Rhetoric Race and Religion
I understand the delusional thinking leading to the potential government shutdown. I understand it from the from the inside and better than the editors of the New York Times do. See, they leave God out of the equation. Rational people just don’t “get” holy war.
I’ve spent the last twenty-five years writing my way out of my false past certainties. My latest attempt to explain myself to myself is my book about religious delusion: And God Said, “Billy!” Yet in spite of the therapy of writing five novels and many nonfiction booksthat describe my tortured journey from fundamentalism to a fact-based way of looking at the world, I keep being reminded of my old self.
When I see Ted Cruz and the forty Tea Party extremists in the House grandstanding and ready to plunge the world economy into a tailspin I understand who they are and why they’re seemingly crazy. You see thirty years ago I was one of them. More over without my late father’s work energizing the religious right the Tea Party as we know it would never have emerged from the swamp of American politics to haunt us.
Readers of the New York Times have had the right wing delusional echo chamber explained to them. Most recently Nicholas D. Kristof (Suffocating Echo Chamber, NYT Sept. 26) wrote about the deleterious effect of the closed circuit thinking of Fox News, the talk radio hosts and other culture warriors. Kristof’s emphasis in his excellent column was on the political consequences of far right delusional thinking that’s literally threatening our economic well-being by threatening a government shutdown.
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