Political Paralysis: what would Jesus do?

Christ Carrying the Cross

Hieronymous Bosch

1485-1490
Oil on panel
76.7 x 83.5 cm
Musee des Beaux-Arts, Ghent

Obama, budget director Peter Orszag and health czar Nancy-Ann DeParle grasp the intricacies of the health-care system as well as any three humans, and they could write a law to make it far more efficient. But now it is in the hands of legislators and lobbyists who care much less about the rationality of the system than they do about the way the bill will affect their particular part of it. Everyone has a parochial agenda. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, for example, wants to be sure a new cancer treatment center in Nevada has favored status. Democracy and representative government are a lot messier than the progressives and their heirs, including Obama, want to admit. No wonder they are so often frustrated.
David S. Broder - Washington Post

Given the slow progress of cap and trade legislation in the Senate, Europeans are beginning to understand why the UN might be an easier forum for Mr Obama than Capitol Hill. In this, Mr Obama is accused of not trying hard enough, rather than trying to do the wrong things. “Europeans no longer see President Obama as merely an innocent victim of what they regard as rightwing nuttiness in the American political wars,” says Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution. “They are beginning to worry that the president has contributed to the paralysis of the system by playing too much defence.”
Edward Luce - Financial Times

David Seaton's News Links  

Wingnuts are always framing any question that comes into their heads with a  "what would Jesus do", so I thought I would approach the subject of America's political paralysis in the same terms.

What would Jesus do it he were elected president of the USA? 

Well of course, if the right wanted to actually run Jesus for president they would have to procure him an American birth certificate, but I suppose if they took the part where it says "place of birth: Bethlehem, Palestine" and rubbed out the (shudder) "Palestine" and substituted "Pennsylvania" that would do the trick. Of course the only president ever born in Pennsylvania was James Buchanan, considered to be in the running with George W. Bush as the worst president in US history. But what the heck, wouldbe birthers would have to be satisfied with Pennsylvania.

American politics being what it is Jesus would have to get a shave and a blowdry haircut and learn to drink beer and boilermakers and eat hotdogs and tacos and bagels and be a regular guy so as not to look effete and elitist... and to read what his handlers wrote for him off a teleprompter, but I suppose if John Edwards could manage all that, God could too.

Of course the wingnuts would have to be crazy to run Jesus for president, it's obvious to me that they have never really studied his programs and policies in any detail; with  his love for the poor and driving money lenders from the Temple and encouraging his followers to pay taxes and all of that. And who is going to be First Lady? His mom? 

Well, so suppose he finally got elected, he would for sure run into trouble from day one.

Imagine that at the inaugural ball he changed water into wine: he's in trouble right then and there with special interest groups like the Winegrape Growers of America. You don't think California's Nancy Pelosi would let something like that pass, do you? Not with her state going broke.

Now, of course, a salient part of Jesus's program was always healing the sick, for which he never charged a shekel, but if he continued to do that while in office the American Medical Association would be all over him and the big pharma lobbies too... You can imagine the smear campaigns... I prefer not to.

And of course then there is the Holy Land, "Terra Sancta" as old Yasser Arafat used to call it. You can imagine how much slack AIPAC is going to cut Jesus, of all people, on that one, can't you?

Finally, I think that one day, after his morning run on the Potomac, he might just up and drown both houses of congress and all of K-street in the reflecting pool of the Washington monument like he did with the Gaderene Swine... to general applause both in America and beyond her shores. 

The moral of the story of course is that the problem is systemic and not really about personalities. As the Spanish say, "esto no lo arregla ni Díos", not even God can fix this paralysis. DS

Another Christmas story

The Holy Family with St Anne, 1628, Rubens, Museo del Prado, Madrid.

David Seaton's News Links

Christmas is a time to be with family and friends, or to think of them and to remember them lovingly if they are very far away or no longer among the living. It is also a time when Christians are urged to wish for 'peace on earth, good will to men' and consequentially obliged to practice the Christian virtues of forgiving and loving their enemies. However, in order to truly love one's friends and to truly forgive and to begin to love one's enemies, it is obviously essential to first begin by being able to distinguish between one's friends and one's enemies. This is not always as easy as it would appear at first glance. Today the relations between Islam and Christianity need, more than ever, to be examined and revised. Westerners ignorance and lack of appreciation of Islam is doubly aggravated by their ignorance of Muslim's traditional knowledge and esteem of Christianity... An esteem born out by the number of Muslims named, "Miriam," (Mary) and "Isa", (Jesus). Tragically, little is known in the West of Islam's affection for the Virgin Mary (Umm Isa) to whom an entire chapter of the Koran is devoted. Karen Armstrong, a former nun and perhaps the English language's most interesting writer on comparative religions, published the article quoted below in The Guardian on Friday. It makes a perfect Christmas meditation in these times of hatred and intolerance. DS

The Muslim prophet born in Bethlehem - Karen Armstrong - Guardian

Abstract: In 632, after five years of fearful warfare, the city of Mecca in the Arabian Hijaz voluntarily opened its gates to the Muslim army. No blood was shed and nobody was forced to convert to Islam, but the Prophet Muhammad ordered the destruction of all idols and icons of the Divine. There were a number of frescoes painted on the inner walls of the Kabah, the ancient granite shrine in the centre of Mecca, and one of them, it is said, depicted Mary and the infant Jesus. Immediately Muhammad covered it reverently with his cloak, ordering all the other pictures to be destroyed except that one. This story may surprise people in the west, who have regarded Islam as the implacable enemy of Christianity ever since the crusades, but it is salutary to recall it during the Christmas season when we are surrounded by similar images of the Virgin and Child. It reminds us that the so-called clash of civilisations was by no means inevitable. For centuries Muslims cherished the figure of Jesus, who is honoured in the Qur'an as one of the greatest of the prophets and, in the formative years of Islam, became a constituent part of the emergent Muslim identity. There are important lessons here for both Christians and Muslims - especially, perhaps, at Christmas. The Qur'an does not believe that Jesus is divine but it devotes more space to the story of his virginal conception and birth than does the New Testament, presenting it as richly symbolic of the birth of the Spirit in all human beings (Qur'an 19:17-29; 21:91). Like the great prophets, Mary receives this Spirit and bears Jesus, who will, in his turn, become an ayah, a revelation of peace, gentleness and compassion to the world.(...) The Muslim devotion to Jesus is a remarkable example of the way in which one tradition can be enriched by another. It cannot be said that Christians returned the compliment. While the Muslims were amassing their Jesus-traditions, Christian scholars in Europe were denouncing Muhammad as a lecher and charlatan, viciously addicted to violence. But today both Muslims and Christians are guilty of this kind of bigotry and often seem eager to see only the worst in each other. The Muslim devotion to Jesus shows that this was not always the case. In the past, before the political dislocations of modernity, Muslims were always able to engage in fruitful and stringent self-criticism. This year, on the birthday of the Prophet Jesus, they might ask themselves how they can revive their long tradition of pluralism and appreciation of other religions. For their part, meditating on the affinity that Muslims once felt for their faith, Christians might look into their own past and consider what they might have done to forfeit this respect.
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