelle Obama seems like a strong and intelligent woman, too bad she wasn’t speaking Monday evening.
America’s wonderful two party system has now become a completely rigged political process, so that a truly normal person, not only is not represented by his or her government, there is no way that you can do anything about it. Now that is not a great way to run a democracy, or even a fascist state.
There is no room for a broad highway of consensus, not even a straight and narrow path to the future. All we have is two deep and foreboding ditches, the far left and far right, and not even a cleared path into the future. The old road that brought American and western culture to the zenith of human civilization has been abandoned, the asphalt or concrete ripped up and now weeds and brush have taken root.
The old saying of “My way, or the highway,” now has become “My way, or no way,” as the “my” has become the political party machines. The problem is that “my” has no reality basis in either you or me.
On Tuesday night Hillary’s standard Democrat rhetoric, excellently delivered, filled the left ditch with her descriptions of her accomplishments. It was interesting watching husband Bill’s reactions, he seemed truly moved by the whole affair, which he should be, but many of us presumed wasn’t really in the man. After Bill speaks tonight, I doubt that there will be much space left in that left ditch for Barack to add much without substance.
So what will Obama speak to in his Thursday revival speech, if there is no room available in the ditch for words without substance? That is why he wants the Presidential challenge, but I doubt further superlative nothing emotionalism, will carry him toward much of a post convention bounce in the polls.
Next week in the Republican convention we will hear pretty much the same type of discussion as they attempt to fill up the political right ditch with their programs of material prosperity by continuing the modern American dream of more and more toys without substance. So the suspense may focus upon just how well John McCain can use the teleprompter during his acceptance speech.
There is really no way in the currently configured American political system to vote for none of the above. In the last century there were times when minority or third party candidates could appeal somewhat to a centrist position, but this time around those candidates are farther out in the ditches than either party.
So for some broad highway or narrow path center spin, by yours truly.
If you look at human political thought as a statistical distribution, Americans tend to be generally slightly more conservative than the true central position. Without getting into real statistics you would probably say that this means that the distribution is not normal in the statistical sense, but then again the statistics may be right and it is that our descriptions of liberal and conservative that are amiss.
Anyway, however you determine the reality, the vast majority of Americans are not part of the political process, because neither party represents their views. As we wrote about last week, all we have is a choice of again an eschewed polar distribution of Agenda Panaceas, which all offer hope but little sound substance. The reason for all this is Agenda Panaceas are where the money is collected and spent. In special rights promotion is where “those guys” fund their hair brain ideas.
To make matters worse the judiciary has extended the preexisting special rights of corporations to political parties. Therefore, we in Washington State were forced to change our blanket primary system, which served the state well for over a century, because the major political parties gained rights superior to those of the individual.
Now for a short period of time we have an initiative enacted primary system where we may have the top two finishers for each office face off in the general election regardless of political party. I watched on television this summer as the Republican Party chairman in Washington State boasted about his diligent work to get this statute overturned by judicial litigation.
In that light, if those who claim to represent the conservative rights of the individual are so blatantly fascist, there is really no hope for our republican form of government without some major stupendous change in either people or the political environment.
If special rights are created ex nihilo, by the courts for political parties, it is no wonder why we have created special rights for other groups, giving legal standing for not even formal organizations but generalized movements at the extremes of the political spectrum.
For the next couple of months the political spin will in someway say power to the people, but what the spin is really trying to accomplish is to divide and conquer. In that way authority rules essentially without power, but those in authority really don’t care, they have their place, and really have no concept of true leadership.
Last week we used the common grace concept of freedom and liberty as the power words of leadership. What little I have actually watched of the Democrat convention, I have heard the term leadership broadcast around, but none of that related to those old fashioned American terms of freedom and liberty.
Especially in this convention the term leadership has been incredibly silent even about the qualifications and experience for leadership of their nominee. If anything gets close to questioning those qualifications the race factor is applied. Which means in its simple form that we must elect a half-black President so that we can say that the last 50 some years of affirmative action worked. I wish it were that simple and the rest of the world believed in that reality.
Now the real answer to what is wrong with this country is that the American religion is broken. Moral therapeutic deism when contrasted with religious revivalism suffers from the same ditches mentality, as do our political parties. Truthfully the answer to all of American and the world’s problems is Jesus. The problem is finding the Jesus of the Bible, or the Word of creation, in what passes for organized American Christianity, thus making Christianity just another organized religion among many.
Therefore if you define yourself as a good person in either Christian ditch you will be either a Republican or a Democrat and as such you will find your brothers and sisters not only in your particular brand of church but also in your particular brand of politics. They are all the same because religion is American politics and the converse is also true.
What is missing in all this is any frame of reference outside yourself or your religious community. We don’t smoke and we don’t chew, and we don’t go with girls or anyone outside our comfortable religion because they make us feel uncomfortable. They should because that is why they were created. The diversity in this world was created and maintained to provide a position for our unique individuality, but also to help us understand that the ability to become the person you can and should be, also rests external to your, or your community’s wishful thinking.
This is the rub, everything is cool in the ditches until someone walking the narrow path between the ditches calls out, “What are you doing in the ditch, come out and be free from what keeps you in the muck?”
Human beings, since they were created in the image of God, inherently understand that freedom. The problem is that they are too insecure in themselves to trust God. This brings us into reality of both God’s grace and our resistance to that grace.
The difficulty is that are human ditches in politics and religion are a product of the Enlightenment. As such, external absolutes outside human reason do not exist, at least that is the enlightenment definition. It is that irrational reasoning that has created such a narrow path with such deep and broad ditches into the American future.
So using Augustine’s City of God and City of Man analogy, nothing is going to change as long as the City of God is content to live as an extension of the City of Man.
True Christianity rests not on the wisdom of man but the free gift of God’s external gift of grace through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in the Holy Land two thousand years ago. This is what Jesus did. What Jesus would do is really not at all relevant to the discussion, because our morality does not save us from the power of death and the eternal nature of hell. That is not my statement, this is the claim that Jesus made for himself, you accept that as a gift of grace or not.
There are two possibilities of the nature of Jesus of Nazareth, either He is who he claimed to be, the Son of God, or he was a mad man. The reality of Jesus as a moral teacher is a broad ditch theology, probably equally shared by both Democrats and Republicans.
Freedom and liberty, all the Founding Fathers of the American Republic realized can only become a reality if they are anchored within the context of Biblical absolutes. Now you can turn most of these people into devout Christians if you would like, but most of them were just not all that different than today’s evangelical, in Christian doctrines. What they did realize however was that a free country could not continue without absolute standards external to human reason.
So continue to watch, if you can, the remaining ditch enhancement techniques of the enlightened political party conventions. What you will notice either directly, or indirectly, and in the news that will bombard you on all fronts, is the supremacy of human capacity of either party.
Someone with an external paradigm of rationality need not, or better not upset the insanity, because someone with that perspective will be able to separate the nuts from the bolts. Once that is done there lies a possibility to design some sort of device to leave the crazies in the ditch and move political reality to where most of the people, live, work, and raise their families.
We live in a great time of stupendous change; the Enlightenment paradigm of human wisdom is being weighed in the eternal balance of God’s sovereignty and found wanting. Until we again recognize not only the existence of God, but his specific revelation, directly linked to the gospel of Jesus Christ crucified and resurrected on the third day, our ditch building vanity will continue.
Welcome to the 21st century. Too bad we had to wait eight years to get here and borrow bus fare to get to these conventions, then find out that no one bothered to fund the infrastructure to get us out of the bus station, for they were too busy making sure all that money drained into the ditches on the sides of the bus route.
PDF copy
A few weeks ago I was reading one of my daily news and commentary emails. The author set the path before us, stating the fact that now that he had the nomination Barack Obama was moving to the center from the political left. In contrast John McCain was moving to the right to try and encourage the conservative base of the Republican Party. The conclusion drawn by the author was essentially, isn’t this American two party system grand. The two party system is what made America the greatest country in history.
That was pretty poor logic. I would long to vote for someone for President (or other political office) that I thought really believed in something, which wasn't created spin, tested in focus groups, or run through the political machine.
I watched about 30 seconds of Michelle Obama’s speech Monday night in Denver. What I got out of it was that the words were carefully and professionally crafted not to say anything that anyone might find offensive, anywhere. Secondly she wasn’t very good at reading a teleprompter, and finally the height of the podium was absurd. It wasn’t high enough to lend her a semblance of authority, nor was it low enough or small enough to connect with the people.
Hello! Is there a real person up there, or a robot just going through the motions? From just her every day demeanor, Michelle Obama seems like a strong and intelligent woman, too bad she wasn’t speaking Monday evening.
America’s wonderful two party system has now become a completely rigged political process, so that a truly normal person, not only is not represented by his or her government, there is no way that you can do anything about it. Now that is not a great way to run a democracy, or even a fascist state.
There is no room for a broad highway of consensus, not even a straight and narrow path to the future. All we have is two deep and foreboding ditches, the far left and far right, and not even a cleared path into the future. The old road that brought American and western culture to the zenith of human civilization has been abandoned, the asphalt or concrete ripped up and now weeds and brush have taken root.
The old saying of “My way, or the highway,” now has become “My way, or no way,” as the “my” has become the political party machines. The problem is that “my” has no reality basis in either you or me.
On Tuesday night Hillary’s standard Democrat rhetoric, excellently delivered, filled the left ditch with her descriptions of her accomplishments. It was interesting watching husband Bill’s reactions, he seemed truly moved by the whole affair, which he should be, but many of us presumed wasn’t really in the man. After Bill speaks tonight, I doubt that there will be much space left in that left ditch for Barack to add much without substance.
So what will Obama speak to in his Thursday revival speech, if there is no room available in the ditch for words without substance? That is why he wants the Presidential challenge, but I doubt further superlative nothing emotionalism, will carry him toward much of a post convention bounce in the polls.
Next week in the Republican convention we will hear pretty much the same type of discussion as they attempt to fill up the political right ditch with their programs of material prosperity by continuing the modern American dream of more and more toys without substance. So the suspense may focus upon just how well John McCain can use the teleprompter during his acceptance speech.
There is really no way in the currently configured American political system to vote for none of the above. In the last century there were times when minority or third party candidates could appeal somewhat to a centrist position, but this time around those candidates are farther out in the ditches than either party.
So for some broad highway or narrow path center spin, by yours truly.
If you look at human political thought as a statistical distribution, Americans tend to be generally slightly more conservative than the true central position. Without getting into real statistics you would probably say that this means that the distribution is not normal in the statistical sense, but then again the statistics may be right and it is that our descriptions of liberal and conservative that are amiss.
Anyway, however you determine the reality, the vast majority of Americans are not part of the political process, because neither party represents their views. As we wrote about last week, all we have is a choice of again an eschewed polar distribution of Agenda Panaceas, which all offer hope but little sound substance. The reason for all this is Agenda Panaceas are where the money is collected and spent. In special rights promotion is where “those guys” fund their hair brain ideas.
To make matters worse the judiciary has extended the preexisting special rights of corporations to political parties. Therefore, we in Washington State were forced to change our blanket primary system, which served the state well for over a century, because the major political parties gained rights superior to those of the individual.
Now for a short period of time we have an initiative enacted primary system where we may have the top two finishers for each office face off in the general election regardless of political party. I watched on television this summer as the Republican Party chairman in Washington State boasted about his diligent work to get this statute overturned by judicial litigation.
In that light, if those who claim to represent the conservative rights of the individual are so blatantly fascist, there is really no hope for our republican form of government without some major stupendous change in either people or the political environment.
If special rights are created ex nihilo, by the courts for political parties, it is no wonder why we have created special rights for other groups, giving legal standing for not even formal organizations but generalized movements at the extremes of the political spectrum.
For the next couple of months the political spin will in someway say power to the people, but what the spin is really trying to accomplish is to divide and conquer. In that way authority rules essentially without power, but those in authority really don’t care, they have their place, and really have no concept of true leadership.
Last week we used the common grace concept of freedom and liberty as the power words of leadership. What little I have actually watched of the Democrat convention, I have heard the term leadership broadcast around, but none of that related to those old fashioned American terms of freedom and liberty.
Especially in this convention the term leadership has been incredibly silent even about the qualifications and experience for leadership of their nominee. If anything gets close to questioning those qualifications the race factor is applied. Which means in its simple form that we must elect a half-black President so that we can say that the last 50 some years of affirmative action worked. I wish it were that simple and the rest of the world believed in that reality.
Now the real answer to what is wrong with this country is that the American religion is broken. Moral therapeutic deism when contrasted with religious revivalism suffers from the same ditches mentality, as do our political parties. Truthfully the answer to all of American and the world’s problems is Jesus. The problem is finding the Jesus of the Bible, or the Word of creation, in what passes for organized American Christianity, thus making Christianity just another organized religion among many.
Therefore if you define yourself as a good person in either Christian ditch you will be either a Republican or a Democrat and as such you will find your brothers and sisters not only in your particular brand of church but also in your particular brand of politics. They are all the same because religion is American politics and the converse is also true.
What is missing in all this is any frame of reference outside yourself or your religious community. We don’t smoke and we don’t chew, and we don’t go with girls or anyone outside our comfortable religion because they make us feel uncomfortable. They should because that is why they were created. The diversity in this world was created and maintained to provide a position for our unique individuality, but also to help us understand that the ability to become the person you can and should be, also rests external to your, or your community’s wishful thinking.
This is the rub, everything is cool in the ditches until someone walking the narrow path between the ditches calls out, “What are you doing in the ditch, come out and be free from what keeps you in the muck?”
Human beings, since they were created in the image of God, inherently understand that freedom. The problem is that they are too insecure in themselves to trust God. This brings us into reality of both God’s grace and our resistance to that grace.
The difficulty is that are human ditches in politics and religion are a product of the Enlightenment. As such, external absolutes outside human reason do not exist, at least that is the enlightenment definition. It is that irrational reasoning that has created such a narrow path with such deep and broad ditches into the American future.
So using Augustine’s City of God and City of Man analogy, nothing is going to change as long as the City of God is content to live as an extension of the City of Man.
True Christianity rests not on the wisdom of man but the free gift of God’s external gift of grace through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in the Holy Land two thousand years ago. This is what Jesus did. What Jesus would do is really not at all relevant to the discussion, because our morality does not save us from the power of death and the eternal nature of hell. That is not my statement, this is the claim that Jesus made for himself, you accept that as a gift of grace or not.
There are two possibilities of the nature of Jesus of Nazareth, either He is who he claimed to be, the Son of God, or he was a mad man. The reality of Jesus as a moral teacher is a broad ditch theology, probably equally shared by both Democrats and Republicans.
Freedom and liberty, all the Founding Fathers of the American Republic realized can only become a reality if they are anchored within the context of Biblical absolutes. Now you can turn most of these people into devout Christians if you would like, but most of them were just not all that different than today’s evangelical, in Christian doctrines. What they did realize however was that a free country could not continue without absolute standards external to human reason.
So continue to watch, if you can, the remaining ditch enhancement techniques of the enlightened political party conventions. What you will notice either directly, or indirectly, and in the news that will bombard you on all fronts, is the supremacy of human capacity of either party.
Someone with an external paradigm of rationality need not, or better not upset the insanity, because someone with that perspective will be able to separate the nuts from the bolts. Once that is done there lies a possibility to design some sort of device to leave the crazies in the ditch and move political reality to where most of the people, live, work, and raise their families.
We live in a great time of stupendous change; the Enlightenment paradigm of human wisdom is being weighed in the eternal balance of God’s sovereignty and found wanting. Until we again recognize not only the existence of God, but his specific revelation, directly linked to the gospel of Jesus Christ crucified and resurrected on the third day, our ditch building vanity will continue.
Welcome to the 21st century. Too bad we had to wait eight years to get here and borrow bus fare to get to these conventions, then find out that no one bothered to fund the infrastructure to get us out of the bus station, for they were too busy making sure all that money drained into the ditches on the sides of the bus route.