Three Wise Men

VAGINAL STATUS: Smartypants


I heard Salman Rushdie speak last year – megawatt smartie, he. He spoke to the conflicts going on around our world these days. There is a misconception, he said, that we are engaged in a holy war; Christians versus Muslims. East versus West. Actually, says he, these are not separable factions, let alone polar opposites, these “sides” are an illusion.

East and West are inextricably intertwined, and have been since the Crusades. Christians and Muslims are both the children on Abraham; they dance, taking turns leading and following, their diaspora link together somewhere in every family, the tracks of these ancestors cross and cross back through millennia.

The conflict, says very smart Salman Rushdie, is between reason and fundamentalism.

And he is right. Two other smart men have also come to this conclusion. Mouse is a student of History, actually, literally, and a teacher to his core. He tells me this is all about the Age of the Enlightenment. There was a time when God was the only Mover, and human lives were short and brutal, and a Better World was the thin comfort that kept the peasants from revolt. Then the Enlightenment dawned, the Revolutions rolled over tyranny and superstition, and the world r/evolved forward.

We built our nation on reason, on logical fairness compelled via laws written and interpreted by Reasonable people. Certainly the system runs good people over from time to time, is full of the flaws that come with humans – our cradle-mates, fear and stupidity – but the basic tenant is that we will try to uncover truth and live by what it says. During the Enlightenment science was at the pinnacle of regard, a web of discovery and excavation expanding our self-knowledge through deciphering the codes manifested in the natural world. Truth IS discernable, our earnest nation thought; we have to make ourselves wise enough to REAL-ize it.

And now this third smart man, Barak Obama, he is telling us that our reasonable selves are needed by our country. He talks to us as though we are capable of critical thinking. He does not refuse to acknowledge complexity, nor does he see complexity as an impossible barrier. He tells us the solutions to our headaches of Now are still possible, but that they will require much work and these hard times are realistically likely to last a long while yet.

Sarah Palin and John McCain are the poster kids for fundamentalism, for because-I-said-so logic, for the theory of fake science that the world was Intelligently Designed for us to consume, for the comforting binary of Us vs. Them. They are rumor-sowers, conjuring up the dragons we ignorant serfs both dread and worship. The bogeymen of that dark side have cultivated our savagery until we’ve almost eaten ourselves right up.

Obama is about nuance and negotiation, wisdom and justice and restraint and the daily work of citizenship, asking us to vote our better selves in a cool, low-pitched lullaby tone. He’s literally the Voice of Reason. Blessed be his name, may he deliver us from evil.