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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.)