Holy Blood, Holy Fail

Obviously my interest in politics is somewhat exhausted of late.  Well, there's the garden to tend to, dinners to prepare, a stubbornly unfinished piece of fiction that I have determined to complete before year's end, and the incipient, inchoate sense that maybe this year I will actually train for and ride in the Dirty Dozen rather than just talking about it.  Ceci dit, everyonceinawhile, a piece of election-year thanksralphery appears that is so numbingly holy, so dripping with a humorless martial piety gone off to war with the purportedly greater piety of its imagine fundamentalist enemies, that it's worth setting down the tea and Madeleines for a little chuckle at its expense.

Item: Garry Wills.  Wills is a conservative by disposition, which is to say, a liberal.  Since the predominant institutions of our society--from the Social Security Office to the Department of Ahem Defense--were crafted by liberalism in the last century, the principal commitment of contemporary liberals is to the preservation thereof, and what is conservativism but a dedication to social and political traditions?  I suppose that he'd want to be called a progressive these days, brand management being the outmoded B-school coinage of the current Democratic realm: an aspirant junta as laughably committed to renaming their little Burma as, well.

Generally, anyone who points out that the Democratic Party is run by a cabal of megalomaniacal war-loving psychopaths stands accused of sententious holiness on matters of grave, uh, compromise.  Usually the accusers are themselves deacons in the church, who perceive in the dissenters an untoward fundamentalism, like Romenys gazing regretfully in the direction of a polygamist compound.  They think that the dissenters and dislikers and malcontents and hippies and commies and anarchists and libertarians and minarchists and stoners and survivalists and queer liberationists and reactionaries and crackpots and so on are all too bathed in the fresh blood of the lamb to sully themselves with the dirt of two-party electoral politics.  What they can't appreciate because they are themselves so hopelessly wedded to their faith is that people aren't troubled by hard choices or bad choices.  We're all obliged to make bad choices all the time, between worse and worst, and to live with them.  What people reject is false choice, choice that isn't choice, heads I win tails you lose choice, life flattened into politics and politics turned into a prisoners dilemma.

Some people do vote for third parties or start Occupy movements or, like the poor perfesser whose dull YouTube occasioned Wills' Jesuitical snarl, give a quiet voice to principled abstention.  Well, how about unprincipled abstention?  How about the value of not giving a shit?  What about indifference?  What if the prerequisite to killing the gods isn't casting down the idols, but simply ceasing to pray?