Bedtime for Bonzo Saturday, June 05, 2004

Political extremism and I go way back. I remember bouncing around my buddy Johnny's apartment in 1981, high-fiving him and fisting the air, when we found out Reagan had been shot. Through high school I had a poster taped over my bed: "REAGAN'S GOTTA GO," with organized labor supply the cartoon boot.

He's gone now, and I have mixed feelings. Obviously, he saved the world, him and Mrs. Thatcher and that eminently sensible Pole on the fisherman's throne. It takes me twenty years of wandering to come to that conclusion. At the time I thought that the three of them weren't saving the world in the ways that mattered: People still hated each other, people were still poor, people were still dying sad and terrified and alone. It takes me twenty years of searching to realize that those problems can't be solved by politics--only talked about in ways that make us feel smug or guilty and remove the burden of action.

The debate shouldn't be, how do we create utopia; you're never going to eliminate poverty or hate. Trying to solve all the world's problems is useless and frustrating, and all the discussions become a pissing contest over righteousnes. The argument should be what our responsibility is to each other, and how best as individuals we can help others who are poor or lonely or hated. The poor you will always have with you, as a certain keen-eyed Jew observed a few years back. And as a Southern doctor commented a bit more recently: Tenderness leads to the gas chamber.

At any rate, while we were waiting for Reagan and Thatcher and the Pope to give everyone a pony, they discredited a profoundly anti-human doctrine and destroyed its strongest agents on earth. (The NYU English Department notwithstanding.) For that they deserve something. If nothing else, a sincere apology and a rest in peace.

Still, I don't love the guy. Many righty commentators are in love with him--his message, his charisma, his vision. I appreciate him but he always seemed like a politican to me, and I mean that in the worst possible sense. One with his head screwed on straight, one with the drive to do good, but a politician nonetheless. Tolkien has spoiled me: I'm still waiting for a god-king. Or the dictatorship of the proletariat. I'm easy that way.

And now the mailbag. A reader writes in, apropos my Randy Newman bullshit:


I wrote:
That, I think, is the proper response to Newman, Parker, Jackson and all the rest of them. Yup, people cheat, murder and hypocritize. You nailed that. So when are you gonna stop pouting and come on up to the grown-up table already?

She wrote:
This was funny to me because that sounds EXACTLY like something Randy would say. His point is: there is no great Father Figure in the sky running
things. God is not responsible for stupid human (or cat) behaviour. We are
our own responsibility. I don't think you've understood him at all.

I agree completely with the idea that we're responsible for our own fuckups. One of the formative moments in my philosophical career, although as usual it took me twenty years to realize it, came when I was watching "All in the Family" with my father. The Meathead made what Norman Lear imagined was a killing point about religion: If God exists, why is there so much evil in the world? My father, who has precisely the same accent as Archie, turned to me and said, "God didn't put evil in the world. People did." Score one for the engineer.

At the same time, that is not Newman's point. What I hear in his songs is: We're responsible for making the world a bad place, and that proves that there's no God. If you think otherwise, you're a dope. My point in the earlier post was: I concede the point that the world is terrible. In fact, Judeo-Christian philosophy is one long caveat that the world is a terrible place. But that doesn't mean that God doesn't exist by any stretch.

I think Newman, like Norman Lear, has a simplistic, village-atheist view of what believers believe: Oh, Jeebus, my house burned down and my wife done left me, so please make everything all right! I think you'll find, in the aggregate, that believers know perfectly well that God, like Ronald Reagan, is not going to give them a pony. But they know that if you believe in God, and allow Him to underwrite your actions, you can work practical wonders. e.g., defeating the Amazing Dancing Bear.

Enough contention! I got a game to write and a wife with a sinus.

@ 8:53:00 PM,

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