Showdown at the OK Corral

Not much drama last night Bush's speech last night.  The drama is yet to come.  As expected a sniggering Bush essentially told the American people, "Stop me; I dare you. " The drama will come only if there are some Wyatt Earps who can get together a posse to face him down.  As I've said before, this could get interesting. Let's hope for the sake of the rule of law it does.

Comments

[Adrienne]

Jack - I'm interested about whether you saw O'Reilly on The Colbert Report tonight and what you thought about his "secular progressives like you . . . traditionalists like me and Jon Stewart" remarks.

[Jack Whelan]

Hi Adrienne--

Long time no hear from. Glad you’re still reading ATF.

Regarding O”Reilly on Colbert, I don’t really have much useful to say. It just seemed like a lot of tongue-in-cheek sparring on both sides. O’Reilly seemed a little confused about whether to play along with Colbert the act or Colbert the person behind the act. In either case, Colbert is not a secularist. While Colbert used to make fun of religion in his “Today in God” bit in his Daily Show days, he is in fact a practicing Catholic, even teaching Sunday School at his parish.

As far as Stewart being a traditionalist, he certainly doesn’t present himself as one on his show, but for all I know he might be an observant Jew in his private life. So on the face of it, his remarks didn’t make much sense to me. As far as O’Reilly being a traditionalist, I would argue that he is a representative of zombie traditionalism, which I wrote about in early December 2005. He grew up on Long Isand near where I grew up and even went to the same Catholic High School that I did for a couple of years. He’s very typical of a mentality that I grew up with and know very well. He and my father (who went to that high school too) are almost mental clones of one another.

The zombie traditionalism I grew up with had an Irish Catholic cast to it; the kind that you might be more familiar with has a Dixie cast. In either case, it is zombie to the extent that it is an empty form animated to undeadness by a nostalgia for something that no longer exists or supports healthy human living. I'm not saying that there are no places where a healthy traditionalism lives, but such instances are rare and moribund.

The alternative to the secularism/traditionalism dead end conflict, is what I've been calling here post-secularism, which requires a combination of a religious world view with a recognition that takes what's valuable from the the tradition on a pilgrimage into the unknown future. It's more of an Abrhamic religiosity than a priestly reliosity. It's less stable, more provisional and adaptible. One has to learn to travel lightly.