Does it occur to anyone that the processes unfolded and still unfolding in the Democratic and Republican parties are eerily reminiscent of the medieval Catholic church? Issues of great import are invented out of whole cloth, and debated endlessly by the learned and the mighty, even though those debates will very likely have little or no impact on the direction of future events?
Iraq? Shall we reclaim the Holy Land? Health care – shall the church use its vast resources to care for the meek and helpless, or are they better employed in building grander and more opulent monuments to the greater glory of the state? Abortion? When does life begin? How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Was Christ poor? Did he own his clothes, or merely have them "in use?" Taxation? Can we buy our way out of our collective guilt for being such shameless hogs of the world's resources by granting indulgences to those who pay heavily for them? Carbon offsets? Ditto. Global warming? Not a prediction; merely a prophesy.
And even the electoral process seems strangely akin to the Holy See's. The democratic nominee will most likely be selected by the party's equivalent of the College of Cardinals, and the final victor similarly chosen, not by popular vote, but by the Electoral College.
With all this wind and noise about pastors, racial slurs, vast hidden conspiracies where the media replaces the Templars as the mystical and secretive wielders of power, is there anything actually happening of meaning or import? Does anything the candidates say have any real value? Or are they just more empty combinations of scripture and dogma?
Does any of this help us understand what may lay in our future, or are we increasingly shrouded in the mists of doubt and uncertainty? Quo vadis, America? No one knows.
