Culture War Victims Racking Up

This summer, it seems like the victims of the culture wars just keep racking up. It used to be that the only battlefields for the culture wars were intellectual. Ann Coulter would publish a book about godless liberals and the New York Times would run a foreign culture piece about abstinent Americans. Occasionally Christmas would get caught in the crossfire between baby killers and capitalist pig-dogs. Otherwise, though, it was plain and obvious to most Americans that liberals are not actually Maoists in disguise and Republicans do not honestly want to sell the Supreme Court to the highest bidder.

The inflamed rhetoric and often comical excess of the culture wars all became shockingly and traumatically real this summer when, just a few weeks ago, a gunman entered a Unitarian Universalist Church in Tennessee during the production of a children’s show and opened fire with a shotgun, killing two adults and wounding seven others.

His declared motive for the attacks? “All liberals should be killed.” He truly believed that liberals are defeating America in the War on Terror and that homosexuality cannot be tolerated in society. Although he is hardly the stereotypical right-winger (he slammed a neighbor’s Christian beliefs earlier and said that everything in the Bible is false), he was a fervent believer in the necessity of fighting a culture war, inspired by books written by talk radio and television commentators from the fighting right.

Last month, the madness continued. A man entered the headquarters of the Arkansas Democratic Party and shot the chairman, Bill Gwatney. He was killed in the attack. Although the shooter did not have an explicitly political agenda, he stated that he had lost his job. In his demented mind, it appears that he blamed Democrats in some part for the weak economy and decided to exact revenge.

It is tragic that the rise of participatory citizenship in the internet age has meant that such extremism has had outlets to grow. We are living in a day and age in which any person can get access to ideas and become an advocate for issues. This newfound sense of connectedness and awareness is absolutely fantastic for freedom and can help our country thrive in the next generation.

Unfortunately, the explosion in passion has not been matched by an upswing in principle. People still cling to labels and marketed identities, refusing to take the time to let reason inform their beliefs. This means that we have people who truly believe that political ideology is the starting point of morality, rather than an offshoot of it. Thus, when one attacks conservatism, they are godless scum who need to be cleansed from the Earth. Of course this belief cannot possibly fit within the label “conservatism,” which is all about traditional values, community rights, national sovereignty, and free markets.

Nothing in these ideas embraces the butchering of human beings.

The right-wing has gotten caught up in this mess more than the left because, for one reason or another, it has sold out its intellectual heritage. In past generations, the right believed in men of intellectual integrity and tested reason, like William Buckley, George Santayana, Russell Kirk, and Milton Friedman. These men were passionate and even temperamental at times, but always smart enough and grounded in principle enough to truly believe in the human scale and social harmony, at least to the point of refusing to allow terrorism to become a means of change.

Now, we are somehow left with Rush Limbaugh, who praises Red China’s socialist fuel subsidies; Michael Savage, who does not believe in autism; and Ann Coulter, who believes that the 2004 GOP convention was “heaven.”

Is it any wonder that such brutal stupidity and antithetical thinking leads to very real death?

It is time to call off these culture wars, fueled by blatant idiocy, brazen propaganda, and the embrace of the very same anti-intellectualism that conservatives once prided themselves in standing against.

And it is time for all of us to set aside our philosophical arguments and conjecturing for a little while and devote our thoughts and prayers to the victims and perpetrators of these awful crimes against humanity.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/08/13/arkansas.shooting/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/07/27/church.shooting/index.html?iref=newssearch
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/guestvoices/2008/07/call_for_culture_war_truce.html

Welcome

Welcome to Bad Dinner Conversations, a blog devoted to religion, politics, and other generally deep things that should not be discussed at that special dinner. After several months of running a blog for all intents and purposes out of the Facebook Notes feature, it only seemed natural to progress to a real blog.

Here you will find a considerable amount of commentary from a right-wing, libertarian-ish perspective combined with Catholic rantings about the world’s people. Every now and then, expect a bit of good old-fashioned Thomas Merton/Dorothy Day/Cesar Chavez-inspired orthodox radicalism.

Some of this work has surfaced in other places, some of it will be entirely original. In any case, may this work find you well and leave you better.

All the best,

Matt