U.S. Presidential Election Day

The Commemoration of All Souls does, alas, take a back seat this particular year to the U.S. Presidential elections even for myself: the souls in Purgatory always need our help, but days that could determine a civilization’s destiny don’t come all the time.

Yet, for that, this elevation in our society of the exercise of the franchise to a sacral dignity is utterly ridiculous; it comes from the inflation of the capitalized Democracy into a sacred cow. Yes, of course, it is the responsibility of every eligible citizen to exercise the franchise, but I defy all the inane “just go vote, no matter who or what for, but just do it” propaganda to declare that part of that responsibility is to do so intelligently, from due discernment in conformity with a rightly-ordered conscience. Any vote for Sen. Sacrilege or sodomite “marriage” is, by these criteria, an irresponsible one, and it would be better for the common good if the uninformed, the stupid, the perverse (spiritually, intellectually, and/or otherwise), and those on government handouts would stay away (or were kept away) from the polls. Rush Limbaugh has something of the right idea here.

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The universally-reported heavy turnout, according to previous political calculus, should benefit Sen. Sacrilege. One can only hope, as much as this “War on Terror” is emphasized by Bush supporters, that fear of what a President Sacrilege would mean not only to our internal civilized life but also to our security from external enemies would get plenty of those folks to the polls, too. Certainly, as I pointed out again last night, the viability of what is still Christian in this society hangs in the balance tonight.

The several stories of Demogogue vote fraud today only emphasize my understanding of this election as a clash between good (at least relatively speaking) and intractable evil….

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There are those mainstream-conservative pundits, like the editorial staff of the Wall Street Journal in its official editorial today, who either hold on to the myth that the liberal element in American society is still distinctly a minority or else that America is not as self-divided as many people say.

[R]emember it was no different in 1776 (when a third of the country wanted no part of Independence) or 1812 (over which the Northeastern states considered secession), or 1848 (which the Whig Party, including Abraham Lincoln, considered illegal), or 1864 (when the Union Democrats fielded their first peace-in-our-time candidate), or even 1968 (riots in the streets) — except that the political divisions then dwarfed whatever separates most Americans today. Notwithstanding Time’s description of a “venomous campaign,” this one strikes us as comparatively tame….

There’s an illustrative point to this, actually, but I have a different explanation for this observation. Our ancestors, as recently as the World War II generation, actually held that ideas and philosophies and loyalties mattered: accounting, thus, for everything from a quickness and decisiveness to respond when attacked (a la Pearl Harbor 1941) to a tendency to take disputes with a more deadly seriousness. The culture clash that produced the Confederate States of America in the 1860’s (and the incredibly bloody war that ensued) was based more upon issues concerning the vision of the American polity than moral issues like slavery (even if so much of the propaganda was over this last).

By contrast, we now face a situation where Belial is in position to drive Christ completely out of not only the American public square, but also from every other single major institution of our civilization, from commerce to education to family issues and anything and everything else. So why has this (not yet) developed into the Second Civil War? For one simple reason: people today do not take the vital issues as seriously as their forefathers did! We are a bunch of marshmallow softies (and I do not exempt myself from this charge). We are so concerned about our contemporary comforts, diversions, lifestyles, and the illusion of “consensus” that anyone who dares to take an uncompromising stand for Christian common sense is immediately denounced as the one thing we cannot tolerate: an “extremist.” Yet, on account of the rigged definition of the term by the leftist mass media, no anti-Christian extremist is called an “extremist.”

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So what kind of nation are we predominantly today? For all the talk of the “red-blue” divide, I’ve long sensed that the anti-Christian “blues” are more determined to fight, win, and dominate than the “reds.” [And just who came up with these color definitions anyway? What a propaganda trick! They've got it totally backwards, I think, on purpose. The "red" states should be the ones who are carried by the neo-Communist Demogogue candidate!] Soon enough, we will see.