\jeff{krimmel}

We Can Trust Him

I went to New York City for a few days this past week and weekend to help celebrate a friend’s 26th birthday. A great time was had by all, and if I am sufficiently diligent, I will recount some of the trip here later on.

I want to write about an exchange I had with a man on one of my flights back, from New York’s LaGuardia airport to the Port Columbus airport in Columbus, Ohio. I didn’t speak with this man at all during the flight, but about half way through, I saw he was reading The New York Times’ “Week in Review” section. From the titles of a couple of articles and some text that I glanced at during the flight, I was definitely interested in reading it myself. Many of the pieces looked like scathing examinations of the many inadequacies and downright failures of the Bush administration’s poor excuse for a foreign policy. At the very end of the flight, just after the plane had landed and while we were taxiing toward the gate, I asked the man if he was planning on throwing away the paper. If so, I was hoping he would give it to me.

He told me he was actually planning on keeping it, because he wanted to keep some of the op-ed/editorial pieces. He asked why I was interested, so I explained a bit about my frustrations with the Bush administration and the sour direction in which our country is heading. We struck up a quick but surprisingly involved conversation that I would never expect to have as a result of basically bumping into a stranger. After our conversation, he said he wanted me to have the paper so that I could read it. He would just print the articles out at work the next morning. It was a generous gesture.

Part of our conversation revolved around Robert Kennedy Jr.’s recent piece for Rolling Stone basically stating how Republicans in Ohio helped President Bush steal the 2004 presidential election by preventing more than 350,000 mostly Democratic voters from actually placing votes: enough to have given John Kerry the White House. It’s an excellent article and one well worth reading. It definitely provides enough evidence to very seriously consider the possibility that President Bush to this day may not have won a single presidential election.

One excerpt from the article that was particularly relevant to the conversation I had with the man on the plane follows:

”It was terrible,” says Sen. Christopher Dodd, who helped craft reforms in 2002 that were supposed to prevent such electoral abuses. ”People waiting in line for twelve hours to cast their ballots, people not being allowed to vote because they were in the wrong precinct — it was an outrage. In Ohio, you had a secretary of state who was determined to guarantee a Republican outcome. I’m terribly disheartened.”

This Ohio secretary of state was (and still is) Kenneth Blackwell, who is currently running for governor. Mr. Blackwell was co-chair of President Bush’s re-election committee in Ohio, just at the time that he was in charge of counting votes cast in the presidential election: a true recipe for disaster. The man with whom I was speaking pointed out another conflict of interest for Mr. Blackwell. He is the executor of all statewide elections in Ohio, which means he will be the executor of the gubernatorial election in which he is running.

And then the man, with tongue firmly in cheek, said something that really resonated with me, “But he’s a man of God, so we can trust him.” That’s right. For many, many people, that’s as far as the argument goes. If (a Republican) someone is a man of God, he is beyond reproach. President Bush has definitely ridden that sentiment to a fair bit of popularity in some regions. And now Ken Lay, the former Enron chairman and CEO who recently joined the ranks of convicted felons, has practically been canonized upon his death.

Andrew Sullivan wrote an interesting piece for The Times titled “St Ken of Enron leads Bush’s new Christianity”. Mr. Sullivan mentions that no one would expect Mr. Lay to be further excoriated at his own funeral, but what proceeded to happen was equally inappropriate:

But what few expected was that Lay would be described not just as a flawed but loved family man, but as the emblem of Christian sacrifice — an icon of fundamentalist victimology, almost a saint. In fact, the minister who gave the sermon compared Lay to Martin Luther King and, yes, Jesus Christ.

Wow. Comparing Ken Lay to Jesus Christ, now that is quite a stretch.

Welcome to the strange new world of conservative evangelical Christianity, where government torture is no big deal, Lay is a martyr, and the death penalty is God’s will. In this version of Christianity what matters is not so much what you do — but what’s in your heart. And if you have committed to Jesus Christ and attend the right church, a little corporate larceny is no big whoop.

Mr. Sullivan goes on to explain how Mr. Bush has benefited from this particular view as well. Too often in this country debate is required to end because someone is a person of God. Invocations of the desire of higher powers for particular courses of action are intentionally or unintentionally designed to silence critics. Conflicts are posed as forces of good, usually acting in the name or at the will of a deity, fighting against forces of evil. This tactic is used by some fundamentalist Muslims against Americans, and this tactic is in return used by some fundamentalist Christians against Arabs. It is part of what drives the continuing and escalating crisis in the Middle East.

Now by no means am I equating the significance of the comparison of Ken Lay to Jesus Christ with the significance of what is currently happening in the Middle East. They’re nowhere close to the same level. But, public discourse is increasingly taking the course of playing the religious trump card, and in America, it’s largely the Christian trump card. As long as a man is God-fearing, it’s not the consequences of his actions that are important, it’s his motivations, which are unquestionable.

The man on the plane in Columbus had it right. “But he’s a man of God, so we can trust him,” is a much too commonly held refrain that is shielding important issues from the intense scrutiny they deserve. Sometimes the will of the people hang in the balance.