Deliver Us From Evil

Last week someone told me that George Bush and his cronies are the American version of the Taliban. Remember the Taliban? Then, just yesterday, I was in the grocery store, in the book section (I don’t know what to say about books in the grocery store) and a title caught my eye. It was called Deliver Us From Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism and Liberalism, by Sean Hannity. I cannot imagine a more ridiculous title. No, I’m not planning to read it.
The first half of the title, “Deliver Us From Evil,” is an obvious appropriation of the tail end of the Lord’s Prayer. I don’t know what Mr. Hannity’s particular religio-spiritual pedigree might be. I also don’t know who came up with the title for his book. When they snagged that catchy phrase, they obviously wasn’t paying attention to the context. No doubt it sounds good, appeals to us religious types. But the Lord’s Prayer is a plea for help, not a battle call. In the prayer, it is God who defeats evil, not us. There is also no pla In the book title, it seems to be Mr. Hannity and his friends who will do the defeating. I’m all for cooperating with God in God’s work, but let’s not jump ahead. Maybe us religious types should be put off.
Then there’s the odd triad of evil: terrorism (got it), despotism (ok), and liberalism (right . . . huh?). Wait. What possible connection could there be among these three? True liberalism opposes the other two. I wonder what Mr. Hannity thinks he’s adding to the national dialogue by using such half-witted rhetoric. He can’t possibly believe that liberalism is the same as terrorism. It sells books, though.
I wonder what connection there is between American liberalism and despotism. Likewise, how is American conservatism anything like the Taliban? To call these analogies caricatures does disservice to caricatures. They’re beyond inept; they’re hopelessly unreal and contribute nothing to our national conversation.
No doubt there are some at either end of the political spectrum (and a few in the center, I suspect) who are totalitarians at heart. The majority, though, are sincere, and usually misguided, participants in the broad democratic experiment.
Don’t get me wrong, I actually kind of enjoy this kind of political discourse. I also kind of enjoy watching orangutans behind plexi-glass throwing shit at one another: it’s a captivating fantasy for a time, but after a while I’m bored and more than a little ashamed of myself.
In America we have guaranteed to one another the right to speak freely. Thankfully, the right to speak does not include the right to be heard. The free speech rights of Mr. Hannity and his Republicans-equal-Taliban opposites should be defended. Let them shout their useless slogans and poor attempts at poetic analogy until they’re hoarse. But let the rest of us ignore them. Their comic book mentalities won’t help us at all. We have more important things to do. We have the hard work of listening and speaking, and making real decisions for a real world.