In Response to Kathleen Parker’s Praise of Jeb Bush’s Ugly Christian-Crusade Sleight of Hand

Beverly, this post reminded me that i forgot to add a comment to one of your earlier posts…it’s this, by Bill Black: The New York Times’ Secret Rule Forbidding Its EU Writers from Reading Krugman…in it, you’ll see he doesnt once mention that he’s being facetious; & you shouldn’t either…what you’re saying doesnt need an explanation for those to dense to get it…
i pay almost no attention to politics, and see our elections as consistently a choice between the lesser of two evils…that said, deeply ugly religious assaults and claims to religious and moral superiority should be called out whenever they’re seen, and you’re doing everyone a service by doing so..

Oh, damn. I forgot to ask

if Rjs was claiming religious and moral superiority.

Rjs

and that’s the problem with being facetious forever:

if you did what i think you just did you are far more subtle than i am.

but what is the good of it? at best you have the pleasure the irish had in insulting an englishman to his face and watching him walk away thinking he had been complimented.

or if you just did what Beverly has been doing… getting tangled in your own facetiousness to where you become merely ridiculous… well, you just lose friends among the vast majority too dense to get it.

but i guess you do get to keep those friends whose understanding is limited to “sounds like” you are ridiculing the “other.”

coberly, my point was, as you’ve hinted at, is that explaining that one is being facetious takes the sting out of it…it’s like having to explain the nuances of a joke to someone who doesnt get it; it’s no longer funny, but a long distraction that never gets to the punch line..

all that notwithstanding, i find it very hard to believe what you seemed to imply, that thousands of christians who were going to vote for hillary will switch their votes to jeb because of anything Beverly might write….you might, for spite, but the rest of her readers are going to be entertained without any impact on their voting…

Rjs

i was afraid of that. just goes to prove that communication is hard enough even without poorly written facetiousness.

no one will change their vote because of Beverly. but many who changed their votes years ago because the Right knows how to appeal to their basic fears and hopes will NOT change their vote to vote for “their real interests” because of Beverly… and I am afraid many many like her who are not being facetious but just nasty and so amazingly stupid it causes me to wonder.

there wasn’t much sting in Beverly’s facetiousness. I don’t like Jeb, and I don’t like Kathleen Parker, who also tries to be facetious.

and just to say it again, because i have said it so many times to no avail, proving that it’s not what you say, it’s what the other guy hears… because it is stamped in concrete in his head: i don’t disagree with Beverly on the substance. I don’t “not get” her facetiousness. I do get that she can’t manage her facetiousness without getting tangled up and saying things she doesn’t mean… which are not noticed by her fans who know what she means and think they are on the side of truth and justice and don’t need to actually make sense, or care about what someone else “feels.” after all, anyone who sounds like they may be disagreeing with you is a “concern troll.”

Now, for a real intellectual exercise: identify just what was “ugly” in what Bush said. remember, he is a politician and is pretty careful not to offend even the people he is about to screw.

And I have been stunned by how many times I have said that I “understood” the facetiousness (not factitiousness) of Beverly’s essay, and moreover that I agreed with her on the substance…

but that her grammar was not equal to her facetious intent: in a list of three “facts” which were, presumably, intended to be facetious, two of them were in fact fact, and only the third was “facetious,” but it was also ugly and wrong and in the context of being part of a list of factual facts could be taken as not intended to be facetious, but intended to be a third fact… accounting for Reagan’s winning the cold war.

The response I got to that was … more facetious language and personal abuse. Which oddly, is what I got from Joel when he announced that since he was right he didn’t need to care about the feelings of others… and I found that chilling, more in the vein of Stalin than of Gandhi, whom Joel claimed to be like. When i offered an excerpt from Gandhi’s writing showing that he insisted that caring about others feelings was the first step to freeing yourself… Joel didn’t even care to try to explain what he meant. Just asserted what a terrible person I was to compare Gandhi with Stalin… etc.

Now I no longer expect anyone to care or understand, so this is just for the record.

What astounds me is that people come here with an opinion that can be shown to be wrong, or at least based on a misunderstanding, and they never vary from their original opinion, never show any sign of having heard the attempted clarification. Well that’s what happens when you know you are right and don’t have to care about the feelings of others or even what they actually say. What matters, of course, is and always is what YOU think, and as long as you never have to change what you think you think, you are safe.

Beverly et al are hardly the only people guilty of this, but are an example of why we never get anywhere.

Beverly appended to her earlier post on this subject what I take to be her evidence/argument about what she found ugly in Jeb Bush’s speech.

It might be instructive to begin with this quote from Beverly:

“I have not read or listened to the speech…”

And this is the part of Bush’s speech she finds ugly:

“No place where the message reaches, no heart that it touches, is ever the same again. And across our own civilization, what a radically different story history would tell without it. Consider a whole alternative universe of power without restraint, conflict without reconciliation, oppression without deliverance, corruption without reformation, tragedy without renewal, achievement without grace, and it’s all just a glimpse of human experience without the Christian influence.”

Now apparently what she finds ugly in this is not what it says, but what she knows is it’s secret meaning. You see, she, and reader Jack, know that Jeb is saying that no other religion has ever done any good in the world, and that the world’s ills for the past two thousand years have been caused by the Christian religion.

Then Beverly explicitly conflates right wing political ideology with “organized religion.” And without actually, you know, having read or listened to Bush’s speech, she accuses him of “erecting an elaborate straw man. He accuses non-Christians and non-religious Christians of attack Christian tenets of compassion….” Which doesn’t seem to be what he, you know, actually said.

Now maybe that’s what he meant, but people being what they are, I suspect he actually thought he meant what he said. What he does may be something else entirely and I would not be the least surprised if what he does is what I might call un-Christian.

But to get seriously hysterical about what he said, you have to believe that “the Christian Right” is the true and only embodiment of what Christians believe and do. Just as you have to believe that all the evil that has occurred in the past two thousand years is somehow the fault of Christians as Christians. Which would suggest a serious lack of knowledge about history, contemporary Christians, and Christianity itself.

Or just a failure to think.

This appears to be Jeb Bush’s actual speech:

http://www.tampabay.com/blogs/the-buzz-florida-politics/in-speech-before-christian-conservatives-jeb-bush-to-imply-obama-has-been/2228900

Given the example set for us by Beverly I cannot pretend that everyone who reads it will not see the smirking ugly face that she sees..

but as to what he actually says beyond a little Christian boosterism… he is after all talking to the graduates of a Christian school…

the only thing i really see to object to is his contention that the “Little Sisters” are being abuse by “Big Brother” by being asked to include payment for contraception in their mandatory insurance.

I think Jeb errs. Christ taught “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” and nowhere does he teach resistance to taxes, or mandatory insurance. If it’s all about money, then Christianity has indeed lost its way.

I don’t think it has, but in the first place I am not surprised to see a right wing politician try to conflate the issues, and in the second I know that if I had some cherished belief I would hate like hell to be required to pay for someone else violating it. But then that is exactly what Jesus tried to teach against: “hating like hell.”

In any case, I don’t see anything here to get hysterical about. And that hysteria is exactly what Jeb is talking about when he talks about Christianity being under attack.

It’s a shame to feed into that.

Ilsm

sometimes I, even I, say things poorly and have to explain them. Beverly could have said, “no, that’s not what i meant.” or even, “you, dale, misunderstood me.” instead she launched a personal attack in her “facetious” voice. and led to all this trouble.

Coberly,

I am late to the game and don’t spend much time here, although this week and the next 2 I am “baching it” so I have more free time.

Dear Joel

that person you don’t like so much said something once (not an exact quote; am i lying?) about what credit is there to you for loving those who love you? i say “love your enemies.”

He had an important point. One you might discern in the Gandhi quote I offered you.

As someone who has watched the English language very closely for over seventy years (I still feel like dancing), I would have to say that you are quite wrong about what “those words” mean. They mean you have an arrogant assumption that you are “right” (exactly what you accuse me of, and of course i may be guilty as charged) and therefore you are proud to agree with the people who agree with you but don’t give a damn about those haters you hate.

But what amazes me is the complete inability you have shown to read what i have actually said… you said i compared Hitler/Stalin to Gandhi/MLK. quite the opposite, I compared Hitler/Stalin to what YOU said and pointed out that Gandhi at least and almost certainly MLK believed the opposite of what you appear to believe: you must care about what your “enemies” think and feel.It is the critical first step to freeing yourself from error or at least futility.

I have written several thousand words above which I think “reacts with concern.” But all Joel sees is “the hater.” The hater is in his own mind.

“Willing to engage” might mean actually reading and thinking about what “the other” said. But Joel seems stuck on the idea that I “lied”… which would be a strange thing to do about something someone said where the whole world can see what he said… and is determined to nurse his hurt feelings … which is actually not very engaging.

Rjs

after all this time you still don’t get it. so once again class:

The problem is not facetiousness. Krugman, Dean Baker, and Bill Black can all manage facetiousness because they are all good writers. Beverly’s problem is not facetiousness but that she is not a good enough writer to pull it off. And she has no idea what “in the mind of the beholder” means.

Nor, apparently, can any one of you read what Gandhi said and understand why it is NOT what Joel said, or Beverly et al practice.

Now, please, this is not getting us anywhere. So I am going to tiptoe out of here. Please let me go quietly.