I continue to be beyond frustrated with the “leadership” in Congress.  Ultimately, the failure to do anything but help the rich and pat the poor on the head with programs designed to appease them much more than to provide any meaningful assistance, can be blamed on both sides.  The Democrats can be blamed for sometimes being complicit in the actions and other times simply not having enough political backbone to stand up the the Republicans.  The Republicans can be blamed for consistently favoring their rich benefactors over the majority of their supporters and constituents who fall into the working class which continues to become (thanks in part to Congress) a poorer and poorer class.

You have to admire the Republicans (in a perverse “hate what you do but admire how well you do it” sort of way) for how consistently they have pulled off their game.  They are running both the short and the long con.  For decades now, they have been working diligently to wedge the classes further apart.  At first I thought they we doing it by decreasing the size of the middle class, increasing the size of the lower class and strengthening both the resolve and power of the upper class via  rules and regulations (or lack thereof) designed to achieve said results.

More recently, I've begun to think I completely missed the boat.  While it is true that in the US the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, the most important statistic is that the gap between the top 1%, in terms of wealth, and the rest of us is as bad as it is has been in 90 years.  The top 1% of the US have almost 39% of the wealth in the US.  And a full 50% of our population own only 2.5% of the over all wealth.  (All data above and below is from The Institute on Policy Study).

Change the measurement to stocks, bonds and mutual funds and that percent shifts to a whopping 51% of the wealth being owned by the top 1%.  Expand that 1% to the top 10% and 90% (no, that is no a typo) of what I'll call the “Wall Street Wealth” is owned by them.  Anyone still wondering why there was a Wall Street bailout and not a Main Street bailout?

It's not that the Republicans are trying to decrease the size of the middle class.  They are trying to widen the gap between the wealthy and the middle class effectively reducing the middle class to a working class poor by comparison to the wealthy.  I might add that they are rather successfully doing so. 

While the top 1% have seen their share of capital income increase by nearly 20% over the last twenty years, the bottom 80% have seen theirs fall by almost 15%.  CEO's income has risen 300% in that time.  Corporate profits have increased by 106%... and worker's pay has increased a measly 4.3%.  You have to hand it to the Republicans – they are good at this.

What is surprising is how well they play the working middle class.  A surprisingly high number of that group of people are some of the stanchest supporters of Republicans.  The Republicans are playing a long con here, making promises and appearing one way while working as hard as they know how to achieve results that rip off their strongest supporters.  All the while, their actions tell the tale saying to those not in the top 10%, “get your own.”

Recent battles on the hill should be more than enough to pull the curtain back to reveal congressional Republican's real motivation, as they work hard to stop Obamacare, stop extending unemployment checks and, at the same time, extend tax cuts to the wealthiest 1%.  While they do, they wrap themselves in the flag, shout things like “down with socialism” and “no taxes,”  in an attempt to endear themselves to middle class America.  All the while, they are working to install a plutocracy operating under the false front of a democracy in America... and they are doing it in God's name.

And that's where we should ultimately see thorough their ruse most clearly.  Adopting Christian precepts to support stepping on the least of these, to intentionally marginalize part of a society, to relegate a particular segment of a population to a place where they struggle to maintain good health, shelter and food while a small percentage of the elite dine of the backs of the least of these... well, that should be a con that just won't sell.

My question is, when is the Church going to do something about it?  My question is, when are you, when am I, when are we going to do something about it?  We have the numbers, just not the money.  We still live in a democracy (for now).  When are we going to do something about it?

(UPDATE: More on this from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I) - Bravo Sen. Sanders!!)

It's an upside down world.  I can hardly think of a better example of how upside down it is than the relationship between church and state in the United States.  We live in a bass-ackward time.  Think about it.  Those who want to close the gap between church and state, don't want the the state to get involved in issues of social justice and want the state to support the war machine.  Conversely, those who want the state to get involved in issues of social justice and want the state to stop supporting the war machine, want to see the gap between church and state reinforced.

Now, of course, there are nuances to each side's perspective that make their take on church and state a little more rational sounding, but in general it just seems crazy.

For me, this is particularly true of those who claim that “America” is a Christian nation.  After all, “One nation under God,” and “In God We Trust.”   They tend to be the very same people who want the government to get out of welfare, food stamps, social security, Head Start, and basically any program that can even loosely be considered “socialist” (except, of course, things like libraries, roads, police officers, firefighters – well, you get the idea).

Their argument is, the church should take care of those things, not the government.  My response is, if the churches were actually taking care of those things, the government wouldn't have to.  I also can't help but think their argument might actually be why they don't see the other things I mentioned as socialist or at least don't mind the government doing them.  It's not for any biblical standard, it's just that they don't want to have to do them.  I mean, can you imagine a road being put down by a church committee?  You think road crews just stand around now, just put a church committee in charge and see how long it takes.  (They'd probably pave the ones leading into New York, Las Vegas and a few other cities in gold. After all, many of them believe that “the road to Hell is paved in gold.”  Oddly enough, in doing so, they would actually be pointing out the irony in their own attempt at metaphor.  But I digress.)

I just can't help but wonder, what does it mean for our nation when so many Christians are using the church itself as an excuse to allow the government to operate in such an amoral way?  When we allow the government to stop supporting its own citizens by placing responsibility on the the church, we are at best pandering to the very lowest form of displacement of responsibility and at worst we are making the church complicit in supporting institutionalized domination which can easily lead to a plutocracy rather than a social democracy.  (And before we know it, the road to D.C. will actually be paved with gold – after all, metaphorically it already is).

If the Church wants to argue that the government should get out of supporting those in need, out of supporting it's citizens who most need it, I say, the Church needs to get to doing a better job of supporting the people who are most in need, because if you were doing it, the government wouldn't have to.  To do it any other way – well, it's just bass-ackward.

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
- Carl Sandburg

I suspect Sandburg was just talking about actual fog in this poem, but we English major types do tend to over analyze...particularly poems.  One way of looking at this is to see the fog as the problems we sometimes face (be they death, worry,  etc.).

For many, many years, the dumbing down of America has been our fog – never rolling in over us, but coming in on cat's feet and looking over America, threatening to pounce.  It has been acknowledged, but not much more than noticed and notated (see books like, “Anti-intellectualism in American Life” and “The Age of American Unreason” ). It is as if we believe that, like Sandburg's fog, it will eventually move on. It hasn't.

Anti-intellectualism has pounced on America.  We celebrate shows that reward people for being smarter than a fifth grader (a show, I might add, which is hosted by the “you might be a redneck” guy).  Possibly the two places that most clearly show our embracing of ignorance are church and state.  From gay bashing Christians who when engaged by someone presenting biblical hermeneutics simply quote scripture, call names and question your piousness to politicians who don't even know that the first amendment directly addresses the relationship between religion and government, the dumbing down of America has pounced on us and now it is just batting us around until it decides to devour us.

Not surprisingly, those who embrace ignorance in both church and state also want to see the two combined (one would assume it is for the sake of making ignorance much more convenient – why be ignorant about two things when you can roll them into one convent package?  What the pancake wrapped sausage is to breakfast, conflation of church and state hope to do for anti-intellectualist).

Worse yet, the unreason of our nation has combined with another terrible instrument that the Republican party has learned to play like a virtuoso: the 'could-be-me' myth.  It started with defending millionaires by telling middle American, “Hey, when you make your million, do you want the government to take it away from you?”  It worked.  Middle America started supporting policies that broadened the rights of the rich and big businesses and decreased the rights of the rest of us all on the off chance that we could make our own million - hey, it could-be-me.

So, they took it to another level.  Why not have a President that could be your drinking buddy? A "decider-er" for the nation that reminds me of me...or at least of one of my drinking buddies or that frat guy I knew in college who wasn't very smart but sure was committed.  If that guy could be President, I could be President - it could-be-me.

Anti-intellectualism has pounced on America as the good-ol-boy elected official that could-be-me has morphed into Sarah Palin and Christine O'Donnell style political candidates that are mostly performance with very little content.  The reality is their lack of content is lauded as making them more like us. “What? You can't see Russia from Alaska?” “Really? The Constitution says government shouldn't get tied up in religion?” “I didn't know that either.” “How awesome is it that Palin/O'Donnell could win and they don't know the same things I don't know. Hmmm, it could-be-me.”

It does not escape me that the powerful (like Rove and the Koch brothers), who would not be able to get elected themselves, are behind this rush to losing our minds (quite literally).  It serves them well to have shills they can shuffle around in the nation sized shell game they have created, moving their interests and those of big business back and forth with a deft hand skilled in trickery and deception while the American public play a guessing game trying to decide under which political party their interests are actually hidden.  For the powerful, having someone who doesn't actually have the capacity or desire to question their motives or the constitutionality of their actions in place to play the game is not a moral question but the height of good gamesmanship...and in their eyes, we are the pawns.

When we make kings and queens of the ignorant we become a nation of fools.  I don't want anyone serving this great nation that isn't quite a bit more intelligent than me.  Every time I see a candidate doing well who clearly isn't among the top political minds our nation has to offer, I don't think, “Well how refreshing, a commoner like me.” I think “Holy shit, that person could be helping run the nation!” (and I don't even cuss when I bang my thumb with a hammer.)

To quote Forrest Gump, “Stupid is a stupid does.”  I can't wait to see what we do this election cycle.  Just keep one thing in mind, Wisdom is the thing in which God delights daily. (Proverbs 8:30)