WHAT A FALLING-OFF WAS THERE!

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (Veterans’ Day 2006)

“What a falling-off was there!” The Ghost’s words to Hamlet are as applicable today as they were in Shakespeare’s treasonous Danish court, only now they apply to the Republicans’ falling-off. They were repudiated because their previously winning strategy of divide and conquer was finally a failure.

Bush and the Republicans thought of the United States as a foreign territory to be conquered, much like the Soviet Union divided and conquered Eastern Europe only eventually to lose it. Bush gained power by alienating the evangelicals from the liberals, the gays from the straights, the rich from the middle-class and poor. Rather than governing with a majority, they chose to govern with a privileged minority using the tool of enmity.

Forsaking reconciliation, they chose alienation, pitting one group against another. They gave privileges to select groups and false promises to others, just as the Soviets promised prosperity to the workers while it created wealth for the favored apparatchiks and poverty for the people. The inevitable corruption that led to their downfall was repeated by the Republicans.

In short, the Republicans raised the bugbears of gay marriage and flag burning while enriching the rich, reducing the middle-class, further impoverishing the poor, and diverting everyone’s attention with a war of their own making. As Abraham Lincoln said, “You may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”

Copyright © Dana Prom Smith 2006