Suffah

And Sarah Palin is the distilled essence of wingnut. She has it all. She is dishonest. She is a religious nut. She is incurious. She is anti-science. She is inexperienced. She abuses her authority. She hides behind executive privilege. She is a big spender. She works from the gut and places a greater value on instinct than knowledge.

-John Cole

Does this seem to you to be the distilled essence of a "wingnut," or, rather, does it seem to you to be the description of a very large portion of the American population? Religious, incurious, discomfited by natural science, narrow in the range of their personal experiences, abusive of their authority (i.e. in the workplace) but unwilling to accept responsibility for the consequences of their decisions, impulsive and instinctive rather than methodical and rational, preferring "common sense" and simple truths to acquired knowledge and reasoning. To me, it sounds like my best friend's mother, my mother's boss, many of my coworkers, most of my neighbors. It describes the "average" residents of York, PA.

While the Obama campaign somnambulates through a series of vague, high-minded appeals to the better angels of human nature, the McCain campaign offers Americans targets for their anger and anxiety. It serves up a gallery of treasonous leftists, crypto-socialists, and Muslim terrorists, who are to blame. For what? For whatever.

Look. The American consumer. If you're merely one more disposable unite of an Ouroboran, self-recycling economy of purchase and disposal, why do you need reason, science, history, cultural literacy, a sense of social continuity, a mutual and reciprocal investment in your lived community, a connection to the land . . . less yet a set of values that include austerity, judiciousness, thrift, candor, honesty, trustworthiness, and self-reliance. These are all values that are absolutely inimical to the political economy of our empire. Contra Progressive hand-wringing, the pig-ignorance of the American people doesn't represent a failure of the American education system, but rather its success. It produces exactly what it's designed and intended to produce.

People suppose that because Americans are Jesus-besotted and express priggish attitudes to priests and polsters, ergo we remain some sort of Puritanical nation. This opinion in particular infects the Europeans whom I know, despite all evidence of their eyes and ears. In fact we've become a deeply, deeply decadent people. The supposed proliferation of "fundamentalist" religion is really just a proliferation of devotional cults, and you must ask yourself: if Sarah Palin, for instance, is such a "religious nut," then why is she parading around in a bikini and plastering herself with makeup in direct contravention of biblical injunctions about modesty and humility? (Note: as pointed out in comments, this is not precisely true. Har-dee-har. The lack of modesty and humility stand.) Our modern sects are not actually Christian religions. They've simply appropriated Christian forms in the same way the early Christians appropriated the various pagan forms of the Mediterranean and Near East.

The cure for decadence is hardship, and callous as it sounds, the problem with America, pace Hope and Change, isn't that people are suffering, but that they're not suffering enough.