"Warren G. Harding Is My Solace"

Of all the Christians who write overtly about their faith, I have always found Anne Lamott to be one of the most consistently thoughtful, humane, and touching. Her latest column at Salon finds her both optimistic and pessimistic about America.

When I got back, a lot of people were going around saying that the war in Iraq was over. Karl Rove said we didn't win the war in Iraq, we won the Battle of Iraq. In any case, now we're in the less festive, "everything has turned to shit" stage, the "granny getting wheeled off to the hospital in a wheelbarrow" stage. People are starting to badger us into "admitting" that the war was a good thing; also, that Bush is not as dumb as a lot of us think. I'd like to point out nicely that they also tried to get us to "admit" this about Ronald Reagan. What can you do in the face of this but just smile prettily? The important thing to remember is that we survived Ronald Reagan, and we will survive Bush. It gives me hope to remember this, because that was really scary -- under Reagan's happy-go-lucky demeanor was true malevolence. [apostropher: Now he's just one of the several thousand delusional people in this country who thinks he was actually President of the United States.] On the other hand, I don't think Bush can pull it off. He just doesn't have it. He's Alfred E. Newman in "Top Gun." He's still just a bad boy trying to redeem himself and his father.

Anne, I respect you and your opinions, but I see a mile-wide streak of malevolence in GWB that even that creaking gasbag Reagan couldn't muster. Bush strikes me as the type that swerves to hit cats, and I grew up around enough of those people to recognize it. But I stand side by side with you on this: there will be no "admitting" that this war was on balance a good thing or that Bush is a smart man. I have yet to see evidence of either.

Another thing that gives me hope is knowing that historically, what is done in secret will be brought to light. You can ask Jesus, or J.Edgar Hoover, or Clyde. This should scare our little Republican friends to death. History promises that the pendulum will swing back to the left. The truth of this smoke-and-mirrors, smirky, smug, pimping White House will be exposed. Everything always is. Even Warren Harding was popular when he died. We've been wearing glasses scratched with fear for nearly two years, but with no WMD, no Saddam, no Osama, people are beginning to see better.

I feel more despair in some areas, though. The White House actually seems to believe that it is fighting a holy war. By the same token, so did Pope Urban II. He thought the first crusade would be a breeze, that his forces were noble and heroic and of God, and that they would rescue everyone. He did not think about the aftermath, what effect the ripples from his rock would have on the pond. For 90 years people thought he'd won, and then we got a thousand years of rage between Christians and Muslims, endless death and brutality in the name of sanctimony and obsession.

[...]

But what gives me the most hope of all is that the more suffering and bullshit there is, the more good you see called forth -- caring, generosity, courage. For awhile, everyone seemed so afraid that they went along while our liberties were being stolen. But recently it's been possible to bank again on the knowledge that the American people really, truly love freedom. I think things will be harder for the right again. They've been crystal clear for a long time now on what they are up to, from Ashcroft trying to make the PATRIOT Act permanent, to Bush flogging his obscene tax cut and then landing on the aircraft carrier with his pleased-as-punch little turtley smirk. What's not clear is how many of us there are, and how hard we're willing to fight for this unbelievably touching, vulnerable experiment called democracy.

Hear, hear. I'm sick of seeing these smug pretenders proclaim that anybody who doesn't swallow their prescriptions hook, line, and sinker is somehow un-American. They don't get to redefine what "American" is and their program is profoundly undemocratic, to boot. They want you to believe that America was founded as a "Christian" nation, when nothing could be further from the truth. America was founded by Christians, along with a motley band of deists, agnostics, atheists, and the rest, and nearly all of them came here to escape "Christian" nations where the government and religion had become hopelessly entangled. And in every case throughout history where this entanglement has happened, religion, government, and the people all came out decidedly worse for the experience.

Bush and bin Laden are both fundamentalists staring across a theological divide at one another, perfectly willing to sacrifice both their own people and each other's because their god has told them to do so. If there is a Hell, they will be roommates in their own private Sartrean eternity where they can fight each other hand-to-hand. In the meantime, it's the rest of the world that gets to suffer through it. I still believe that Bush is deeply vulnerable in 2004 and that he stands no better than a 50% chance of winning a second term, but that doesn't mean that he hasn't made the world immensely more violent and dangerous for at least a generation. He has.