A SPEECH TO DEMOCRATS
The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (10/13/05)
I come to you as a life-long, fourth-generation Republican who in his seventy-fifth year, a scant two and a half years ago, came of age and signed on as a Democrat. My coming of age was in large part due to my parents, staunch Republicans as they were, and my wife, a fervent Democrat as she is. The values I learned from my parents, as Gretchen kept pointing out, could only be politically expressed in the Democratic party.
When I was a lad, a patient of my father’s, a traditional Chinese gentleman, invited my father, mother, and their children to dinner at his restaurant in Chinatown. My father’s sister and brother-in-law also came along. I was six. It was 1933 and the Great Depression was in full-swing. As we walked through old Chinatown in L.A., my father, who as a young man had been poor and had gotten a leg-up on hand-outs, gave silver dollars to the homeless when a dollar was worth about twenty in today’s economy.
My aunt, a self-righteous, vindictive fundamentalist with halitosis, remonstrated with my father about handing out money to drunks. "Don’t be a fool, Tom. They’ll just drink it up." My father fixed his eye on her and said, "Aye and now, Emily, when the Lord God’ll be calling me before the Grand Assize to give account for me life, I’d rather be judged a fool than cruel."
When we went into the restaurant, we were met by a slim, elderly Chinese man, clad in a long, dark silk, pajama-like gown, wearing a silk, embroidered skull cap with a tasse. A whisp of a goatee graced his chin. He looked as though he had just come from central casting for a "B" Foomanchu movie. He ushered us down a dim, forbidding hall, bowing up and down like an oil well all the way. Exotic, foreign aromas swirled around us. At the end of the hall, he unclasped his hands and motioned my father into a private dining room different from that which he in mind for my mother and the rest of us. My mother drew herself up, ready for instant outrage. My father would have none of it and said, "We’ll be dining as a family." The host mumbled that women and children and men should never dine together to which my father replied, "Me wife, me children, and me guests were all created in the image of Lord God as was I. They’ll be in no wise lesser than I." We all ate together.
It was then I learned the delights of fried rice and egg foo young and was taught grace toward everyone and dignity for all.
My other tutor has been my wife, Gretchen, an ardent Democrat, a fierce feminist, a Martha Stewart homemaker, a potter of growing accomplishment, and a woman who along with being vibrantly beautiful is also a great cook. To use Martin Luther’s phrase, we have lots of table-talk, some of which requires "time-outs."
When I feel somewhat awkward and displaced as a Democrat, I recall the words of my grandfather, Brynjolf, who told me that on coming to America from Norway that the first thing he did was to adopt Thomas Jefferson as his father. I wish to thank you for letting me adopt you and for welcoming a stranger and sojourner.
In his monumental work The Second World War, Winston Churchill outlined what he called "The Moral of the Work." He wrote:
In defeat, defiance.
In war, resolution.
In victory, magnanimity.
In peace, goodwill.
All of which means that
goodwill reveals the peaceful;
magnanimity the victorious;
resolution the fighter;
defiance the defeated.
President Bush and the Republican party are defiant, and, therefore, defeated even in victory.
As Adlai Stevenson said during his campaign against Dwight Eisenhower, "The Republicans have to be dragged, kicking and screaming into the 20th century." Their defiance is the defiance of the reactionary. The signs?
Bush’s swagger and strut mark him an unproven adolescent, "a poor player\that struts and frets his hour upon stage, and then is heard no more." His smirk at executions in Texas reveal the resentments of a loser. His immature and premature bragging about victory in Iraq reveal a man testosteronically challenged. When he boasted "bring ‘em on" about the Iraqi insurgents, he exposed himself as a man who plays at war, who fled combat, who’s never tasted combat’s adrenalin, metallic taste. He’s scripted, a paper-mache version of a defiant Clint Eastwood in a spaghetti western. He bears all the marks of a man who was discounted by his family during his formative years as the runt of the litter. He’s still proving himself, not the task of a grown man worth a damn.
By now we know he’s defeated. He had three years to prepare for the next disaster and had to be told about Katrina. He prepared for disaster by appointing a ne-er-do-well, as himself, to get ready for the disaster. It didn’t take the Democrats to defeat him. He defeated himself. As with Communist Russia, he and his Republicans cronies are imploding.
While Bush and the Republicans may have won some tactical battles, they are strategically, as were the communists, on the losing side of history. A reactionary lot, they’re opposed to the times, whatever the times may be.
They opposed Social Security and still do.
They opposed Medicare.
They opposed equal rights for women.
They opposed civil rights for blacks.
They oppose equal opportunities for the poor.
As a matter of fact, they don’t even know the poor exist.
They oppose decency for gays and lesbians and wish they’d disappear.
They oppose almost everything decent and honorable.
They are congenital opposers, except for war and tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations.
As a party which claims it wants to restrict the power of the federal government, the
Republicans, their darling John McCain included, believe that the government’s arm should reach into a woman’s womb. They’ve failed to grasp that while most people may find abortion abhorrent, they still believe in choice and freedom.
Instead, they espouse welfare for the wealthy.
They’ve been lavish with the lavished,
penurious with the poor,
frugal in the vital,
prodigal in the trivial.
They’ve been in bed with the very corporations that corrupt our society. They’re on their last spree before the final defeat. "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die." It is not difficult to underestimate President Bush. With the bravado and machismo of the hapless, he’s unaware that leadership is not photo-ops.
After over half a century as a pastor and a psychotherapist, I figured out that when we are overcome by adversity, we generally go through four stages of recovery.
First, we see ourselves as victims,
then survivors,
next prevailers,
and finally pilgrims and pioneers on the frontier.
Victims are children tyrannized by sexual predators, prisoners of war, women raped and assaulted, men and women chained and tortured.
We are not victims. We lost an election. We lost an election, not because the Republicans are powerful, but because the people were terrified after 9/11. We failed to reassure them.
Put bluntly, President Bush would not have won a second term had we not been scared out of our wits by Osama ben Laden and al Qaeda. In short, he’s inept and his administration dysfunctional.
The surest sign of the victim is whining. So it is time we stopped whining unless we want to become perpetual victims. We have to figure out how to win which in times of uncertainty means putting forth candidates who are unequivocal and sure of message.
In short, we’re not victims of Republican perfidy and deceit. We’ve survived that, but as survivors we don’t have to drift in a lifeboat awaiting rescue all the while complaining about not being rescued. Our wounds are no longer open.
As with all survivors, we are scarred. But what are warriors without scars? My old, regular army drill sergeant knew the price of victory. He was scarred. He told that 17 year old, homesick boy with his straight-talk, dead-eye voice, "Soldier, stop whining and get up off your ass."
It’s time to get off our asses. We’ve survived and are beginning to prevail over a gang who lied us into a tragic war, proposed a domestic program that isn’t worth a damn, has failed to protect the nation, and whose mercy is a dollar short and five days late. By now, we know we lost an election to a bunch of losers and cronies. Prevailing means grasping that one’s adversaries are horses’ asses and losers, just as the victim of incest has to realize that the perpetrator was weak and pathetic, or else he wouldn’t have preyed on a child.
So having prevailed, it’s time for us to get along with our pilgrimage, as in going somewhere. While on a journey, it’s important to know where we’re going, as in looking through the windshield. It’s important to check the rear-view mirror from time to time to remember from whence we have come, to know the sources of our values. We have to remember that we’ve been on the right side of history. We have believed in democracy and the welfare of people and the nation.
Our message is in the process. Process as distinguished from content is akin to the difference between and automobile assembly line and an automobile. If the assembly line or process is flawed, all the automobiles will defective. If the way we process our experiences is flawed, our ideas will be shabby. Process drives content.
We’re committed to the process of democracy, not the content of our right ideas. The doctrinaire Republicans believe in right ideas all of which traps them in the past from which have come their ideas. Ideas and doctrines are always the result of process. We believe in the process of democracy, and in ideas which are driven by that process. The Republicans talk of doctrine. Democrats talk of grace. The great American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr said that the ethic of love translated into social concerns means justice. As the prophet Micah said, we are "to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God. " Justice, mercy, and faith are our processes.
We must recapture that which the Republicans have taken captive. It’s time to stop playing the anti-military game. We need a strong military if we’re going to give peace a chance. As an old Sgt/Maj of Special Troops, I believe this is a dangerous world. We can’t protect ourselves with slogans and good intentions. We need the capacities to fight. The problem with the military is not the military, but the way perfidious politicians play war games as though they were playing with toy soldiers. The Republicans have misused the military. It’s time we support the military, unequivocally, and use it wisely. As Katrina has shown us, the military is probably the only effective part of the federal government.
Also, we’ve got to stop playing the anti-faith game. With fully 90 % of Americans thinking of themselves as believers, only a smart-ass would ridicule faith and the faithful. Faith is not knowledge about everything and right ideas and values. It is means, as the Epistle of the Hebrews says, "the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." That was my father’s message, the hope and conviction of grace and dignity.
Many of the so-called "faith-based" groups aren’t really "faith-based." They’re ideologically based, advocating theocracies of exclusivity and privilege. They have never read the Book of Job which pointed out that there is no correlation, much less causality, between wealth and faith. We have to redeem the word "faith" from right-wing ideologues and nut-bags. The fact is that faith flourishes in secular societies, not theocracies.
Sadly, many of our senatorial leaders in Washington have so compromised themselves with their initial support of the war in Iraq that they’ve lost credibility. "Staying the course" and "not cutting and running" are not policies, but mindless, testosteronic statements of politicians who can’t think of anything else to say to cover their betrayals.
We have to find our voice,
a voice for dignity,
for democracy,
for decency,
for defense,
for peace,
for faith
for hope.
Whining and complaining are strategies for defeat. If we think of ourselves as victims of their deceit, then we’ll remain victims. They’ve demonstrated their incapacity to govern. We have to find our voice and find leaders to give voice to that which we believe.
We believe in human dignity,
and in human dignity’s political process,
the process of democracy
which means the process of equality
equality for that vast collection of diverse human beings
known as America.
Jean-Paul Sartre, the famous French Existentialist, once wrote that people who lie and then believe their own lies are guilty of mauvais foi, bad faith.
The Republicans have lied and believed their own lies. Iraq has been their chief lie amongst many. They are the party of mauvais foi, the party of bad faith.
Our opportunity is to tell the truth and believe in dignity, democracy, freedom, and prosperity for all, to be the party of bonne foi, the party of good faith, and as the Prayer Book reads, "to persevere therein to the end." Amen.
Copyright © 2005 Dana Prom Smith
