Laughter Better than Tears?

I try not to get all wobbly when people say crazy, mean, and stupid things, you know, the "man in the street" comments that make one wonder about the morality and intelligence of one's fellow travelers. But when elected officials (or leaders of groups of people) make crazy, mean or stupid comments, I wonder not only about the morality and intelligence of the official who is supposed to make important decisions, sometimes national decisions, for us, but I also wonder about the majority of voters who put him or her in power.  Are they complicit? hateful? stupid? clueless? uninformed? or gobsmacked that their representative, so clever and eloquent during the campaign, has turned out to be such a prick?

Political rhetoric has always had a mean streak, but it seems particularly vitriolic these days. Joe Wilson's (R-SC) screaming "you lie" during President Obama's 2009 address to Congress seemed to me to presage the vaguely (and sometimes overtly) racist comments aimed at our first black president. Some would deny that Wilson's outburst was racist, but many of us in the South heard the unexpressed "boy" hovering at the end of that accusation, a ghost of Old Dixie that has materialized more substantially in the past four years. Underneath such comments is the ancient fear of the black uprising and a resentment of the "uppity" black. To keep people in their place, you have to convince yourself that they are inferior; when they prove to be equal or superior--morally, socially, intellectually--well, that's a challenge to a lot of people. No one shouted "you lie" in that august chamber when President Bush pushed the more obvious lies of weapons of mass destruction and yellowcake uranium. No, his lies were met with silence, approbation, and submission. You decide what the difference in response means.

But in keeping with my resolve to laugh at the follies of our elected officials, in the hope that laughter will prove more efficacious than tears, I offer here for derisive laughter a comment by Haley Barbour, former Republican governor of Mississippi, who actually hoped to be president of this country.

Barbour offered a brief assessment of the Republican National Convention. 'While I would love for [Chris] Christie to put a hot poker to Obama’s butt,' said Barbour of the RNC keynote speaker, 'I thought he did what he was supposed to do.' [source: Sheelah Kolhatkar, "Exclusive: How Karl Rove's Super PAC Plays the Senate," Bloomberg BusinessWeek, 04 September 2012]

Whew! close call! Aren't you [cue relieved laughter] glad this person isn't making national decisions now? Can you imagine [guffaw] what the brutality of that image says about the illustrious former governor of Mississippi? Oh, [wiping eyes] but the sexual innuendo and the implied delight in the forced submissiveness of our president isn't racist at all....oh....no.... Of course, comments such as this play well to a certain demographic. Isn't that hilarious?
 

The Evil of Praying for Evil

Anyone who has never been treated unfairly lives a very charmed life. Can such a person exist? Perhaps. But most of us have encountered, numerous times, situations or people that caused us pain or injury unnecessarily, unfairly, or deliberately meanly. So we can sympathize with those who wish bad things to happen to venal people who initiate, nudge, or incite the harm that befalls others. Been there, done that, here's the souvenir. But we also suspect that such wishing does not emerge from our better nature; it crawls up from the primordial mud with the animal that snarls "kill or be killed." Our more deliberative pre-frontal cortex puts on the brakes and "gather[s] a more judicious 'big picture'. . . .  and thereby exert[s] executive control over behavior." The primitive brain has its place and its uses, but we usually realize, after some reflection, that wishing for evil to befall others is fraught with more danger to ourselves than to the one whom we think deserves the curse. We all know people who fall into the pit of bitterness and blame and learn to love the smell of their own excrement.

And that's the stench I catch a whiff of when I read about people praying for the death of President Obama.  These people aren't primitives raised by wolves and thus taught to tear at the flesh of their victims; they're leaders of Christian churches. Southern Baptist pastor Wiley Drake is just such a leader, and a former vice-president of the Southern Baptist Convention. He invokes Psalm 109 in his prayers that God kill President Obama: "May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow. May his children be wandering beggars; may they be driven from their homes."

Okay, this goes beyond wanting mean people to get their comeuppance. The fact that the verses appear in the Bible is no excuse to be muttering them like curses toward the President of the United States--or anyone, for that matter. What kind of person prays for evil to happen to the children of political opponents? Someone listening to his basal ganglia and not his pre-frontal cortex. The thing about religious texts is that they're something like the human brain; they contain all that's human in us, from the first howling of the wronged that wants revenge to the ecstatic poetry of the mystic who realizes the connectedness of all things and the frailty of all humans.  To read the texts as if they are recipes is to court disaster. Once these haters pray for the death of one enemy, will they stop there, especially if that prayer seems to be successful? Won't they think, "hey, this is better than pulling the trigger myself, getting God to do it for me" (albeit through some nutcase like the abortion opponent who shot and killed Dr. Tiller)?  And then they'll go on to the next person they've labeled the "enemy." (And anyone want to guess what really drives this hatred of Barack Obama?)

So for all those people with bumper stickers that say "Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8"--Evolve, People!