In a Good Horror Movie Almost Everybody Dies

Geraldo, with whom I shirt-sleeved the long warm afternoons away during our Chronicle daze, writes:

I would like to see more tooth and claw in your blog .... Tell people what Garrison Keillor is really like, as opposed to the head-scratching sage from rural parts he pretends to be. "He's a MEAN man," you told me when you came back from an interview. Tell about the confused feelings when you see a plumber's butt on a fat man. Write about faculty politics in the context of Kissinger's apercu that they're so vicious because so little is at stake. More red meat, please.

He also tells me not to be so "wistful."

In fact, I am composing anti-Bush columns in my head all the time, but it seems to me that such attacks should be as precisely done as a Shakespearean sonnet. They should be not just a scream of rage but something that honors and advances a noble form, albeit an angry one. Unfortunately, Bush really does reduce me to incoherent gasping, which makes people want to give me a Heimlich, not follow my lead. That stuttering fury arises because I really don't understand people whose view of the world is such that they think he's doing a good job for working people. Why don't they see? I think. It seems to me that the average working person should be able to see. Finding ways to make that particular anti-Bush argument seems worthwhile, but others have already done so. With time and hard work -- maybe I could get dual degrees in psycholinguistics and marcoeconomics in my spare time -- I might be able to add something to existing arguments. Still, it's frustrating to know that existing arguments haven't had great success. I don't really understand why not.

But my agitation is greater because I do understand why so-called Evangelical Christians support Bush. They think God wants them to. They think that voice in their ear as they work through the confusion and contradiction of the "inerrant" Christian Bible is God's voice, not simply their own desperate wish to find simple meaning in a murky pastiche.

I do not want to oversimplify the Evangelical mind and call it dangerous --currently dangerous -- in the same way the segment of Islam that encourages suicide bombing is. But I wonder what the brake is that would keep the Evangelicals from becoming so? The crusades and the Inquisition and a thousand wars of fratricide and genocide were Christian, and if they were imposed by hierarchies, at the top of those hierarchies were people in whose ear God whispered. For all the talk about the independence of Protestants, many of them seem more than willing to follow their own God whisperers.

I have been there and done that. I know what it was like to work day by day to suppress rationality because my preachers would work through their Sunday lesson step by step and idea by idea, boasting of their iron logic, only to say, "Finally, it becomes a matter of faith," meaning, "Of course, it doesn't make sense but what are you gonna do?" Anyone who knows he or she is right and that the premise on which that certainty is based is unfalsifiable -- though you slay me, yet shall I trust Him -- is a dangerous person. This attitude isn't just limited to conservative Protestantism, but conservative Protestantism is what I know. And I know there is nothing I could possibly say to convince anyone who believes George Bush is God's chosen that he is not. All I can do is offend them. And that's certainly worth doing since perhaps it will raise their blood pressure and they will die before election day.

But perhaps it will only raise mine. And that makes me wistful.