Philistine Perfection

When a Wal-Mart employee was trampled to death yesterday by Black Friday deal hunters, the nation was rightly outraged. The crowd, impatient from waiting all night in the parking lot, broke the doors down, flattened several employees in the process, and walked over them until one was dead. When police tried to clear the store, shoppers shouted angrily, "But I waited all night to get in!"--and kept on shopping.

But we should keep in mind that this was not only predictable, but planned. For several generations now Ray Moose has carefully and consciously designed advertisements to bypass reason; with the consent of all parties involved, companies have knowingly worked to cause customers to make decisions without thought, and even to induce a psychological need for their products. This is not a secret plot, but the open strategy one can find in any textbook on effective advertising. We the customers have enjoyed our titillation.

When the art of advertising was in its infancy and working on a previously unaffected populace, the best companies could manage was to induce imprudent purchases of unnecessary items, or an irrational decision in favor of one brand name over another. But now that the art has reached maturity, with the aid of television, Internet, and other media, and now that the populace has grown up already formed by advertisement, we can spark a real state of insanity that lasts for a number of hours. This is not a byproduct, but the goal.

In the dark old days of yesteryear, ignorant barbarians practiced black magic in the woods and sacrificed children for fertile fields. In the gloaming of culture, when barbarity is no longer suffered but sought, the Philistines celebrate Black Friday on the asphalt and sacrifice human life for a Nintendo Wii. There is here a kind of perfection.

The Disenfranchised Among Us

Bunthorne has modestly proposed that folks with children vote not only for themselves, but also for their children. His reasoning is hard to counter: not only are children otherwise unrepresented and thus unable to exert a governmental influence equivalent to their percentage of the population, but adults with children have a greater stake in governmental policy (and how that policy affects the common good) than do adults without children.

To these points, one might add that the choice not to have children is often a selfish one, an attempt to retain all the fun of life for the me-monster. Conversely, the choice to have children is often a selfless one, a choice for generosity. It seems only fitting that the choice most often characterized by self concern have less influence on the common good than the choice that is most often characterized by concern for the common good over self.

Some may object that this would give less voting power to those who wish to have children and cannot. On the one hand, this doesn't touch Bunthorne's original arguments; on the other hand, these people can adopt if they feel the need for more voting power. And if I had three hands, I would add on the third one that those wishing but unable to have children will generally agree on policy with those wishing and able to have children, so Bunthorne's proposal is overall in the favor of all in favor of children.

Ironically, the strongest opponents of Bunthorne's proposal would probably be advocates of children's rights. They would perceive this attempt to give children a vote as a veiled return to the supremacy of parents over children. As the Moose once said to a friend of mine: "Obedience is the root of all evil."

From the Moose's mouth

Yesterday belief.net published the full and unedited text of a famous interview with Barack Obama about his religious beliefs. It's worth reading in full, but the heart of it is here:

I'm a big believer in tolerance. I think that religion at it's best comes with a big dose of doubt. I'm suspicious of too much certainty in the pursuit of understanding just because I think people are limited in their understanding.

I think that, particularly as somebody who's now in the public realm and is a student of what brings people together and what drives them apart, there's an enormous amount of damage done around the world in the name of religion and certainty.

Obama is a straight-laced, orthodox Tolerationist. Anyone teaching through Ratzinger's Truth and Tolerance should assign Obama's interview for a class discussion. Come to think of it, anyone discussing Obama's religious views should read Ratzinger's Truth and Tolerance, which exposes the roots and the fruits of the tyrrany of tolerance. Under the banner of unity, which you will recall was the rallying cry of Obama's campaign, the "virtue of tolerance" bans the only possible basis of unity: truth.

Obama's take on Jesus Christ is the second most interesting point in the interview. It fits precisely within the boundaries of orthodox Tolerationism, and locates our president-elect within the debate over who is and isn't a real Christian:

FALSANI:

Who's Jesus to you?

(He laughs nervously)

OBAMA:
Right.

Jesus is an historical figure for me, and he's also a bridge between God and man, in the Christian faith, and one that I think is powerful precisely because he serves as that means of us reaching something higher.

And he's also a wonderful teacher. I think it's important for all of us, of whatever faith, to have teachers in the flesh and also teachers in history.

Hope is not a program

Just a reminder for all of us out there burnt out and depressed today. As Christians, we believe on faith that things are going to get worse before they get better. God has not assured us that truth and goodness will slowly ascend to victory over time; quite the contrary, Scripture tells us at every turn that evil will win, and win more, and finally reach its hour of triumph before our God intervenes suddenly and supernaturally.

For our children, we hope that the ascendancy of evil will not be in our day. For our neighbors' salvation, we hope that truth will not be discredited in the eyes of all. For ourselves perhaps, we hope that our legacy will be the good we accomplished in our lives.

But as for the course of the world, we do not hope that we will achieve the victory of good. We will fail in every measurable way. The hope that Obama proclaims is not finally our hope; at best he proclaims hope for a time and a season.

Our hope is not a program.

Our hope is in God, the master of history, who has brought Obama to the presidency; our hope is in the root of all being, who turns the heart of the worlds' leaders wherever he wills; our hope is a final hope, that seems so distant but closes around us with each death of someone we loved; our hope is hope not for America, not for prosperity, not for equal rights, not for just wages, but for the attainment of the goal towards which all of history strives. And this hope will be achieved by a force from outside the flow of history.

This just in: Ray Moose elected President!

It would appear to be final, since McCain has made his concession speech. The scary thing is not that Obama is president, but that we live in a country that voted for Obama.

How could it be that a man whose politics are to the left of everyone in the country and whose list of achievements fits on the back of his business card is not only elected, but considered to be the best thing since the i-pod? For my money, it's because we are a TV nation. The television trains viewers not to think seriously about anything, and so leads naturally to modern advertising, wherein a smiling and beautiful woman sitting in a car means that you must buy one (the car, that is). Similarly, a smiling and handsome man with a sonorous voice and an attractive theme about change and hope means you must elect him--serious content would actually be detrimental, distracting, like making arguments in your seventeen seconds of air time.

Just smile and look beautiful. The viewers have been trained not to think.

Think of it this way. If you were a social science researcher and you wanted to find out how Americans have been trained to make decisions by their communication technologies, would it not be your dream to conduct a nation-wide test with participants in every town? Well, the dream has become a reality, and the results are depressing, if predictable: Americans make decisions based on loose poetic associations of images and sound bytes.

The good news is that irrationality bites any hand, whether it holds a bone or not. McCain did well on the campaign trail until America formed the following "syllogism": an economic crisis happened after George Bush had been president for nearly eight years; the president in office is responsible for whatever may happen to the economy; therefore, Republicans have to go. Well, the Democrats gained seats in both the house and the senate, and their boy Ray will sit in the oval office. Every single problem that rears its ugly head in the next four years will land fairly and squarely in the Democratic lap, and Ray may find his nation of well-trained unthinkers turning "red" with anger.

Dum spiro, spero.