Conversation with a Friend

I wanted to share this correspondence with all of you (with my friends permission):

Zee says:

If only Al Gore had won the election!!! Then this Schiavo mess would never have happened and things would be so much better!


I respond:

A little better yes, but how much better? And don't you think the religious right hacking of the enlightenment, science, and rational thought would have continued, they would have to work a little harder then they do now but they would wrap themselves up in another martyr.


Zee says:

I do not see this cases so much as the blurring of church and state, but a ploy by the right to advance their own agenda. I have been particularly struck by commentator's penchant for undermining the rulings and behaviors of judges. Not only in the Schiavo case, but also in the Jackson case. The statements
usually take the form of: "I could care less what the opinions of some activists judges are, the people believe blah, blah, blah." I was particularly struck by a statement by Nancy Grace (a Court TV commentator) responding to a Supreme Court decision about what constitutes pornography as (paraphrasing here): who cares what nine people in Washington have to say about pornography.

I find it disturbing that so called journalists feel so free to undermine the judiciary, the very foundations of our political system.

I feel as if the Schiavo case in particular is being used to advance the conservative agenda of packing the courts with like minded people. And in Diane Rheim (sp?) program, I learned that many would like to see the courts return to 19th century jurisprudence that favors the rights of property over the rights of individuals. So, the bottom line is the solidification of the
religious zealots over the rest of us.

However, they are playing a dangerous game. If conservatives undermine the judiciary itself, it will lose legitimacy in the eyes of the public. So, even if they succeed in turning that branch of government back before the New Deal, they still leave themselves vulnerable to people seeing them as not credible
regardless of how they rule.

I respond:

TV and radio are now designed to push the emotional buttons to maximize ratings and get the ad contracts. They have nowhere to go but downhill, and the information value is now not zero but negative: dummification.

They just missed the possibility that you can also push the wrong button, or pushed the court button too early - and that is what they just may have done. Nancy Grace is very experienced in appealing to the lowest common denominator, and it seems that she is quite conscious of it, even gets a kick out of it (and money, of course), hence her Supreme Court argument. And she does not write her lines. The Larry King team does, for instance, on CNN. But perhaps it does not matter any longer:

The 'rule of law' is already sinking which is a deliberate religious right strategy. Anything that leads to a global mono culture will be supported. Capitalism will increasingly seek diminished relevance of nations and their bodies of law, other than protection of property and personal security (i.e. police, military, and other forms of intelligence), what do we the people have? Religion still is the old stand-by opium for so many. And now that it is attacking the judiciary and what passes for an intellectual class in the US, what will stop them?

But now the stops are gone, and religo-capitalism (courtesy of GWB) is catching up (where it left of in the 19th century. Many jobs now pay less than minimum wage and have no health insurance or are barely subsistence when you consider the cost of health care and insurance for so many. Where are people going to turn? To Religion?

And then there is still the question, if the conservatives loose the next election, so what? Practically everything we are seeing under Bush started under Clinton! The days of the old national democratic/conservative politics are gone. We need a new idea, a new way to think about these things. The danger is not simply conservatives vs. liberals. It is this odd political religious configuration that is willing to push what a few men think is God's special agenda for all of us. Scary.