A spoonful of sugar

It's always magical when they swear in a new pope.  Everyone watches his style and demeanor and all the scandals are forgotten during the honeymoon, if that isn't a wholly inappropriate term.  Francis I is a rock star, wading into crowds to kiss babies, holding press conferences, working the rope line, and basically acting as if he needs to be re-elected.  (He doesn't, does he?  If popes can quit whenever they like, maybe the rules have changed.)  He has the knack for making people feel good while budging not a centimeter from the church's centuries-old traditions of misogyny and homophobia.

John Boehner was invited to accompany Vice-President Biden to Rome but declined.  This was probably a mistake, as he and his party need to study Francis closely.  Having decided during last week's ComiConservative '13 that their basic philosophy is perfectly sound, they now must learn how to sell it better in order to avoid another debacle like last November.  In other words, they have to "reach out" to the objects of their hate -- women, gays, naturalized Americans and the non-white.  With Republican-controlled state legislatures vying to enact the most rigid restrictions on voting rights, collective bargaining, abortion and even contraception, this is going to take more than the snark of prop comic Sarah Palin and the artful deployment of a few brown faces like Bobby Jindal's.  With the Mad Tea Party in Congress bent on ending government as we know it, it's going to take mass hypnosis.  

Part of the GOP's "image problem" stems from its willingness, for more than a decade, to use hate radio, Fox "News" and the rightmost extremes of Blogenheim as a free source of propaganda.  Now they need its operatives to bank down their incendiary ravings.  Why should they?  Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, Coulter et al. are not in politics, or even in journalism.  They are in show business.  Their fat paychecks depend upon their ability to corral the largest possible number of mouth-breathers and deliver them to the sponsors; this is how commercial media work.  Jabba the Rush is not going to stop calling women sluts just because the RNC has decided it needs the slut vote.  Glenn Beck doesn't care who wins elections as long as he frightens the foolish and walks off with their money, and he can't do that by comparing Mitt Romney with Hitler.  Right-wing media need Obama the way Oceania needed Emanuel Goldstein.  If I were given to wild conspiracy theories...

Pope Francis has one advantage over the Republican Party -- his edicts are optional.  It has been many years since the pope's word had the force of law outside Vatican City.  Millions of people call themselves Catholics, raise their children as Catholics, financially support the Catholic Church, and yet ignore its doctrines concerning contraception and abortion.  From time to time the Church tries to make an example of a politician who refuses to denounce Roe v. Wade -- John Kerry, for instance -- but short of Stalinist-style purges, nothing will detach those sub rosa "sinners" from their religion, and I can't believe anyone wants to.  When the inevitable encyclical "Non usare pillum" is read from the pulpits, the people in the pews will listen in silence, line up for the sacrament, and drive home, stopping at the pharmacy to pick up their birth-control pills.  Assuming they live in a state where the Republicans haven't made that illegal.  The people in the pews had no voice in picking the pope.  Picking the next governor is another story.  There isn't enough high fructose corn syrup in this country to mask the arsenic the Republicans want to feed us.

      

The one who mounts

In Eumenides, the final play of his Oresteia trilogy, Aeschylus brings on the god Apollo to free Orestes from the burden of guilt he has carried since killing his mother Klytemnestra.  (He had no choice after she killed his father, her husband Agamemnon.)  Apollo drives off the Furies with these words:

Here is the truth, I tell you -- see how right I am.
The woman you call the mother of the child
is not the parent, just a nurse to the seed,
the new-sown seed that grows and swells inside her.
The man is the source of life -- the one who mounts.
She, like a stranger for a stranger, keeps
the shoot alive unless god hurts the roots.

   (translated by Robert Fagles)

It's easy to understand why this theory of procreation obtained in the ancient world:  Semen is visible to the naked eye, but centuries would pass before anyone saw a human ovum.  Now we know that men and women are equal contributors to the genetic makeup of their children, knowledge which brings a thicket of legal issues from viability to parental rights to the odd notion that women should control their own bodies just as men do.  This last seems to be particularly frightening to fundamentalists of all kinds.

Last summer the experts predicted that the 2012 presidential election would be a referendum on the issue of same-sex marriage, still legal in only a handful of states and the District of Columbia, one of those Kulturkampf bugle-calls that have the power to stir up voters.  By way of illustration, the television "news" showed video of citizens lining up to participate in a homophobic promotion announced by a chain of chicken restaurants, patiently waiting to sample the Buffalo hate wings.  This was meant to spell doom for Barack Obama, who supports same-sex marriage, and the inevitable election of anyone who doesn't.   Well, it's late October and no one has even mentioned same-sex marriage for at least two months, partly because the Republicans, with incomparable stupidity, have turned the election into a referendum on rape.

I thought this had been settled long ago.  Rape is illegal in all the states and the District of Columbia, and in such outposts of the empire as Guam and American Samoa.  Rape is also illegal in every country in the world.  Nobody is in favor of rape except rapists,. who must have been bemused to find themselves getting support from the family values party.   I know I was.  "Bemused" may not be the right word.

The latest chapter in the GOP's long divorce from reality began a few weeks ago, when their Senate candidate in Missouri, Todd Akin, explained why his party's platform has a "no abortions-no exceptions" plank.  Republican "moderates" believe abortion should be allowed in cases of incest or rape, or when the health of the woman would be endangered, but not Akin, who has enriched our language with the phrase "legitimate rape."  In such cases, he says, pregnancy cannot occur because "the woman's body has ways of shutting that whole thing down" (that he was quoting some doctor is even more disturbing).  The only women who need abortions are not victims at all, but sluts who allege rape in order to force their insurance companies to pay for abortions, or for the "morning after" pill if they can find a pharmacist enlightened enough to fill the prescription.  (Many refuse, and guess what?  The Roberts Court says that's just fine.)  False rape reporting, like voter fraud, is one of those phantom menaces that only Rightzi paranoids can perceive; in the real world, rape is under-reported because most victims are unwilling to face the ordeal they know they will be put through, especially if the case comes to trial.

It turns out that Akin represents the lunatic fringe of the lunatic fringe.  His fellow Senate candidate Richard Mourdock of Indiana is willing to concede that rape can result in pregnancy, but when it does it's "god's will" and the victim can just lump it.  Again, no abortion, no exception, amen.  A soundbite that outrageous was guaranteed  more airplay than Prince William's wedding, but I'm still waiting for someone to ask Mourdock (and Mitt Romney, who filmed an enthusiastic commercial for him) the obvious questions -- the place, if you like, where issues of economy and taxation slam into notions of morality..  What are your plans for the unwanted babies who will result from these rapes?  A few women may choose to raise these constant reminders of the crime, but I suspect most will not.  Will your Department of Health establish a chain of orphanages, hiring thousands of people to care for the children while thousands of others investigate prospective adoptive parents?  What will the additional expense do to your promise to liquidate the Cheney-Bush deficit?  Does this means the rich will have to pay taxes after all?  Have you checked with Grover Norquist, the Koch brothers, Donald Trump, and all the other moochers who think they should continue to fatten off this country without paying for its functions?  Why am I talking to the insane as if their answers would make sense?  And Akin and Mourdock are only the beginning:  there are dozens of Republican candidates (and some Democrats, and even some women) who share their views on "personhood," the granting of Constitutional rights to zygotes.  We're through the looking glass, people, which is not surprising when you remember that we're dealing with the Mad Tea Party.  How about enforced ultrasounds for women seeking abortions?  From the party that wants to get the government off our backs and into our wombs.*

If these troglodytes are elected -- at the national level, they already control many of the states -- we will return not to the good old days before Roe .v. Wade, but to Athens in the fifth century BCE.  Women will be flowerpots where men plant their seed, with or without consent, and the Uterine Police will make sure they remember to water and weed until the little miracle is born.  After that, I'm willing to bet, the state will lose interest.  It's the will of god (Apollo?), so let him take care of them.



*In Communist Romania, women of child-bearing age were required to report for monthly medical exams to determine if they were, or had been, pregnant.  This was not for religious reasons, obviously, but because the state made money selling unwanted babies to adoptive parents in other countries.  Not all of them, unfortunately -- thousands led wretched lives in Dickensian orphanages.  It is grimly amusing to contemplate right-wing Christians walking in the footsteps of a Communist dictatorship.     

      

Asunder

With the Schwarzeneggers, another political/showbiz marriage has come undone. It's hard to see why this one has attracted so much attention. First of all, Arnold's proclivities (I'm going to call him Arnold, to save space) were well known when he first ran. People who voted for him anyway don't get to act all surprised and righteous now. Second, he's no longer in public office and is one of the five Republicans who definitely won't run for president, so who cares? Third, this scandal doesn't even come with the sweet smell of hypocrisy. Remember when we found out Strom Thurmond was implacably opposed to race-mixin' everyplace but his own bed? That was fun. Arnold, on the other hand, has cheerfully maltreated women of every ethnic background.

To my mind, the interesting question is one that nobody has raised: How will this marriage end? The Catholic Church does not permit divorce, but has always managed to accommodate the Kennedy family and their money. One of Maria's cousins was granted an annulment despite the fact that his marriage had produced several children, and over the bitter protests of his wife. (The Church has always had trouble hearing the voices of women without money.) I have no idea how much an annulment costs, but clearly they are beyond the means of rank-and-file, dollar-in-the-collection-basket Catholics. And perhaps in anticipation of his coming de-legitimization, the Schwarzeneggers' son has announced his intention to use the surname Shriver. Of course, it's easier to spell.

If this seems crass, it's probably because the religion/money nexus has been much on my mind since the Rev. Camping's prediction of doomsday last week turned out to be another disappointment. He has run through his arithmetic again and announced the next doomsday for October, which means the believers will have to invest in new t-shirts and bumper stickers. Somebody is doing very well off their credulity, and, as Harry Lime would say, "Free of income tax, old man, free of income tax!" Religion is the best legal racket in this country.

The Cheney-Bush regime succeeded in creating a deficit which would, in conjunction with two pointless wars, cripple the government's ability to meet social obligations like Social Security and Medicare. States and cities are laying off police, teachers and firefighters, and casting about for ways to raise revenue without the political suicide of raising taxes. And here's Big Religion, enjoying a tax exemption apparently based on a wildly generous interpretation of the First Amendment and dropping nothing in the basket for over two centuries. When this nation began, "religion" meant the parish church, a parsonage, and maybe a school, orphanage, or other charitable institution. It didn't means shopping malls, amusement parks, publishing houses, radio and television stations, and all the other properties currently off the tax rolls. When the church was richer than the government in sixteenth-century England, Henry VIII took action. It's time for another reformation.

All great ideas, from women's suffrage to abolition, started out unpopular. The sooner we move on this, the sooner we can achieve revenue justice. Maybe not in my lifetime, but it's coming.