Like Pigs in Mud
Not even a month ago, the GOP swarmed some goons into the Capitol building to fingerpaint the walls with their own shit. You might have seen the footage.
And yet, despite the clarion symbolism of an idiot poop siege of our national legislature, the Democratic Party can’t figure out a way to capitalize on what should be an obvious moral upper hand.
Instead, we find them negotiating stimulus spending downwards, trading horses with the enemy mere days after having won a significant battle. You see, they seem to say, only after we compromise our integrity and negotiate with these dipshit terrorists can the healing process begin.
And they do this in the name of cultivating unity, which is really what I find the ultimate kick in the nuts here.
Unity is a major touchstone word for those of us who consider ourselves interfaith. The idea that people should come together in community—(common unity, heyyyy)—is a Huge Spiritual Idea, the ultimate aim of virtually all spiritual practice. You could reasonably assert that most of what religions (and awesome drugs) are about, fundamentally, is getting practioners closer to unity consciousness, of realizing our inherent communion and oneness with all of creation. Community I understand not as an outcome to be forced upon the unwilling but the fruits of conscious labor of those who see themselves building common unity.
Disunity consciousness (cacophonic consciousness?) would then be its opposite, what Marx referred to as social alienation. This state of disconnection, of loneliness and separateness, this is the condition where most of us are living most of the time. In fact, our severence from the whole is sacralized as independence, described to us an achievement, even codified as a moral duty to stand apart on our own and be held accountabile for everything that ever happens to us.
Haha, what thought garbage. That doesn’t even make empirical sense. No actual scientist would affirm that worldview in the construction of their models.
Anyway, disunity consciousness is the collective norm. Most of our culture reinforces and reproduces disunity. Most people are way, way sadder and disconnected from each other than any of us would like to admit. We’re living through what many social researchers call an “epidemic of loneliness.”
Conservatives are called conservatives because they think this problem of widespread alienation can be solved with nostaglic cosplay. They definitely sense that Americans have nothing substantial anymore holding us together. For a while, they tried fixing this problem with Big Daddy Godtalk and forcing men and women back into antiquated gender roles, with women tacitly assigned to do all the invisible hearthwork of maintaining families and holding communities together, just as it always was.
But there’s another way of thinking about cultivating unity and that’s as spiritual practice. Working to cultivate unity in spiritual practice means unlearning ego, dropping the deluded “I” and tuning into a bigger “we.” We might even call this solidarity consciousness, this thinking of ourselves as a Big We.
The GOP is an electoral Party that has made it perfectly clear that fascism, Nazism, misogyny, and racism are not dealbreakers for membership among their ranks. They have made it known that they will never apologize for anything and accept accountability for absolutely nothing.
When Republicans talk, I know that I can’t in good conscience share their vibe, I can’t join their idea of “we.” These are men and women who campaign on the promise of dropping bombs on innocent people all over the world. They practically brag about how many foreign states they’ll lay waste to after the election. Genocide is a funny punchline to them.
This is a self-selected group of people who wallow in their own callousness like pigs in mud.
Bipartisan compromise with an electoral Party that resonates with such mad Nazi energy isn't my idea of unity. Quite the opposite, actually. The GOP as a party has largely succeeded in its aim of misappropriating Christianity to morally whitewash its platform of unstopping violence--not unlike any other religious extremist terrorist group doing the exact same thing elsewhere. Unity with them would mean giving in to their death cult demand that good people must continue to suffer and die in the name of their savior, our Lord Jesus Christ. As a Christian and a minister, I literally can’t even.
Ironically, though, the call for unity with Nazi Pigs by Democrats makes me wonder if the Democrats’ idea of “we” vibes with me, either. After all, like most millennials at this point, I don’t consider myself a member of either party. I feel exhausted by a two-party system that reduces everything to electoral contests that get in the way of having higher-level moral discussions about, say, classism, systemic racism and institutionalized misogyny.
But what I’m really against is Nazism, so any party that either welcomes Nazis or apologizes for them isn’t for me. That’s just a big duh for me.