Decoding the Oracle of Dubya

President Bush, apparently needing something to fill his time other than talking torture 'n' "tehrah" and attempting to fundraise for Republican legislative candidates without infecting them with virulent cases of disaffection-by-association with him and his policies, is now prognosticating a "Third Great Awakening" of rampant religiosity catalyzed by these "times of crisis:"

Bush told a group of conservative journalists that he notices more open expressions of faith among people he meets during his travels, and he suggested that might signal a broader revival similar to other religious movements in history.

Because the people Bush meets on his travels are a regular cross-section of America that's never, ever pre-filtered for ideological simpatico. Though unnervingly, recent polls appear to concur–not only are respondents reporting increased levels of belief in God and spiritual affiliation, but the nuances of their faiths are also being intriguingly correlated with contemporary political issue positions more commonly classified in the red state/blue state dichotomy. The president, ever the astute student of history, had this to add:

Bush noted that some of Abraham Lincoln's strongest supporters were religious people "who saw life in terms of good and evil" and who believed that slavery was evil. Many of his own supporters, he said, see the current conflict in similar terms.

Though he made a point of claiming he's not really saying his supporters equal good and everyone else equals evil, Bush does seem to assume this alleged swelling of Christian sentiment is something to celebrate. Though given his tendency to invoke another major world religion when tossing out catchy euphemisms for the ephemeral enemy in his war on terrorism, I fail to see how stoking religious fervor of any persuasion is something positive. Isn't much of the problem here the cluster of vocal religious nuts wanting to wage holy war on another sect of religious nuts greater in number but blessedly less actively fanatical?

Regardless, when you start sorting your world in absolutes, it's easy to get a little too sure of yourself–and for your press secretary to start spouting borderline delusions. Take this snippet voiced by Tony Snow Sept. 13 on "Good Morning America" on the topic of across-the-isle congeniality:

I would love to hear Democrats step up and say, "I'd love to help you, Mr. President ... because we are impressed with the fact you ended up getting intelligence that foiled numerous plots that were aimed at Americans."

Yeah, I'm sure that's up there on the Democratic agenda, right between "co-sponsor legislation with Rick Santorum" and "violate selves with rusty garden tools."

Though it's human nature to band together in threatening times, those in power have already played that hand, and the unity that had been within flapping-distance of their partisan banner has dissipated. If there really is a religious revival in our midst, at least this time the electorate is rallying around an all-powerful spiritual construct as opposed to its thinks-he's-all-powerful stuttering mortal conduit in the Oval Office.

But still, when people get too comfortable with perceived coherence of their places in the world and start feeling a little too good about themselves, they can get reckless and blindly self-righteous at one end, complacent and lazy at the other.

I realize I've said it before, but one of my favorite bits of Nietzschean philosophy describes how groups like to preserve their "plebian weakness" by using social and institutional sanctions to produce guilt that discourages individuals from rising above the collective mediocrity, while simultaneously rationalizing their own ordinariness by preaching doctrines of essential equality in the eyes of some higher, other-worldly authority.

Take this country's education system and its preoccupation with self-esteem and making every student feel like an extra-special superstar for merely showing up. In a bit of anecdotal evidence scorching enough to compel anyone still carrying the torch for scientific literacy in this country to just give up and go join the Discovery Institute, the Oct. issue of The Atlantic Monthly reports, "despite faring worse on a standardized eighth-grade science test than students in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea, American students are more than twice as likely as their peers in those countries to enjoy high 'self-confidence' in their ability to learn science." Well, as long as they feel good about their incompetence, that's all that really matters, because their identity as citizens of the most powerful country on earth supersedes such substantive trifles.

Not that the perils of mindless ideological action aren't multi-cultural. Vengeance, to take one manifestation, is truly a global commodity. For a silly yet telling example, the AP reported Sept. 13 that officials in Australia are finding dismembered stingray carcasses on Queensland beaches–victims, they suspect, of retaliation-by-proxy for the death of Steve Irwin at the barb of one of their species last week. Yes, human beings, the most intellectually and ethically advanced creatures on the planet, are scooping up stingrays and slicing off their tails to avenge the death of the "Crocodile Hunter." Christ, people, what if one of them is Jesus? Way to go.

Yes, though at least Tucker Carlson no longer has license to blaspheme bipeds across the land with his repugnant dance routines and Dr. House is back to his dreamy, Vicodin-popping, sonovabitchin' self, I'd at least wait until Katie Couric stops leading the ratings perched atop the network news anchor desk like some kind of over-coifed toy canine before I'd register divine endorsement of our culture's current course.