A Long Time Comin'

Part of something I wrote a decade ago:

...

Almost any system or hybrid can be made to work on paper. You can yoke capitalism to the plow of common good and make the fields green. You can make a socialism where the gifted and the industrious still do better by virtue of their labors. And a Jesuit with a gifted tongue and naughty turn of mind can make a friendly and receptive Atheist scream “Oh. My. God.” with such sky-rending sincerity as would make Baby Jebus smile.

Because between the angelic and bestial poles implied within James Madison’s famous quote -- "If all men were angels there would be no need laws much less for government.” – you’ll find real people.

You’ll find all of us pervy, frightened little angels with flawed intentions.

And with equal helpings of humor, discipline and reciprocity, most of us can make most systems work most of the time.

But not all of us. Not all of us.

And that is the bitter, epiphanic cup which too many of us choose to let pass on by.

Because we want to believe that there must be a better tool, a more perfect voting machine, a more compelling narrative that can be wrapped around the bare, blinding facts of Evolution which will (as I have written before) compel “Conservative Christopaths to grow opposable thumbs en masse, climb down out of the Stupid Tree and stop believing dangerously lunatic trash.”

But there isn’t.

And while all of those are perfectly good ends in themselves, there are no upgrades, patches or new releases that can bulletproof a system against the malevolent intentions of those who come with fascism burned on the board.

The predicament which faces us – which has always faced us – is predominantly a hardware, not a software problem, which is why I suspect we were never promised anything but a more perfect union.

Because no matter how elegant your solution looks in the dorm room or in the Upper Room, there will always be men who will butcher, slag and pervert any system to serve the shadows.

The Sieg-Heiliotropists who strengthen only in dark energy of Authoritarianism, and bend and breed only in the direction of the totalitarian.

Those who will deliberately claw their way to the highest offices a constitutional democracy can offer in order to better rape and raze that carefully constructed system of checks and balances

so they can build a corporate slaughterhouse on its bones.

Those who will methodically debase and pulverize one of the most radically liberal, compassionate and explicitly altruistic faiths on Earth and sift the rubble to “prove” to themselves that Christ was really --

-- a lily-white, lard-assed, illiterate, queer-hating, ‘Murrican bigot whose greatest beatitude was “Blessed are the swinishly privileged, for they shall inherit…every fucking thing”

And those who will 

cheer them on.

I believe that if you examine the long road Modern Conservatives have traveled to come to be where they are today, what you will find most striking and depressing is the degree to which their fundamental ideology has not changed one fucking iota over the centuries.

That the problem with America is not to be found in the -Ism of the Month – in what color Conservatives are choosing to paint their pulpits this generation, or which group they expeditiously choose to hate and blame for the misery of their lives.

The problem is deeper than that. Sadder than that...