Why anger at the Right can be justified

Last updated on: April 27, 2014 at 7:38 pm by Dave Griffey

Why anger at the Right can be justified 2014-04-27T19:38:00-04:00 Dave Griffey

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Conservatism is no Christ. And sometimes those who walk under the banner of conservative can be wrong. Dead wrong. For instance, torture. Torture is wrong. Always has been. It’s what the bad guys do. From Reginald Front de Bowuf to Major Toht, one of the character traits meant to drive home their evilness was the use of torture. The Gestapo, the Vietcong, the KJB, the Spanish Inquisition, American Indians, you name it. Their use of torture was a black mark on their ledgers. Torture and evil, they go hand in hand.

And waterboarding? Torture. I’m no expert, but it doesn’t take more than an ant’s brains to figure if we found our terrorists were waterboarding our troops we’d be screaming from coast to coast. And rightly so. It is torture in the classic sense of the word. Before the world heard of waterboarding, variations of it were long understood as horrifying, cruel and evil.

And yet, for reasons that are beyond this brief post, modern conservatives have thrown their lot in with the torturers of the past, not just shamefully using the practice, but almost boasting of their willingness to do so. Here is Sarah Palin, whose star showed brightly for a brief time, and has since fallen to earth for most thinking people, pining for more torture via waterboarding. And and not just advocating it, but invoking religious imagery connected to Christian rites and sacraments, an act one thinks of when thinking of Jesus and John the Baptist, of babies sprinkled and families celebrating a milestone in one’s faith walk. Sigh.

When Francis Ford Coppola fused the assassination of the heads of the Five Families with the baptism of Michael Corleon’s nephew in the classic The Godfather, the juxtaposition is clear. The sacred versus the profane. What is good occurring alongside that which is evil. Birth and new life, death and murder. And here’s Palin, mixing the two to whip up her followers and appeal to the base. An appeal that rests heavily on a growing trend in our post-modern age: that right and wrong don’t apply to us, they only apply to them. The Right isn’t the only ones to do this of course. But since the Right claims to stand on the best of the past, one would expect better. Especially since we’ve seen where that attitude – the attitude that rules don’t apply to us, just them – tends to lead.

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