Hi to anyone still reading. I guess that was more like a month long break, but here I am. I was toying with the idea of giving up the blog altogether, but I’m not going to, at least right now. Posting will probably be somewhat infrequent, but on the bright side, Railyard Mackenzie has another guest column coming up and a lot of people who have better blogs than me are turning out better stuff than ever.
I was out of town for a week recently and ended up spending some time with a far-right, Evangelical relative of mine. He’s a good guy on a personal level, but totally insane when it comes to politics/society/religion/anything bigger than baseball. If he’d been alive in the 50s, he’s one of those guys who’d be in the John Birch society and calling Ike a communist. The difference is, those people were the fringe back then, now they’re running the show. While the conservative movement of Goldwater et al was heartless and vicious, there was still a certain amount of respect for science, reason, and basic realities of governance. The new conservatism is the worst of all possible worlds, based on a blend of ultra-nationalism, social darwinism, irresponsible economics, an imperial mindset, and an anti-reason religious fanaticism that has come to permeate the other aspects of modern con thought. It’s a truly scary combination, on par with or exceeding Iran’s ayatollahs (who may be assholes but don’t seem to have any serious imperial ambitions). The evangelical explosion of the last three decades has been largely to blame, and has brought America, a nation formerly known for its scientific advances and high quality of education, into a rut behind many third world nations. I can honestly say I think that this explosion, which culturally shares many elements with the Islamism of the post World War Two era, is probably the single most destructive force in American culture. But it’s important to remind ourselves that it’s made up of regular people, whose daily lives wouldn;t change much regardless of what they believed. As much as I want to hate them, I can’t, they’re ultimately not that different. They’re us and we’re them, and it’s a scary realization that to make things better, one has to confront the worst elements of oneself.
Anyway, off the soapbox for now. This coming week, Railyard’s guest column and I’ll natter at you about an interesting thing I learned regarding the way antinomianism works. See you soon.
