On deaf ears: The Pope’s message and the radical right’s coup
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. There was very good news and very bad news in the United States the last few days.
The good news was provided by Pope Francis, who with his message, demeanor, and sheer humanity took the country by storm. Francis spoke out on every key topic–the family, climate change, Cuba, economic inequality, the humanity of the incarcerated, the need to avoid social polarization, the shameful sexual abuse of children by priests. On each issue he expressed himself powerfully, struck the right note and the right balance. But what was most impressive was his authentic need and ability to touch and embrace and comfort and inspire people of every sort and condition, but especially children and the most marginal, excluded and despised of our society.
The bad, bad news came, as happens time and again, from the extremist faction that has come to dominate the Republican party. The right-wing radicals in the GOP, who stand against just about every value and every idea the Pope preaches and personifies, forced out their own leader, Speaker of the House John A. Boehner, for the grave sin of not being ferociously partisan and totally unwilling to compromise, in plainer words, for not being a snarling pit bull.
To be sure, Boehner, himself a Catholic, is no Pope Francis and certainly nowhere near a progressive. But he was at times a voice of sanity in the face of wild-eyed colleagues out for blood. Now the dog pack is free to roam and wreak more havoc.
There could not be a starker contrast between the morality Francis upholds, his attitude toward how people should treat each other, his vision of the world, and the dog-eat-dog dystopia that is the ideal of the Republican wolf pack.
Where the Pope said you must give security to have security, the Republicans believe in a foreign policy in which security is achieved through aggression, threats, and economic punishment. While the Pope speaks of solidarity, Republicans believe in a domestic policy under which, in a world of organized self-interested groups such as corporations, each man or woman is an island who should attain security through his own individual efforts alone.
We know where this cynical fantasy of the self-reliant individual leads, a society of institutionalized savagery. One example. Recently, an individual in the Virgin Islands suffering from terrible chest pains was diagnosed with a tear in an artery in the aorta. It was quickly determined that he needed immediate surgery, and the closest place the difficult operation could be performed was Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. It took the hospital 18 hours to sort out the patient’s insurance coverage, but by the time that happened the man had died.
Just a few days before, an entrepreneur, having bought the only company that makes a drug used by 10,000 AIDS patients, promptly raised the price of a pill from $13 to $750 a pill. That’s as savage as it gets.
The fallacy of self-reliance goes hand in hand with the dogma that all things private are better. Recently, some business leaders here in Miami have been sensibly advocating for better public transportation, although their proposals are not radical enough to resolve this huge metropolitan-wide problem. Metro-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez countered that any expansion in mass transit should be through private initiative. But the mayor surely knows no mass transportation system in the world runs without substantial public subsidies. A proposal to have a privately-run mass transit system expansion is a proposal to have no expansion at all.
One of the things the Pope stressed repeatedly was the need to care for the Earth, “our common home.” Among the first things Francis said on American soil was that he was encouraged by President Obama’s recent decision to force electricity plants to lower carbon emissions.
For their part, Republicans are seething at Obama’s executive order, promising to fight it in the courts, calling it an unconstitutional overreach of authority, blah, blah, blah. Obama’s actions are consistent with the Pope’s admonition contained in his address to Congress that specific interests must sacrifice for the common good. That’s a concept alien to Republican free market zealots. After all one of their heroes, Margaret Thatcher, famously said that “there is no society, only individuals and families.”
The Pope carried the hope of redemption, but there are those who just refuse to be redeemed. Indeed, the whole of the recent papal encyclical, and not just the sections on the environment, could serve as an indictment of global capitalism as it exists today, never mind the version favored by the fierce Republican faction that lusts to make the system an even more powerful and inhuman assault against our common home and the common good.
[Photo at top of Pope Francis on Capitol Hill. In background is Speaker John Boehner and to his left is his likely successor House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy.]
