Until a week or so ago, John McCain had been bumbling along in his quest for the presidency, committing gaffe after gaffe, which is either an indication of his ignorance or that he’s lying his ass off. The Republicans loyally if unenthusiastically supported him mainly because he’s a fellow Republican.
But, things changed drastically when he threw the catalyst of Sarah Palin into the mix of superstition, fear and ignorance that she so perfectly embodies, and is the driving force that is at the bottom of the hard-right, fundamentalist, religion obsessed fanaticism that is always simmering away in the lower depths of irrationality.
Catalyst: One that precipitates a process or event, especially without being involved in or changed by the consequences.
Superstition: An irrational, ignorant belief or notion, not based on reason or knowledge of the ominous significance of a circumstance, occurrence or proceeding.
McCain and Palin have no idea what a catalyst or a superstition is, and are unaware that the definition of those terms fit them so perfectly. Until McCain stirred Palin into the great cauldron of ignorance and superstition lying there just waiting to be catalyzed, he had no idea that she would precipitate a process in which she is ignorant of the ominous significance of the proceeding, and that no matter how disastrous the results of that process, she will not, can not be affected by the consequences. Insight into and understanding of cause and effect are not to be found in the superstitious. The people on the far right who have found the quintessential representative of their beliefs in Sarah Palin, the religious fundamentalists, literally believe in magic.
Their view of the world and how it works is the same as would be the case with a citizen of Rome of the time around 100 to 60 BC who is plunked down in the center of a modern city. Everything he would see, self-propelled vehicles, machines flying overhead, pictures coming out of a box, people talking into tiny plastic devices to other people, night made bright without fire, all of that he would attribute to magic and he would become superstitious because of his ignorance of the rational reasons for everything he was seeing.
The people who so enthusiastically support Sarah Palin share the same view of the world as that citizen of ancient Rome would of today’s world. The world is a mystical, magical place, controlled by supernatural beings, unseen and unheard except by the select few who, as ordained by God, just happen to make a very good living out of it without having to get a job and work for it, like the Palin supporters do, themselves.
McCain knew that he needed to do something to take the focus away from his so very obvious ineptitude, blandness and inability to gather any support other than that from ritual loyalty to name brand. And he knew that those religious fanatics were there just waiting for any excuse to galvanize them into frothing at the mouth superstitious belief in one of their own, elevated Phoenix like from the ashes of ignorance, the true believer, Sarah Palin.
So, as a last resort, he took a chance. He threw Palin into their mix and got results that he could only dream of. They have come bounding out, snarling and snapping at everyone who is not just like them, condemning us to eternal hellfire and damnation for not sharing their ignorant, superstitious beliefs and are preparing to vote themselves and us into a country ruled by religious fanatics.
They know to keep themselves restrained in normal times, when reason, logic and knowledge prevail as a working hypothesis on how to run the country, in hopes of not looking completely idiotic and foolish. Even though they repeat the lie, with chest-beating, puffed up hypocrisy that, “This is a Christian nation, founded on Christian principles by the Christian founding fathers,” they also know that there is no mention of Christianity in the Constitution and that the Constitution specifically forbids religion being any part of the governing of our country. But, they, along with Sarah Palin, would like to repeat that known lie, and maybe they can get people to believe it just as they accept their own unfounded beliefs.
What is so unbelievably insulting about this is that they, in their ignorance, assume that we are just as ignorant as they are.
The thing that makes these people so pathetic, is that they don’t know that adhering to a belief is a form of giving up. It’s a rejection of intellect, a rejection of the ability to acquire knowledge and the use of reason to understand it. There is no definition or meaning of belief that includes the need for evidence to support it. In order to hold a belief, it must not be able to be proven to be true. If it is able to be proven to be true, then there is evidence that supports it, and it is no longer a belief, with evidence it becomes knowledge, the opposite of belief.
The Sarah Palin followers cling to their and Palin’s beliefs in an effort to avoid confronting the knowledge that would dispel their beliefs. That knowledge is uncomfortable, messy and hard to deal with because their experience with that knowledge is in opposition to and contradicts everything they want to believe and the way they so desperately want things to be, which is based on the fantasies and wishful thinking of other delusional, superstitious writings about, not how things were, but how they wished they were and how they should have been.
Those writings are 2000 and more years old, and the process that brought them about is being repeated today by the Palin supporters in real time, right before our eyes. The re-writing and re-phrasing of the way things are to reflect how they want them to be is being done, regardless of all evidence to the contrary, in complete disregard for the fact that they are provably false, but in the best tradition of the Republican method of the McCain/Palin campaign to tell it like they want it to be, there are some who just might believe it and vote for them.
To a lot of the people who will go to vote this November, the choice is pretty much like flipping a quarter. But, they don’t realize that the choice of McCain/Palin, if they have their way, will have us, by law, burning and banning books, denying that there’s global warming, requiring church attendance in their choice of churches only, believing that the earth was created in a blinding flash of magic by a supernatural being, and as the McCain campaign has already indicated by not allowing her to be interviewed unless the questioners “show the proper deference.”
Asking for deference to someone who is owed no deference is the thinking that leads to the requirement for obeisance and worship required of the god-like pharos, kings and royalty of the past. The Constitution forbids that but the McCain/Palin campaign wants to set it up so that if they’re elected, they become the arbiters of all things without question. Congress as the law-maker will be superseded by the superstitious Sarah Palin. If you want to know what the law will be, just ask Sarah, she’ll thumb through the 2000 year old book, find a passage that conforms to her beliefs, and tell you that’s the way it is. Says so right here. No question about it.
