politics

Wallowing In The Quagmire of Ignorance

“Personal attacks have no place in civil discourse” or so I was taught in high school by Mr. McCollister. He labeled it “Wallowing in the quagmire of ignorance.”

According to my grandfather, somewhere in scripture it says “… if you fall, don’t wallow.” His rejoinder was, “but sometimes wallowing just feels good.” I’ve found the highest expression of this philosophy in the blues.

I have yet to find the scripture he quoted but I did find this:

“Simpletons! How long will you wallow in ignorance? Cynics! How long will you feed your cynicism? Idiots! How long will you refuse to learn?” – Proverbs 1:22 (Message translation)

A less than ringing endorsement of our current level of public discourse. But there it is. Our most striking example being the very public twitter feud between our current sitting president and Senator Bob Corker. President Trump consistently degrades Corker with the appellation “liddle” and Corker famously compared Trumps Whitehouse to “an adult daycare center.”

If we’re honest about it, most of us don’t mind when someone we don’t like is personally attacked. We enjoy seeing our “enemies” brought low. TV talkshow hosts Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers (to name only a couple) do it regularly and they do it well. They make fun of Trump’s tan, Kelly Ann Conway’s hair, Sebastian Gorka’s beard. The humor is  pointed and it’s usually quite clever and it seeks to bring low those who would set themselves over us. It makes powerful people look ridiculous.

But I’m beginning to wonder if we’ve wallowed long enough. Mr. Mac used to caution that slinging barbs at one another makes us “feel good” but does little to enlighten or illuminate discussion and it closes off dialogue.

Not that people like Trump, Conway, or Gorka would be likely to listen. And talk shows are not the proscribed venues for “civic discourse”.

But the rest of us need start listening to each other if we’re going to get anywhere.

Because even though I hate to admit it, as much as I love Colbert’s monologue and as much as I agree with Corker’s assessment, I have neighbors that believe that Donald Trump is telling the God’s truth.

Random Bullet Points On Gay Marriage

 

  • Someone much smarter than me (I believe it was a gay author) once remarked that straight people don’t have an issue with gay people until they imagine what they do in bed, behind closed doors.
  • I once remarked to a rather homophobic neighbor – upon her pronouncement that “what gays do is disgusting” – that I imagined that “what many of my neighbors do in the privacy of their own homes is disgusting.” I got the oddest look.
  • Marriage is a social construct, a contract basically. An agreement by which men conducted business and transferred property (including women).
  • If you’re going to “live by the Bible” then you’ve got a whole lot more reading to do (and I say that as a practicing Christian).
  • Many (most?… all?) of the arguments against gay marriage are the same (often “Bible based”) arguments once used against blacks and whites marrying.
  • Seems to me that the bigger threats to “traditional” marriage are infidelity and economics.
  • It does seem ironic that one of the most “counter-cultural” segments of our society is now seeking the trappings traditional monogamy. But then they’re using hip hop to sell yogurt (and Cube is making the lamest beer commercials ever) and I’ve even seen my beloved P-Funk shilling mini-vans. America eats its young. 

 Originally posted here: http://tmblr.co/ZG6b4yLCi76F

Progress In The Party of Lincoln

My grandfather voted Republican for a good portion of his life. Largely, because Lincoln freed the slaves, or at least that’s how it was told to me. I imagine it had a lot to do with his experience with southern Democrats for most of his life.  They were pro slavery, pro Jim Crow, and anti practically anything that had to do with full citizenship for black people.

So I imagine the choice was pretty easy for quite a while.

Conventional wisdom has it that the Civil Rights movement changed all that. Essentially the progressive planks of the Democratic platform – and LBJ’s signing of the Civil Rights Act – sent southern Democrats, the “Dixiecrats”, into the welcoming arms of the Grand Old Party. Which says a couple of things to me. One: Race (at least in this case) trumps party affiliation. Two: In politics, winning trumps everything.

Either way, it took a lot of coaxing and cajoling to get my grandfather to change his party affiliation, even after his party changed their racial affiliation. Loyalty trumped everything for that old man.

I wonder how my grandfather would feel  about Herman Cain. A friend commented to me once that she could not see how a black person could support the Republican party. I flinched a little, recalling my grandfather’s history, and kept my own council.

I’ve always tried to give people the benefit of the doubt, at least upon first glance. This is something my mother taught me. Something she learned from my grandfather. But I don’t think the old man would be too impressed with Cain after hearing him speak for a while. I think he’d see the hypocrisy of a man claiming to be a victim of the Race card while dealing it or in a black man promising to exclude members of a minority group from his (hypothetical) cabinet because of the behavior of a few within that group. I think he’d be struck by the irony of a true carpetbagger as standard bearer for the very people who historically exploited fears for the majority with the image after Reconstruction [exhibit A: BIRTH OF A NATION]. I think my grandfather would be put off the claim, put forth by Cain, that black people who don’t support the GOP “can’t think for themselves.”

I don’t know my grandfather’s voting record after breaking his solid streak with the GOP. I do know that he voted, rain or shine, whenever the polls were opened. I wish he could see what’s become of his once beloved, GOP. I wonder if he’d count it as progress.