Not much drama last night Bush’s speech last night. The drama is yet to come. As expected a sniggering Bush essentially told the American people, "Stop me; I dare you. " The drama will come only if there are some Wyatt Earps who can
get together a posse to face him down. As I’ve said before, this could
get interesting. Let’s hope for the sake of the rule of law it does.
Showdown at the OK Corral
Not much drama last night Bush’s speech last night. The drama is yet to come. As expected a sniggering Bush essentially told the American people, "Stop me; I dare you.…
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Jack – I’m interested about whether you saw O’Reilly on The Colbert Report tonight and what you thought about his “secular progressives like you . . . traditionalists like me and Jon Stewart” remarks.
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Hi Adrienne–
Long time no hear from. Glad you’re still reading ATF.
Regarding O”Reilly on Colbert, I don’t really have much useful to say. It just seemed like a lot of tongue-in-cheek sparring on both sides. O’Reilly seemed a little confused about whether to play along with Colbert the act or Colbert the person behind the act. In either case, Colbert is not a secularist. While Colbert used to make fun of religion in his “Today in God” bit in his Daily Show days, he is in fact a practicing Catholic, even teaching Sunday School at his parish.
As far as Stewart being a traditionalist, he certainly doesn’t present himself as one on his show, but for all I know he might be an observant Jew in his private life. So on the face of it, his remarks didn’t make much sense to me. As far as O’Reilly being a traditionalist, I would argue that he is a representative of zombie traditionalism, which I wrote about in early December 2005. He grew up on Long Isand near where I grew up and even went to the same Catholic High School that I did for a couple of years. He’s very typical of a mentality that I grew up with and know very well. He and my father (who went to that high school too) are almost mental clones of one another.
The zombie traditionalism I grew up with had an Irish Catholic cast to it; the kind that you might be more familiar with has a Dixie cast. In either case, it is zombie to the extent that it is an empty form animated to undeadness by a nostalgia for something that no longer exists or supports healthy human living. I’m not saying that there are no places where a healthy traditionalism lives, but such instances are rare and moribund.
The alternative to the secularism/traditionalism dead end conflict, is what I’ve been calling here post-secularism, which requires a combination of a religious world view with a recognition that takes what’s valuable from the the tradition on a pilgrimage into the unknown future. It’s more of an Abrhamic religiosity than a priestly reliosity. It’s less stable, more provisional and adaptible. One has to learn to travel lightly.
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