Awaken the Army of Davids

Pat Archbold gets it. And, despite the remarks of a few remaining suckers in his comboxes, most of his readers get it, too. As many people were sickeningly sure would happen, the pro-life cause was betrayed yet again by the Stupid Evil Party, and pro-lifers were, once again, instructed by the Party to talk about the betrayal as a big victory. “Victory” boiled down to a trivial impact on abortion policy in the District of Columbia and punting the question of funding Planned Parenthood to the Senate, where it will be dispatched with the ruthless efficiency of Kermit Gosnell stabbing a baby to death — as our “staunch” pro-life leaders in the GOP well know.

Some suckers continue the game of saying that the Evil Stupid Party makes it impossible for the Stupid Evil Party to do anything about abortion. But the truth is the Stupid Evil Party will “strive” to get rid of abortion only when they know the effort will fail. All this fake “effort” is an elaborate kabuki that keeps pro-life suckers on the reservation voting for them. But when they actually owned the executive and legislative branches, their efforts were entirely focused elsewhere (primarily on maintaining and expanding the Empire) and they did virtually nothing, keeping the nation at sub-Carthaginian levels of respect for human life and giving us such winners as Supreme Court Justices O’Connor, Souter, Kennedy, and (had Bush 43 gotten his way) the pro-choice and incompetent Miers. Of our two “pro-life” successes on the Court, one is on record as saying Roe is settled law.

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They. Don’t. Care. Sure, there are a few serious pro-life GOP members in Congress. But the proof is in the pudding. For 30 years, the bulk of Stupid Evil party policy and practice has made it clear that pro-lifers are useful, not respected. For 30 years, Stupid Evil Party Presidents have phoned it in on Roe v. Wade Day, not wanting to actually be seen with us. For 30 years, both parties have maintained a sort of equilibrium that has been an archetypal Hegelian Mambo, which sees the slow and steady erosion of concern for human life and the family, while the Stupid Evil Party continues to take our vote and slowly sell us down the river.

Why? Because the principal concern of both parties is not the common good, but their own increase of power and wealth. We are the necessary apparatus that the Constitution (that increasingly irrelevant document) forces our ruling classes to use to obtain that goal (and there are strong signs that an increasing number of our rulers itch to find a way to trample that obstacle down once and for all). Yet still we go on trusting them as they plunge us into world historical levels of debt, continue and expand our wars of Empire, and give not one thought to the prospect that one way to reduce our gigantic load of debt is to, for instance, stop maintaining a huge military presence in more than a hundred countries which it is not our business to police. World War II and the Korean War have been over for quite some time. The Soviet Union is gone. Why, then, does the Party of Family Values not oppose President Barack Obama’s nation-building experiments by bringing troops home to raise their families? Because only a sucker believes that eitherparty cares about families.

 

And now, like clockwork, Donald Trump of all people has a sudden come-to-Jesus moment about being pro-life, and I am watching in amazement as suckers on Facebook are suddenly taking him seriously as a GOP candidate.

Please. The command is to be wise as serpents, not wise as doves. Demand some credibility from these people.

The most astonishing thing is to watch Christians gullibly buying this naked bid to corral the Evangelical and conservative Catholic vote and seriously proposing that because he is stinking rich and famously arrogant he “can’t be bought” (as though every politician in DC isn’t stinking rich and swimming in a culture of arrogance, too). How quickly we forget the camel and the needle.

The Prophet Chesterton warned long ago:

Only the Christian Church can offer any rational objection to a complete confidence in the rich. For she has maintained from the beginning that the danger was not in man’s environment, but in man. Further, she has maintained that if we come to talk of a dangerous environment, the most dangerous environment of all is the commodious environment. I know that the most modern manufacture has been really occupied in trying to produce an abnormally large needle. I know that the most recent biologists have been chiefly anxious to discover a very small camel. But if we diminish the camel to his smallest, or open the eye of the needle to its largest — if, in short, we assume the words of Christ to have meant the very least that they could mean, His words must at the very least mean this — that rich men are not very likely to be morally trustworthy. Christianity even when watered down is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags. The mere minimum of the Church would be a deadly ultimatum to the world. For the whole modern world is absolutely based on the assumption, not that the rich are necessary (which is tenable), but that the rich are trustworthy, which (for a Christian) is not tenable. You will hear everlastingly, in all discussions about newspapers, companies, aristocracies, or party politics, this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man. The whole case for Christianity is that a man who is dependent upon the luxuries of this life is a corrupt man, spiritually corrupt, politically corrupt, financially corrupt. There is one thing that Christ and all the Christian saints have said with a sort of savage monotony. They have said simply that to be rich is to be in peculiar danger of moral wreck. It is not demonstrably un-Christian to kill the rich as violators of definable justice. It is not demonstrably un-Christian to crown the rich as convenient rulers of society. It is not certainly un-Christian to rebel against the rich or to submit to the rich. But it is quite certainly un-Christian to trust the rich, to regard the rich as more morally safe than the poor. A Christian may consistently say, “I respect that man’s rank, although he takes bribes.” But a Christian cannot say, as all modern men are saying at lunch and breakfast, “A man of that rank would not take bribes.” For it is a part of Christian dogma that any man in any rank may take bribes. It is a part of Christian dogma; it also happens by a curious coincidence that it is a part of obvious human history. When people say that a man “in that position” would be incorruptible, there is no need to bring Christianity into the discussion. Was Lord Bacon a bootblack? Was the Duke of Marlborough a crossing sweeper? In the best Utopia, I must be prepared for the moral fall of any man in any position at any moment; especially for my fall from my position at this moment.

We live already in a plutocracy, as President Obama made clear a couple of days ago when he surveyed the hoi polloi with his cool eye of imperial regard, informed us that he remembered what it was like to pump gas, and told us to get used to sacrificing for the regime. We learn the same thing every time some wag notes that nobody in the ruling class ever has to balance their own checkbook. We are learning it as Congress shaves a microscopic sliver off the mountain of debt they are bequeathing our children and then turns to us and seriously expects us to applaud their largesse. We have a fabulously rich ruling class that is, as rich and powerful people always are, radically out of touch with reality (since one of the chief functions of wealth is to shield the fallen human soul from the consequences of its actions). It is no wonder that this class is also fundamentally supportive of abortion and always will be: after all, abortion is all about making somebody else pay for our bad choices — which is all our Ruling Class does.

 

For myself, the choice has been obvious for some years now. Change begins, as our faith tells us, in the heart, not in politics. A people changes when they live “as if”: as if it were true that we are creatures made in the image and likeness of God; as if it were true that it is self-evident that all men are created equal; as if it were true that we are not forced to choose between the radically deformed visions of the Stupid Evil Party and the Evil Stupid Party; as if it is possible to act as a Catholic in the public square and not perpetually have to choose which part of Catholic teaching one must drown in order to be an organ-grinder monkey clapping for a Big Man who wishes to exploit us.

As is my custom, then, I will be supporting no candidate next year who asks me to support a grave and intrinsic evil. That will mean, naturally, voting for a candidate who is not mainstream, whoever that may be. But the only reason such a candidate is not mainstream is that most people continue to live in the illusion that they are being “realistic” to vote for a “serious” candidate like the preposterous Donald Trump or the preposterous Barack Obama and not for a candidate who actually reflects what they think. So the Left will “hold its nose” after the stunning betrayals Obama has inflicted on his base and vote for him in a spirit of “realism” (because they imagine the sole alternative has to be the Stupid Evil Party), while the Right will do the same with whatever joke it nominates because they imagine the sole alternative has to be Obama. I refuse to vote for either if (as is virtually certain) they advocate something that I believe will send me to hell for supporting.

The lie is always put forward that voters like me are demanding “perfection.” It remains, nonetheless, a lie. It is not perfectionistic to not want to be asked to support policies and choices that involve you in sins worthy of the everlasting fires of hell, whether it be abortion or unjust wars of Empire (or both, under Obama). It is the bare minimum of human decency. I will not play that game anymore. From here on in, my bare-minimum demand, as a free man in an increasingly less free country, is that my rulers not insult my intelligence by promising me they offer 30 percent less evil than the other leading brand. I will vote for the Doomed Quixotic Candidate who promises not to do any intrinsic grave evil, and I will continue to do so until Washington surrenders to my will. I would urge you to do the same.

I just hope the poor bastards in DC realize who they are up against.

Author

  • Mark P. Shea

    Mark P. Shea is the author of Mary, Mother of the Son and other works. He was a senior editor at Catholic Exchange and is a former columnist for Crisis Magazine.

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