Last Friday Paul Krugman of the New York Times wrote about our sorry political condition in a piece titled “Karl Rove’s America.” His cause for lament was that “there is no longer such a thing as nonpolitical truth,” which is to say there is no Truth in Rove’s world. The GOP elite, observed Krugman, have contorted, lied about, misrepresented, exploited or sidestepped virtually every issue and smeared every critic -- and it all goes down easily with “the faithful,” who happily “follow the twists and turns of the party line with a loyalty that would have pleased the Comintern.”
Yes, and you can test that proposition by watching the faces of any Bush audience, which grin and fawn as though the truth is descending from on High, no matter how far removed it is from reality. Of course dog-and-pony-show pundits then regurgitate the talking-points Republican “truth” in conservative setting after conservative setting in the liberal media.
After surveying the sordid history of the Bush administration’s lies, smears, etc., Krugman finished with, “How did our political system get to this point?” He partly answered this question in the preceding line: “Mr. Bush … has always known that his trusted political adviser … is a thug.” So what could we expect? But something else soon caught my attention that seemed to suggest another partial answer.
While heading to the Politics section of the Washington Post I noticed a headline in Health. I assure you that as a man known to endure a strict diet of cigarettes, cinnamon schnapps and double cheeseburgers I am decidedly not an avid student of the Health section, but this was too enticing to leave uninvestigated: “Prayer's Power to Heal Strangers Is Examined.”
It seems the smartest man alive is one Mitchell W. Krucoff, a Duke University cardiologist. He must be really brilliant, because somehow he finagled a government grant or somebody of a chump’s cash to fund the multiyear-research conclusion that “praying for sick strangers does not improve their prospects of recovering.”
More precisely: “The study of more than 700 heart patients, one of the most ambitious attempts to test the medicinal power of prayer, showed that those who had people praying for them from a distance, and without their knowledge, were no less likely to suffer a major complication, end up back in the hospital or die.”
Now keep in mind that Dr. Krucoff was given money for this stunningly predictable outcome. But there were nettlesome problems with the medieval methodology; for instance it “could not accurately measure factors as fundamental as the ‘dose’ of prayer administered and could not account for the possible effects of family members praying for patients on their own, the researchers noted.”
That was all the opening needed for other “researchers” of a preconceived bent to declare that “the study showed the need for additional research.” (One happens to be conducting a “federally funded study” of the power of prayer on healing wounds. That’s “federally funded.” As in the federal government. As in your tax dollars.) In short, no amount of contradictory findings will ever deter, discourage or sway those who simply choose to believe.
In matters of religious faith, that’s fine. I too hold spiritual beliefs, which, of course, by definition lie outside scientific verifiability. But when Krugman asked “How did our political system get to this point,” I think part of the answer lies in his too-figurative use of the term, the GOP “faithful.”
That is, for many among us the same level of pure, unverifiable faith properly rooted in spirituality has improperly spilled over into secular beliefs. Faith in the GOP is to politics what faith in God is to religion. No evidence of its good government is required and no facts to the contrary will ever make any difference to the True Believer.
We -- or I should say, the red half of us -- have forsaken the Age of Reason and plunged headlong into the Age of Faith. We have neocon faith, discredited time after time. We have supply-side economic faith, discredited time after time. We have groundless faith in global warming as garbage and faith in teenage abstinence and even faith that Saddam really did have those weapons. Facts are irrelevant. Faith is all that’s required to know the truth of the matter.
So yes, the GOP “faithful” will indeed “follow … the party line with a loyalty that would have pleased the Comintern.” And why not? Reason and analysis are out. Pure, disembodied faith is in. And there is no more stubborn foe of an informed democracy.