Middle Ground

There's a lot of talk, recently, about bipartisanship and "finding the middle ground." I often wonder what that means exactly. When I see a Joe Lieberman or a John McCain speak about bipartisanship, they usually mean that Democrats should get in line and support one of Our Leader's policies.

After the last election, franco-filmmaker Michael Shea decided to travel into the Heartland to see if he could find a middle ground between his liberal views and those held by patriotic Christianists. He approached the task earnestly, knowing, as only liberals can know, that if people just sat down and discussed their differences reasonably with each other, they'd find that they shared a lot of the same basic values. Indeed, he was certain that the commonalities would outweigh the differences.

He was wrong, and the film he made during his journey, Red State, documents how he finally came to the realization that there is no middle ground between the faith-based and reality-based communities.

This is a dangerous film. It exposes our private views--the ones we seldom share with the unchurched--for all the world to see. It could prove to be a very powerful mobilization tool for leftists and secularists who are clever enough to share it with their friends or show it at regularly scheduled events like Drinking Liberally or conversation salons.

Imagine if you will, how the French would react to the following exchange between Shea and Gladys Gill, the State Director of the Mississippi chapter of Concerned Women For America:

Mrs. Gill: I think we lost more than we gained with civil rights. I hope to see them repealed.

[...]

Mrs. Gill: Well I don't know where you folks were when we were trying to hang on to state's rights

Shea: I was two I think.

Mrs. Gill: Yeah, right

Shea: In fact I was born in the year the Civil Rights Act was passed.

Mrs. Gill: Yeah. Right. So you don't remember what life was like when we had liberty to do what we needed to do in our own lives.

You won't find that kind of honesty on the CWA website, because the public isn't quite ready for it. We're getting there with the help of traditionalists like George Allen and Conrad Burns, but we still have a way to go before we air these kinds of views in prime-time.

The same is true of the comments Boise Republican activist Dennis Mansfield, made in the film:

Those of us who are conservatives and call Christ the king of our lives realize that we really serve a kingdom and not a democracy. In a sense we're citizens in two cultures at the same time. We are Americans, but we really realize that the longer, bigger picture, sort of the eternal picture, is that we're also citizens of a king, and his name is Christ; his name is Jesus.

[...]

Christ is love, but he's also the god, Jehovah, that had tons of people taken out because of their complete idolatry.

Here again, it's not time to us to fully spring Republican Jesus on the public, at least not until Our Leader makes a few more of his "crusade" speeches.

So while I urge you to buy a copy of Red State to help you better understand our values, I hope you'll guard it carefully. We can't allow it to get into the hands of our domestic enemies. We haven't finished marketing the Christianist States of America. It's better to keep these kinds of views to ourselves until we're ready.