THE UNBEARABLE TONE DEAFNESS OF BEING CONSERVATIVE

Summary: A lot of conservatives don’t seem to get it. Here in Cathedral City, perennial political wannabe Jens Mueller has managed to reconfirm the view —held by an increasingly large number of Cathedral City residents— that he is a tone deaf right-wing extremist with crypto-Nazi views who should not be anywhere near public office. His apparent admiration for Adolf Hitler’s views on labor automatically disqualifies him from holding any elective office in this country. Meanwhile, in the Roman Catholic Church, angry right-wing Roman Catholics are pitching a fit over Pope Francis’ conciliatory interview in Civiltà Cattolica, while in Washington City, Republicans seem hell-bent on shutting down the United States government and committing political suicide next year.

By: Paul S. Marchand

It’s curious, really, how oddly tone deaf so many self-identified conservatives seem to be. A small number of examples suffice to make the point.

Here in Cathedral City, perennial Council hopeful Jens Mueller, who seems to have forgotten that Adolf Hitler died in 1945, an unmourned suicide, has been busily pushing Hitler’s anti-labor agenda on his so-called Citizens Against Corruption Facebook page. The blowback against him has been sulfurous, and the white wannabe has managed to insert his foot in his mouth and gnaw all the way down to the bone. His National Socialist tendencies will not help him in the forthcoming elections.
Meanwhile, among our brethren and sistren of the Roman Catholic observance, political and religious conservatives in the United States find themselves reeling following Pope Francis’ astonishingly conciliatory 12,000 word interview in Civiltà Cattolica, in which the Roman Pontiff suggested that his church should be less obsessional and less condemnatory about contraception, queerfolk, and women’s reproductive issues.

Closer to home, the GOP finds itself caught in a battle it cannot win as it attempts to shut down the United States government in order to defund the Affordable Care Act.

OUR LITTLE WANNABE HITLERS: “BREAK ALL UNIONS; PRIVATIZE ALL GOVERNMENT FUNCTIONS”

"We must close union offices, confiscate their money and put their leaders in prison. We must reduce workers salaries and take away their right to strike." This quotation, attributed to Adolf Hitler, was supposedly uttered on May 2, 1933, the day the recently installed Reichskanzler broke the German labor union movement.

  According to certain historians, the quotation is apocryphal. Nonetheless, it accurately reflects Hitler’s views about the German labor union movement.

Indeed, on January 4, 1933, three and a half weeks before Reichspräsident Paul von Hindenburg let himself get bamboozled into appointing Hitler as Reichskanzler, Hitler met in Berlin with a number of leading German bankers and industrialists, who proffered significant financial support to the Nazi leader in return for Hitler’s ironclad commitment and promise to smash the German labor union movement. Hitler delivered on that commitment on May 2, 1933.

    Curiously, Hitler’s bad ideas always seem to have a way of coming back to haunt us. Here in Cathedral City, Nazi ideas seems to be enjoying a certain vogue on the far right fringe of our political universe.

    Occupying part of that nutcase right wing in Cathedral City is a Facebook page administered by perennial Tea Partisan Council wannabe Jens “Cowboy” Mueller.

    In a post dated September 15, 2013, Miller wrote “If you want to unleash American potential, I propose the elimination of all public and private unions, by any legal means possible.”

    My response, knowing Mueller’s National Socialist views and proclivities, was: “Jens, you're flat crazy. That was Hitler's position, too.”

    I was somewhat astonished to see even a naturalized German-born American citizen respond with admiration for a monster responsible for the deaths of nearly 40,000,000 human beings.

Mueller’s response was as follows: “He had one good idea then! Out with unions and in with privatization of all government functions.”

    Not only was Mueller’s response tone deaf, but it was a typical example of everything that is wrong with right-wing politicians and wannabes in this country. It was also an insult to the millions of Americans of the Greatest Generation who proudly wore this country’s uniform and went to war to stamp out Adolf Hitler and the Nazi cancer he represented. No aspiring politician in the United States should ever have a kind word for any one of Adolf Hitler’s ideas or views. Not one. 

     This community needs to know what kind of viper is nurturing at its breast. The community needs to know that a man who is prepared to admire Adolf Hitler on one issue will be prepared to admire him on others.

    If you are Jewish, if you are a person of color, if you are a member of a labor union, or if you are queer, Jens Mueller will do his level best to run you out of Cathedral City before turning to his ill-concealed desire to destroy this community on behalf of whatever moneyed corporate interests may be bankrolling his campaign. 

     Perhaps, in the name of our own honored dead who fought to save the world from the horror Hitler had prepared for it, we should send a clear message to Jens Mueller that he is not welcome in our community anymore. 

PAPA FRANCESCO UPSETS THE RIGHT-WING APPLECART

Papa Bergoglio certainly has upset self-identified religious, social, and political conservatives in the United States, who have been accustomed in recent years to be obsessional on certain “litmus test” issues such as queerfolk, contraception, and abortion.

    Pope Francis’ remarks, contained in an astonishing 12,000 word interview published last week in the Jesuit magazine Civiltà Cattolica, and reprinted worldwide in a number of Jesuit publications including America Magazine in this country, were more conciliatory on the subjects of human sexuality, family planning, and reproductive choice than any we have heard from his recent predecessors, the authoritarian John Paul II or the profoundly regressively, excessively Scholastic Benedict XVI.

    Indeed, the tone Pope Francis has set seems to have more in common with the so-called breath of fresh air represented by Pope John Paul I —who was so tragically cut off just 33 days into his tenure of office— and with the aggiornamento ushered in by Bl. John XXIII half a century ago, a process of “updating” the Roman church that brought about Vatican II and so many of the changes from which John Paul II and Benedict XVI tried so hard for so many years to retreat.

    The tone the current Pontiff is setting seems light years removed from the stultifying, authoritarian, neo-Pian posture of 35 years of Papa Wojtyła and Papa Ratzinger, both of whom seemed intent upon restoring in their fullest forms the sterile and conformist dispensations of the period of Pius XII.

    On the Wojtyła/Ratzinger watches, the Roman church adopted an increasingly conservative line. Progressives such as Hans Küng who did not hew to the Vatican’s views were incrementally hounded out, as conservatives within the Roman church eagerly availed themselves of various regressive papal pronouncements, using them as sticks with which to belabor so-called liberals.

    By liberals, ultramontane conservatives meant not only any Roman Catholic who dared to differ from the doctrinal positions of the Roman curia —specifically the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, formerly known as the Holy Office of the Inquisition— but also Roman Catholics who dared preach a gospel of social justice as well as women religious who dared suggest that the Roman church ought to rethink its astonishingly patriarchal views on the position and participation of women in the Body of Christ.

    Moreover, in the United States, the Roman Catholic Church, pushed in that direction by conservative prelates appointed by the authoritarian Polish pontiff, found itself increasingly identifying itself as “the Republican Party at prayer.” Roman Catholic bishops increasingly found themselves identifying with the GOP platform.

    Archbishops such as Denver’s Charles Chaput (now translated to the archbishopric of Philadelphia) went so far in the election cycle of 2004 as to suggest that persons inclined to vote for Democratic candidate John Kerry should perhaps absent themselves from the Eucharist, stating that Kerry voters were “cooperating in evil.”

    Other conservative prelates, feeling themselves emboldened by the Vatican’s apparent willingness to overlook the strong negative optics of Roman Catholic meddling in the American political process, increasingly aligned themselves with the policy positions of the Republican Party.

    Who can forget Peoria Bishop Daniel R. Jenky’s March, 2012, over-the-top attack on the Affordable Care Act in which the prelate explicitly compared President Obama to Adolf Hitler and Iosif Stalin?

     Thus, when Pope Francis uttered words of conciliation and suggested in Civiltà Cattolica that the church should stop treating homosexuality, contraception, and abortion as litmus test issues, and should stop being so obsessional and condemnatory in its words and actions on those subjects, the hair of conservative Catholics in the United States spontaneously combusted.

    In the days since the Pope’s interview in Civiltà Cattolica and America appeared, conservative Catholics have been lining up not only to try to reassure us all that the Pontiff didn’t really mean what the Pontiff had taken 12,000 words to say was exactly what he had meant, but also to presume to “instruct” the head of the Roman Catholic Church on how obviously “wrong” he was.

     If the screamers and hand-wringers on the comment threads had merely been members of such schismatic outlier organizations as the so-called Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), or if they had just been whacked-out Hutton Gibson-esque sedevacantists, lost in their delusional insistence that there is no true Pontiff, that the See of Peter is somehow vacant, and that in some conspiratorial way the papacy is in hiatus, it might be easy to dismiss them.

Unfortunately, it isn’t just ancient fools like Hutton Gibson or schismatics like SSPX who can’t stand the idea of a progressive pope.  A not insignificant number of prelates within the Roman Catholic episcopate in the United States has seen fit —in the words of the Pope himself— to“reprimand” the Pontiff for being so forward as to suggest that the church ought to be more Christlike and less institutionally “Christian.”

    It does seem rather tone deaf for Roman Catholic bishops in the United States (including the “ultraorthodox” Abp. Chaput) to want to reprimand the man they call the Holy Father in Rome, from whom, in Roman Catholic theory, they derive not only their ordinary episcopal authority, but also their magisterium, i.e., their teaching authority, as well.

    The protesting prelates sound less like obedient servants of the Roman church than they do like certain bitching bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church, a number of whom have been happy to try to secede from the Episcopal Church over such issues as marriage equality or (OMG! WTF?!) the ordination of women to the priesthood.

    It certainly seems as if for every former Episcopal Bishop John-David Schofield (who tried to take the Diocese of San Joaquin out of the Episcopal Church because he disagreed with its stance on queerfolk and on the ordination of women) there is a Daniel R. Jenky, a Thomas Tobin (of Providence, RI), or a Charles Chaput of Philadelphia.

    Perhaps bishops Jenky, Tobin, Chaput, and others of their ilk should think twice about complaining against a Pope to whom they had sworn allegiance.

    Of course, when such authoritarian pontiffs as Wojtyła and Ratzinger were in control, it was easy for Roman Catholic conservatives to be ultramontane. Hiding behind the aegis of the Vatican, they could engage in muscular policing of the spiritual lives of American Roman Catholic churchgoers, go after women religious, repel Democrats and progressives from Communion, and thunderously damn uppity queerfolk to the outer darkness with the metaphorical equivalent of bell, book, and candle.

    Now, however, Roman Catholic conservatives may find themselves caught in a paradox. Having eagerly declared their ultramontane views in the past, they must now determine whether their protestations of unquestioning allegiance to Rome still apply now that a Roman Pontiff has gone and said something they don’t agree with.

    For those of us not of the Roman observance, who see ultramontanism as a cancer in any body politic where there is religious liberty, the Hobson’s choice faced by ultramontane conservative Roman Catholic Americans is delicious to us.

    As certain conservative Roman Catholics used to experience schadenfreude watching the internal anguish within the Episcopal Church over the issue of ordaining women and queerfolk to Holy Orders, many of us —God forgive us— feel a certain schadenfreude watching as conservative Roman Catholics find themselves trying to reconcile their own ultramontane views with the refreshing currents of aggiornamento that seem to be coming from this Pontiff.

    If only these ultramontanists and defenders of so-called orthodoxy would realize how tone deaf they are and how their own hateful messages are undercutting conciliatory one Pope Francis has put out, urbi et orbi, to the city of Rome and to all the world beyond!

But the right-wing will always be tone deaf, for as Talleyrand once said of supporters of France’s restored ancien régime: ils n'ont rien appris, ni rien oublié: they have learned nothing and they have forgotten nothing.

NOTHING LEARNED NOTHING FORGOTTEN IN A NEW THREAT OF GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN

If the ultramontane conservatives within the Roman Catholic Church in the United States find themselves weeping and gnashing their teeth because the new Pontiff doesn’t appear to share their retrograde views, and if those same ultramontanists find themselves unable to moderate their tone, so too does the Republican caucus in Congress seem curiously unable to understand that the American public, especially those of us who left our teen years behind long ago, remembers unkindly the government shutdown engineered by Newt Gingrich and other Shiite Republicans during Bill Clinton’s administration.

    Of course, part of Gingrich’s stated reason for shutting down the United States government under Bill Clinton was wounded amour propre; his nose was out of joint because he had been asked to ride in the rear of Air Force One. The motivations for this attempt at a Republican shutdown of government are just as crass, churlish, and childish.  To destroy “Obamacare,” a piece of legislation they do not like, Republicans will ignore the very clearly expressed sentiments of the American people against the shutdown, place this country in danger from her adversaries, and create havoc in public services across the country.

    This is considerably more serious than right-wing Roman Catholics having a shit fit over a conciliatory interview given by the Roman Pontiff in Civiltà Cattolica. No disrespect to Papa Bergoglio, but the immediate responsibilities of the Vatican in the world pale into insignificance compared to those of the United States of America.

    While it is emphatically not the job of the United States government to mediate the Salvation of the World or to carry out the Great Commission Our Lord laid upon His disciples in the concluding passages of the Gospel according to St. Matthew, it is very much the job of the United States government to try to maintain the peace. Deliberately shutting down perhaps the only government in the world with the resources to maintain some kind of peaceful order in an often fractious global community is more than just the height of irresponsibility.

    Republican obduracy and irresponsibility have come to resemble the kind of hysterical, obsessional, Roman Catholic efforts to undo Queen Elizabeth I during the latter part of the 1500s. Successive 16th-century Roman pontiffs underwrote conspiracies, assassination plots, and proposed invasions of England, all with a view to toppling the woman they called a “cursed Jezebel,” and replacing her on the English throne with her presumably more reliably Catholic cousin, Mary Queen of Scots.

    Yet, across the 45 years of Elizabethn I’s reign, the Vatican’s Tudor Derangement Syndrome never bore fruit, though it did contrive to drive the Roman Catholic cause in England into the realms of treason. 

 Republican sufferers from Obama Derangement Syndrome would be well advised to moderate their tone deaf transports and take another look at the history of 45 years of Queen Elizabeth Tudor.

    They might actually learn again what they have apparently forgotten so badly.

-xxx-

Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City.  He is a descendant of World War II veterans who put everything on the line to bring down Hitler’s Third Reich, and has no sympathy for or truck with National Socialist ideas, and believes that Nazis, neo-Nazis, and crypto-Nazis have no place in American society.  The views expressed herein are his own, and not necessarily those of any other entity or individual.  They are not intended, and are not to be taken as, legal advice.