“This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.”
If the country took its obligations to self-government at all seriously, the presence of Sarah Palin on a national ticket would have been an insult on a par with the elevation of Caligula’s horse. However, the more people pointed out Palin’s obvious shortcomings, the more the people who loved her loved her even more. She was taken seriously not merely because she had been selected to run, but also because of the fervor she had stirred among people in whose view her primary virtue as a candidate was the fact that she made the right people crazy. Their faith in Idiot America and its Three Great Premises was inviolate. Because the precincts of Idiot America were the only places where his party had a viable constituency, John McCain became the first presidential candidate in American history to run as a parody of himself.
You could see it all coming that rainy night in New Hampshire, when all the Republican candidates were alive and viable. They were faith-based and fully cognizant of the fact that they were not running for office so much as they were auditioning for a role, trying for a chance to do their duty on behalf of people who were invested as vicariously in their citizenship as baseball fans are in their teams, or as the viewers of American Idol are in their favorite singer. So that was how it happened that, at one point in the debate, the contenders were asked whether they believed in evolution.
And, in response, three of the Republican contenders for president of the United States, in what was supposed to be one of the crucial elections in the country’s history, said that, no, they didn’t believe in evolution. And the people in the hall cheered. It was a remarkable moment in that it seemed so unremarkable. There was no doubt that the three of them—Tancredo, Brownback, and Huckabee—were sincere. However, since admitting that you don’t believe in evolution is pretty much tantamount to admitting that you plan to eradicate the national debt by spinning straw into gold, it should immediately have disqualified the lot of them. In fact, it should have given people pause about the entire Republican party that a third of its presidential field was willing to admit that their view of the life sciences had stalled in the 1840s. Instead, it was a matter of hitting the right marks, and delivering right on cue the applause lines that the audience expected.
The latent causes of
faction are thus sown in the nature
of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of
activity,
according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for
different
opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other
points, as
well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders
ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of
other
descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human
passions, have,
in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual
animosity, and
rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to
co-operate for their common good.
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Listening Rowe thought, as he often did, that you couldn’t take such an odd world seriously, and yet all the time, in fact, he took it with a mortal seriousness. The grand names stood permanently like statues in his mind: names like Justice and Retribution, though what they both boiled down to was simply Mr Rennit, hundreds and hundreds of Mr Rennits. But of course if you believed in God — and the Devil — the thing wasn’t quite so comic. Because the Devil —and God too — had always used comic people, futile people, little suburban natures and the maimed and warped to serve his purposes. When God used them you talked emptily of Nobility and when the devil used them of Wickedness, but the material was only dull shabby human mediocrity in either case.
...[T]he reconciliation of the people and the army turned out to be a chimera. When the chips were down, "supporting the troops" elicited plenty of posturing but little by way of binding commitments. Far from producing a stampede of eager recruits keen to don a uniform, the events of 9/11 reaffirmed a widespread popular preference for hiring someone else’s kid to chase terrorists, spread democracy and ensure access to the world’s energy reserves. In the midst of a global war of ostensibly earthshaking importance, Americans demonstrated a greater affinity for their hometown sports heroes than for the soldiers defending the distant precincts of the American imperium. Tom Brady makes millions playing quarterback in the NFL and rakes in millions more from endorsements. Pat Tillman quit professional football to become an army ranger and was killed in Afghanistan. Yet, of the two, Brady more fully embodies the contemporary understanding of the term Patriot.
It's not that I have anything against 