The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
    David Seaton's picture

    Political Paralysis: what would Jesus do?

    By David Seaton on Tue, 04/12/2011 - 2:00pm |
    Christ Carrying the Cross
    Hieronymous Bosch
    1485-1490
    Oil on panel
    76.7 x 83.5 cm
    Musee des Beaux-Arts, Ghent

    Wingnuts are always framing any question that comes into their heads with a  "what would Jesus do", so I thought I would approach the subject of America's political paralysis in the same terms.

    What would Jesus do it he were elected president of the USA? 

     

    Well of course, if the right wanted to actually run Jesus for president they would have to procure him an American birth certificate, but I suppose if they took the part where it says "place of birth: Bethlehem, Palestine" and rubbed out the (shudder) "Palestine" and substituted "Pennsylvania" that would do the trick. Of course the only president ever born in Pennsylvania was James Buchanan, considered to be in the running with George W. Bush as the worst president in US history. But what the heck, would-be birthers would have to be satisfied with Pennsylvania.

    American politics being what it is Jesus would have to get a shave and a blow-dry haircut and learn to drink beer and boilermakers and eat hot-dogs and tacos and bagels and be a regular guy so as not to look effete and elitist...and to read what his handlers wrote for him off a teleprompter, but I suppose if John Edwards could manage all that, God could too.

    Of course the wingnuts would have to be crazy to run Jesus for president, it's obvious to me that they have never really studied his programs and policies in any detail; with  his love for the poor and driving money lenders from the Temple and encouraging his followers to pay taxes and all of that. And who is going to be First Lady? His mom? 

    Well, so suppose he finally got elected, he would for sure run into trouble from day one.

    Imagine that at the inaugural ball he changed water into wine: he's in trouble right then and there with special interest groups like the Winegrape Growers of America. You don't think California's Nancy Pelosi would let something like that pass, do you? Not with her state going broke.

    Now, of course, a salient part of Jesus's program was always healing the sick, for which he never charged a shekel, but if he continued to do that while in office the American Medical Association would be all over him and the big pharma lobbies too... You can imagine the smear campaigns... I prefer not to.

    And of course then there is the Holy Land, "Terra Sancta" as old Yasser Arafat used to call it. You can imagine how much slack AIPAC is going to cut Jesus, of all people, on that one, can't you?

    Finally, I think that one day, after his morning run on the Potomac, he might just up and drown both houses of congress and all of K-street in the reflecting pool of the Washington monument like he did with the Gaderene Swine... to general applause both in America and beyond her shores. 

    The moral of the story of course is that the problem is systemic and not really about personalities. As the Spanish say, "esto no lo arregla ni Díos", not even God can fix this paralysis.

    Crossposted from: http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com/

    Comments

    Great blog David. There are people who like to think that if only we had another FDR or Truman or JFK or LBJ that surely they could fix this mess. Or if we had a congress like the ones in the 1960s that they could fix this mess.

    The first problem with this fantasy speculation is that none of those people would have a prayer in hell of ever getting elected. If they did, we would have a few in office like them and we don't have anyone even remotely that honest, sincere or dedicated to their constituents.

    Secondly we don't have an electorate that is sufficiently concerned with the country as whole to back any proposals that these aforementioned politicians would come up with.


    by cmaukonen on Tue, 04/12/2011 - 2:59pm

    I don't think I've ever called a comment 'bullshit' before, but: bullshit.  In 2008 we exactly elected one who told us just what he would fight for, and synthesized a grand vision in aid of all of us.  He knew (or his speech-writers did) exactly what to do.  For crying in a barrel, look how many new voters, even, came out to vote for the first black President.  How unlikely was that? 

    Some days I think you love to hover under an Eeyore tree.  Watch this video and see if it ain't so that such a fulsome and wholistic and moral speech isn't exactly like the person you think couldn't ever get elected.

     

    Now that the man folded like a cheap lawnchair is a another matter, but his message was there.

    "We have an empathy deficit when we’re still sending our children down corridors of shame, schools in the forgotten corners of America where the color of your skin still affects the content of your education. We have a deficit when CEOs are making more in ten minutes than ordinary workers are making in an entire year, when families lose their homes so unscrupulous lenders can make a profit, when mothers can’t afford a doctor when their children are stricken with illness. We have a deficit in this country when we have Scooter Libby justice for some and Jena justice for others, when our children see hanging nooses from a school yard tree today, in the present, in the 21st century. We have a deficit when homeless veterans sleep on the streets of our cities, when innocents are slaughtered in the deserts of Darfur, when young Americans serve tour after tour after tour after tour of duty in a war that should have never been authorized and should have never been waged. We have an empathy deficit in this country that has to be closed. We have a deficit when it takes a breach in the levees to reveal the breach in our compassion, when it takes a terrible storm to reveal the hungry that God calls on us to feed, the sick that He calls on us to care for, the least of these that He commands that we treat as our own. So, we have a deficit to close. We have walls, barriers to justice and equality that must come down, and to do this, we know that “unity is the great need of the hour.”


    by we are stardust on Tue, 04/12/2011 - 5:18pm

    Great speeches do not a great president make. If they did, Ronald Reagan would have been a great president which he surely was not.


    by cmaukonen on Tue, 04/12/2011 - 5:24pm

    You said: "The first problem with this fantasy speculation is that none of those people would have a prayer in hell of ever getting elected."  He did; no matter how far he has run away from those ideals.


    by we are stardust on Tue, 04/12/2011 - 5:27pm

    Are you actually comparing Obama with FDR or JFK or LBJ or even Truman ??? He ain't even close. These people are major league and Obama has shown he is not even in the minors yet.


    by cmaukonen on Tue, 04/12/2011 - 6:15pm

    No, of course not; but one of the issues you raised was electability.  The other afterword was Reagan: you liked his speeches?  Never mind.


    by we are stardust on Tue, 04/12/2011 - 6:39pm

    No...I just said he great at giving speeches. Most actors are. But Reagan was a lousy actor both in Hollywood and DC.


    by cmaukonen on Wed, 04/13/2011 - 9:44am

    Actually he wasn't that bad an actor. You have to remember that he was working steadily as an actor in Hollywood's golden age, nobody who was a bad actor could rack up that many movies in those times. This doesn't keep him from being a crappy president, but fair is fair.


    by David Seaton on Wed, 04/13/2011 - 10:40am

    Peggy Noonan wrote the Gipper's best stuff.


    by David Seaton on Wed, 04/13/2011 - 8:56am

    I remember reading at the time that Obama's speeches were written by a very young man, who wrote them on his computer in Starbucks. Does anybody remember his name? Where is he now?


    by David Seaton on Wed, 04/13/2011 - 1:27am

    He's been with Obama since 2005, sitll with him, happens to be the president's head speech writer now @ $172,00 per year,

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Favreau_%28speechwriter%29

    also as per the above he

    has been named one of the "100 Most Influential People in the World" by Time magazine.[17] He ranked 33rd in the GQ "50 Most Powerful in D.C." and featured in the Vanity Fair "Next Establishment" list.[18][19]....

    Thanks for letting on how up you are on the administration you often criticize. Kiss



    by artappraiser on Wed, 04/13/2011 - 3:49am

    What is this guy doing to earn his money? Or does he have writer's block?


    by David Seaton on Wed, 04/13/2011 - 4:58am

    Well, Obama's social media game has also been in decline ever since Nov 5, 2008, so might just be fear of success, or like Obama policy, has been recast to support a post-victory agenda.


    by Desider on Wed, 04/13/2011 - 6:02am

    "a post-victory agenda"

    Whatever that might be.


    by David Seaton on Wed, 04/13/2011 - 7:30am

    In a related vein, you can campaign in broad strokes, but you must govern in fine ones. Slightly more specifically, it's easy to talk about the laudability of bipartisanship, but it's much more difficult to practice it, even in the best of times (which these most certainly are not). That's not meant to be criticism or an apology for Obama, just a trite observation.


    by Verified Atheist on Wed, 04/13/2011 - 8:23am

    Perfectly correct. It is one thing to race and quite another to govern. In a race there is a beginning middle and end. A winner and loser(s), but governing is 3-D chess and rarely is it clear who is winning or if the object of the exercise is even to "win".


    by David Seaton on Wed, 04/13/2011 - 8:55am

    You really remembered his name?? 


    by we are stardust on Wed, 04/13/2011 - 10:51am

    He is actually famous for being the hottest guy in DC.

    Which, when you see him, is kinda sad. But anyhow...


    by Obey on Wed, 04/13/2011 - 10:56am

    What, Huffingtonpost decided?  Kiss  I thought it was Peter Orzag who had that honor...

    But then all the supposed hotties that get on Kimmel kinda make me wonder why...

    I just went and looked at pix of the dude; naaaaaaah.  Must have a great personality.


    by we are stardust on Wed, 04/13/2011 - 11:06am

    What I am interested in is NOT, how well he scores with DC's political groupies, but why he doesn't write any good speeches anymore.


    by David Seaton on Wed, 04/13/2011 - 12:29pm

    Gonna make me stay after class and clean the blackboards, Dave?


    by we are stardust on Wed, 04/13/2011 - 3:01pm

    I will tell you what I would hope ole JC would do:


    by Richard Day on Tue, 04/12/2011 - 4:16pm

    Contrary to popular belief we do not have any intelligent highly educated people running this country. We have moderately trained people of average intelligence (democrats) and very poorly trained people of below average intelligence (republicans) running this country.


    by cmaukonen on Tue, 04/12/2011 - 5:07pm

    I've heard most of this somewhere before....

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEccLl9Xz4c

     

    The erratic way this software handles images/videos grows tiresome.

     

     

     


    by EmmaZahn on Tue, 04/12/2011 - 5:33pm

    LOL!

    (Try embedding through your Firefox; it's the only way I can get videos to load and stay loaded.)


    by we are stardust on Tue, 04/12/2011 - 5:49pm

    I hoped that this would be more interesting; maybe deeper.  It's not your fault, David, that it devolved into a posting seminar.  It is your fault that this blog was really simplistic.  There were so many places you could have gone with this.  Too bad.

     

     


    by CVille Dem on Wed, 04/13/2011 - 7:52pm

    PS:  I did really like the Birth Certificate thing, though


    by CVille Dem on Wed, 04/13/2011 - 7:54pm

    The danger in going much further would have been in being unnecessarily offensive to many people's religious feelings.


    by David Seaton on Thu, 04/14/2011 - 1:28am