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oselleThe most staunchly Republican states in America rank the lowest in standard of living. They have the worst health care performance. The lowest minimum-wage salaries allowable by law. The worst working conditions. The poorest education performance. The highest murder rates. The highest divorce rates. The most out-of-wedlock births. The most teenage mothers. In fact:
In my darkest, most conspiracy theory-prone moments, I think that the conservative religious fanatics in this country truly believe that if they reduce people to a state of constant desperation, if they take everything away from them -- health, education, dignified labor, financial security -- then people will have no choice but to turn to God, and they would see this as a good thing. But faith that is born from hopelessness is a mean and vicious sort of faith, and a society based upon such faith is a terrible, degraded, inhumane place to live.
The countries with the highest standards of living do have a more secular character, while the poorest and most backward nations tend to be places where religion flourishes. Desperation will always make people turn to religion because where else can they possibly look for hope? Desperation also makes people turn to superstition and religious fanaticism as a way to impose some sort, any sort of control upon their lives. If I pray to this god the crops won't fail...if I make this sacrifice my child will live...if I burn just the right witch... Well, you get the picture.
I think desperate faith is something that's especially easy to achieve where matters of health are concerned. You know, sometimes I kick back and watch a little 700 Club. No really, I do. At the end of each show, the hosts pray for people whose illnesses they've apparently seen or perceived in visions sent by God. One of them (actually I've only ever seen Gordon have the vision) will close his eyes and say something like, "I'm seeing a lady out there with some sort of spinal problem...something wrong with one of her disks..." And then Gordon and Terry will pray together and say that God's healing power is coming to that lady right now. Whenever I see this, I think how much power you can gain over a person by leading them to believe that their health or freedom from chronic pain or even their very existence depends upon prayer and ritual...not upon the objective and unbiased realities of good medical care. I'm not discounting the psychological aspect of health here, you understand, but I am saying that it's very easy to reduce people to a dependency upon God if they have no other hope of being well. And that's when I begin to wonder if that's what the religious conservatives really want -- dependency upon God. Desperate faith.
On a slightly different note, but still on the theme of desperation, I read the most fascinating article in The New Yorker about Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House books and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane. If you cherish the Little House mythos (which I know many people do) you might want to stop reading right now.
I never read the books but I certainly sat through enough of the 1970s television series to know that what Wilder created was a highly idealized depiction of frontier life -- a world of hardy settlers, loving families and close-knit communities united by the common bonds of devotion to family, country and God. The truth is that the Ingallses lived hard and poor, moved around the country by a restless father who didn't seem to enjoy staying in one place for very long. Among the children, only Laura was really healthy, and their mother took charge of everything from child care to hard physical labor while their father sometimes disappeared for days at a time in search of ways to eke out a meager living.
Their frontier lifestyle was marked not only by hardship but by the kind of racism so commonplace during those times that I don't think the term or even the concept existed. At one point in the Ingalls family history, Pa decided to homestead on land that the Federal Government had given in treaty to the Osage Indians -- in other words, they illegally squatted on someone else's property. When the Feds show up to clear off the Ingallses and the other white homesteaders, Pa Ingalls is, of course furious, raging against "the blasted politicians in Washington" who have "betrayed" them. In an early edition of one of the books, Ingalls wrote, "There were no people...only Indians lived there." (The passage was later changed to read, "There were no settlers.")
Laura Ingalls married Almanzo Wilder when she was eighteen. The Wilders basically lived in near destitution and constant hardship. Rose, their only surviving child, left home and eventually became a writer (she co-wrote the Little House books with her mother) and a sort of globe-trotting bohemian who had a deeply dysfunctional and co-dependent relationship with her mother and who was also a staunch libertarian, decrying Franklin Roosevelt as a "dictator" whom she hoped would be assassinated a year after his election. She also flirted with socialism and communism, but always came back to her love of "liberty," i.e. freedom from governmental authority. An essay named "Credo" that Rose Wilder Lane published in 1936, promoted, "...a quasi-anarchic democracy, with minimal taxes, limited government, and no entitlements, regulated only by the principle of personal responsibility."
What really caught my eye in this fascinating article was a statement made by Laura Ingalls Wilder to a Republican congressman: "What we accomplished was without help of any kind, from anyone."
This is to some extent true but is also something of a frontier fantasy. As the author of the article explains, "...the Ingallses, like all pioneers, were dependent, to some degree, on the railroads; on taxpayer-financed schools...on credit—which is to say, the savings of their fellow-citizens; on “boughten” supplies they couldn’t make or grow; and, most of all, on the federal government, which had cleared their land of its previous owners."
However, this fantasy of absolute self-sufficiency in the face of grinding hardship is ingrained and celebrated in the American character...and I think it's led to the sort of malicious fuck-youism that we see in so much conservative ideology. It's desperation all over again but now it's payback time -- the mindset of people like Wilder and Lane who led miserable lives because they had or believe they had "no help of any kind" is that other people should be miserable too. No one ever helped ME, why should I help anyone?
Not only is this a decidedly unchristian attitude, but it's also spiteful, vicious ignorance masquerading as a sort of patriotic independence and fortitude. It's the ugly fruit of desperation -- willing suffering on others because you suffered. And yet this is a cornerstone of the conservative ideal. The author of the New Yorker article concludes:
(The full text of the New Yorker article is here....but I think it'll be up on the site this week only, and then be available only to subscribers or for a fee.)
"By almost any measure of societal breakdown that so-called Republican "values voters" decry, it is Red State America where moral failure is greatest."In contrast, the states that rank the highest in these areas are the "blue" or Democratic states.
In my darkest, most conspiracy theory-prone moments, I think that the conservative religious fanatics in this country truly believe that if they reduce people to a state of constant desperation, if they take everything away from them -- health, education, dignified labor, financial security -- then people will have no choice but to turn to God, and they would see this as a good thing. But faith that is born from hopelessness is a mean and vicious sort of faith, and a society based upon such faith is a terrible, degraded, inhumane place to live.
The countries with the highest standards of living do have a more secular character, while the poorest and most backward nations tend to be places where religion flourishes. Desperation will always make people turn to religion because where else can they possibly look for hope? Desperation also makes people turn to superstition and religious fanaticism as a way to impose some sort, any sort of control upon their lives. If I pray to this god the crops won't fail...if I make this sacrifice my child will live...if I burn just the right witch... Well, you get the picture.
I think desperate faith is something that's especially easy to achieve where matters of health are concerned. You know, sometimes I kick back and watch a little 700 Club. No really, I do. At the end of each show, the hosts pray for people whose illnesses they've apparently seen or perceived in visions sent by God. One of them (actually I've only ever seen Gordon have the vision) will close his eyes and say something like, "I'm seeing a lady out there with some sort of spinal problem...something wrong with one of her disks..." And then Gordon and Terry will pray together and say that God's healing power is coming to that lady right now. Whenever I see this, I think how much power you can gain over a person by leading them to believe that their health or freedom from chronic pain or even their very existence depends upon prayer and ritual...not upon the objective and unbiased realities of good medical care. I'm not discounting the psychological aspect of health here, you understand, but I am saying that it's very easy to reduce people to a dependency upon God if they have no other hope of being well. And that's when I begin to wonder if that's what the religious conservatives really want -- dependency upon God. Desperate faith.
On a slightly different note, but still on the theme of desperation, I read the most fascinating article in The New Yorker about Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House books and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane. If you cherish the Little House mythos (which I know many people do) you might want to stop reading right now.
I never read the books but I certainly sat through enough of the 1970s television series to know that what Wilder created was a highly idealized depiction of frontier life -- a world of hardy settlers, loving families and close-knit communities united by the common bonds of devotion to family, country and God. The truth is that the Ingallses lived hard and poor, moved around the country by a restless father who didn't seem to enjoy staying in one place for very long. Among the children, only Laura was really healthy, and their mother took charge of everything from child care to hard physical labor while their father sometimes disappeared for days at a time in search of ways to eke out a meager living.
Their frontier lifestyle was marked not only by hardship but by the kind of racism so commonplace during those times that I don't think the term or even the concept existed. At one point in the Ingalls family history, Pa decided to homestead on land that the Federal Government had given in treaty to the Osage Indians -- in other words, they illegally squatted on someone else's property. When the Feds show up to clear off the Ingallses and the other white homesteaders, Pa Ingalls is, of course furious, raging against "the blasted politicians in Washington" who have "betrayed" them. In an early edition of one of the books, Ingalls wrote, "There were no people...only Indians lived there." (The passage was later changed to read, "There were no settlers.")
Laura Ingalls married Almanzo Wilder when she was eighteen. The Wilders basically lived in near destitution and constant hardship. Rose, their only surviving child, left home and eventually became a writer (she co-wrote the Little House books with her mother) and a sort of globe-trotting bohemian who had a deeply dysfunctional and co-dependent relationship with her mother and who was also a staunch libertarian, decrying Franklin Roosevelt as a "dictator" whom she hoped would be assassinated a year after his election. She also flirted with socialism and communism, but always came back to her love of "liberty," i.e. freedom from governmental authority. An essay named "Credo" that Rose Wilder Lane published in 1936, promoted, "...a quasi-anarchic democracy, with minimal taxes, limited government, and no entitlements, regulated only by the principle of personal responsibility."
What really caught my eye in this fascinating article was a statement made by Laura Ingalls Wilder to a Republican congressman: "What we accomplished was without help of any kind, from anyone."
This is to some extent true but is also something of a frontier fantasy. As the author of the article explains, "...the Ingallses, like all pioneers, were dependent, to some degree, on the railroads; on taxpayer-financed schools...on credit—which is to say, the savings of their fellow-citizens; on “boughten” supplies they couldn’t make or grow; and, most of all, on the federal government, which had cleared their land of its previous owners."
However, this fantasy of absolute self-sufficiency in the face of grinding hardship is ingrained and celebrated in the American character...and I think it's led to the sort of malicious fuck-youism that we see in so much conservative ideology. It's desperation all over again but now it's payback time -- the mindset of people like Wilder and Lane who led miserable lives because they had or believe they had "no help of any kind" is that other people should be miserable too. No one ever helped ME, why should I help anyone?
Not only is this a decidedly unchristian attitude, but it's also spiteful, vicious ignorance masquerading as a sort of patriotic independence and fortitude. It's the ugly fruit of desperation -- willing suffering on others because you suffered. And yet this is a cornerstone of the conservative ideal. The author of the New Yorker article concludes:
"Last June, Anita Clair Fellman, a professor emerita of history at Old Dominion University, in Norfolk, Virginia, published “Little House, Long Shadow,” a survey of the Wilders’ “core” beliefs, and of their influence on American political culture. Two streams of conservatism, she argues -- not in themselves inherently compatible -- converge in the series. One is Lane’s libertarianism, and the other is Wilder’s image of a poster family for Republican “value voters”: a devoted couple of Christian patriots and their unspoiled children; the father a heroic provider and benign disciplinarian, the mother a pious homemaker and an example of feminine self-sacrifice...Fellman concludes, 'The popularity of the Little House books . . . helped create a constituency for politicians like Reagan who sought to unsettle the so-called liberal consensus established by New Deal politics.' Considering the outcome of the November election, and the present debacle of laissez-faire capitalism, that popularity may have peaked. On the other hand, it may not have. Hard times whet the appetite for survival stories."Survival. Superstition. Desperation. Conservatism. Only in America.
(The full text of the New Yorker article is here....but I think it'll be up on the site this week only, and then be available only to subscribers or for a fee.)
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no subject
Date: 2009-08-12 03:13 am (UTC)This is exactly what the religious cons want. They think anyone who isn't saved is "of the world," which = bad. You are supposed to be caught up in a religious mysticism at all times, with no thoughts for "worldly" things like movies, food, or fun. In extreme cases, dancing or wearing pants = "worldly."
Faith should come from a place of strength, not desperation. Wearing a hair shirt and rending your garments doesn't prove you love God more than your neighbor who is out at a club on Friday night. It's all about the show for the true fundies, though they will deny it to their last breath.
Btw, I'm really enjoying this latest series of posts. Very thought-provoking.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-12 03:28 am (UTC)I'm only writing this stuff because I think the conservative movement, especially the religious aspect of it, is such a multi-layered swamp of pernicious crazy that I'm really trying to make some sense of it. Glad you're enjoying.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-12 03:32 am (UTC)And unfortunately (for me) that just goes away, like it's a brief outburst of grief and presumably he accepts things, but it made me think of how this original nice idea of having a god to look to when you have nothing else because this totally oppressive force.
Also, I totally read that article too! (But mostly I love the TV show because it's so crazy.) And I totally remember that ending. And also Pa Ingalls' claiming that the government betrayed them is just so familiar--I stole someone else's land, but no matter what happens, I'm the victim here.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-12 03:42 am (UTC)I stole someone else's land, but no matter what happens, I'm the victim here.
They just didn't see the Native Americans as being people at all -- the notion that you could "steal" anything from them was ridiculous to most white people in the Ingallses time. You could no more "steal" land from them than you could from a cow or a dog. It really gives you pause to think how the brutal racism of those times has been whitewashed (no pun intended) into a sunny fantasy of noble pioneers.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-12 03:54 am (UTC)And it's just like...so basically, you're taking credit for the pain and suffering because God did it to force someone to be religious. Great! Especially when you never give a thought to the other people in the accident/disaster who tied.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-12 04:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-12 04:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-14 03:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-12 01:08 pm (UTC)I find The part about the people who claim to live "without help of any kind, from anyone" especially interesting. I know quite a few republicans, yet I completely don't understand how they can actually justify that they are republicans. Many work for the state, or federal government. I frequently want to scream "Do You like your job?". Republicans always talk about smaller government(though they don't actually follow through, but, that is another subject). Some of my relatives have jobs that seem the republican definition of wasteful spending. Do they not realize the Republicans are talking about cutting them? Yet, will completely talk about how they do not support any of the democrats plans or programs, and they love the republicans. They are completely fooled into thinking that something will be taken away from them if other people have access to healthcare.
I completely don't get it. They get government healthcare. They get it Because they work for the government. Everyone else who works full time for a small business must be a bum. They must somehow be lazy and this justifies their lack of healthcare. It makes me so mad.
I had even more to say, but I realized I rambled quite a bit already. Thank you for your interesting and well thought out posts.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-14 03:00 am (UTC)Just a couple of weeks ago some Republican Congressman (practicing that "compassionate conservatism" we've all heard about) told some woman that if she wanted the same kind of healthcare he had, she "just" had to go work for the government. OK cool. Can the government employ the whole country then?
The whole "nobody ever gave me nothing" shtick is pure delusional bullshit. Just look at Wilder's daughter -- how the fuck would she ever have become a writer and a world traveler and a libertarian pundit without the FREE EDUCATION that she got from the GOVERNMENT PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM? She'd have been knocked up and spewing out babies there in the Ozarks instead of spewing her conservative no-government fever fantasies.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-12 01:45 pm (UTC)I'd like to defend Laura a little bit. I guess I'm going to sound conservative here, but I don't want to judge people of the 1880's by 2000 standards. Indians were known only by stories of scalping. Sex roles were defined by physical differences. They didn't know about germs.
The books are definitely edited to show mostly good parts, but life in general sucked. The last book, The First Four Years, is unedited and therefore depressing.) The books don't dwell on religion. The family goes to church when they can, and once walked out in the middle of the revival. That's about it. There is some double-think on racism. The town throws a vaudeville show mocking "darkies," but they have no trouble accepting medical treatment from a black doctor when they all contract malaria.
To be fair to Laura, she has a little feminism in her. She refused to say "obey" in her marriage vow to Almanzo. (Almanzo agreed with her.) They do, however, display the usual libertarian hypocrisy, although I'm not sure if they are aware of it.
OKAY, that said, that was the 1880's. There is NO excuse for people of today to still have such attitudes. We all know that scarlet fever is caused by germs, not God's will. Women can operate a computer (or forklift, or what-have-you) just as well as men, etc.
The so-called values that kept people alive a hundred years ago just don't apply today. We don't need them. But that doesn't stop conservatives from exploiting the past to extend their dominion, now does it? Nowhere was that more blatent than in that god-awful TV-show, which had nothing to do with the books. I could barely watch the TV for its sledgehammer moralizing.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-13 12:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-14 02:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-13 02:19 am (UTC)The Little House mythology has been adopted by modern conservatives who no doubt see themselves as the inheritors and standard bearers of the hardy frontier spirit embodied by the Ingallses. Is that Wilder's fault? Not entirely, but her late-in-life thinking about not having any help from anyone sound, to me, like the usual conservative blather about self-reliance and personal responsibility and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and we don't need no stinkin guvmint to help us. Frankly, it sounds like both the Ingalls and the Wilder clans could have USED some help, if only to keep little Rose's teeth from rotting out of sheer malnutrition.
Now Rose, IMO, is just an utter psychological train wreck, turning her resentment of her mother into resentment of a "mommy state" that she imagined she saw in Roosevelt and the New Deal Democrats. There's nothing about Rose's ideology that seems to be anything more than pure spite and bitterness -- and yet in typical conservative (or "libertarian" if you will) hypocrisy she loathes the very government that enabled her to get an education and escape the destitution and desperation that she would have been condemned to in her own no-taxation, limited-government fantasy world. I've developed such a loathing for this sort of thinking that frankly, I don't care whether it's set in 1880 or 1936 or 2009 -- it's all and always bullshit.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-13 04:32 pm (UTC)Sometimes I amuse myself reading the TWOP board for the show, aptly titled: Little House on the Praire: Ma, Pa and that Mime that Raped Sylvia.
no subject
Date: 2009-08-14 02:53 am (UTC)