Maybe I’m Amish After All

Last updated on: January 20, 2009 at 9:04 pm by Fr. Dwight Longenecker

Maybe I’m Amish After All 2009-01-20T21:04:00-05:00 Fr. Dwight Longenecker

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I watched the inauguration today, and I’m sorry folks. I simply can’t get excited about this ‘extraordinarily gifted man’ that everybody is ecstatic about. I think he’s full of hot air. His speech was a load of platitudes that was probably strung together by Oprah Winfrey. I can’t help feeling that he’s just another canned politician with a slick grin put together by smarty pants media men paid by the guys in the back room.

When I breathe my dislike of the guy people assume that I must be barmy for Bush, kooky for McCain and pie eyed for Palin. (OK, I admit that I was rather taken with Palin but that is for a reason which will become clear) I’m not. I think they’re all full of hot air, that they’re all canned politicos slapped together by their own PR guys and paid by another set of guys in the back room.

This is where my true political colors show. (If anybody really cares) and that is, that my political color is beige. That is to say, I don’t have any political colors. The only reason I liked Sarah Palin is because she was a breath of fresh air from Alaska who stepped on to the political stage as a genuine nobody, spoke her mind, had a nice line in high heels, shot from the hip and didn’t seem to like all the stage managers they surrounded her with.

In this respect I think it is my Amish roots revealing themselves. I distrust politicians of all sorts. In ordinary life I don’t much like people who want to be in charge, and are willing to say anything to anybody to get elected, so why should I like somebody like that writ large? That’s what the Amish are like. They dislike the establishment. They don’t fit in. They thumb their noses at the lot of them with their pinned together clothes, their outlandish beards, their bizarre customs and their kooky clothes. “Keep it!” they cry out, “Keep it all! It’s all a load of foolish worldliness. All of you are full of horse apples. I’m keeping my buggy and my barn raisings and my scrapple and schnitz and knepp and fat ladies wearing bonnets and chicken pot pie and braided rugs and apple butter and my pork and sauerkraut.

Maybe that’s why I like being a Catholic too. It’s the best way to be counter cultural, and maybe that’s why I keep my own outlandish beard, wear my cassock every day and keep turning out the lights.

I wonder if the insurance on a horse and buggy is cheaper than my Volkswagen. Maybe that’s why I bought a VW in the first place…’Volkswagen’ is probably German for ‘horse and buggy.’

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