Hildegarde

Yesterday, I had a lot of running around to do, of the drive three hundred places, eat up seven hours and get very little done variety. 

And during that, I took some time off to sit down in the Barnes and Noble cafe and have one of those silly frappacino things, just to sort of sit there to take a breather.  And while I did that, I read through some magazines.

One of the magazines I looked at was the lated (July/August 2010) edition of The Humanist.  Mostly, that’s something I read to give myself a chance to roll my eyes.  I’ve said this here before, but the problem with The Humanist–and the entire American Humanist Association, as far as I can tell–is not that they’re “liberal” or “progressive” or even “left,” but that they’re stuck in 1968 in the worst way possible.

And this edition had a really good example of what drives me so crazy.  It was a special issue on climate change, and it contained the requisite set of articles all proclaiming that there are Rational People Who Accept Science and who therefore not only accept the popular version of climate change but believe we must drastically alter human behavior to reverse it and save the earth–and irrational capitalist ideologues and religious fanatics who deny that reality.

Then there was another article on the ideas of Freeman Dyson–scientist and atheist and rationalist–whose basic idea is that climate change isn’t the issue.  Human well being is the issue.  We should do whatever it takes to make sure everybody is fed, housed and clothed and if that means higher temperatures–so be it.

So, what?  It turns out that you don’t have to be a “capitalist idelogue” or a “religious fanatic” to think that the political prescriptions coming out of the climate change issue are wrong?

Imagine that.

Maybe they should let the rest of their writers in on it.

But it isn’t the climate change stuff I was really caught by.  It was a little sidebar about a project called “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day,” which started as a poster by the cartoonist Molly Norris in response to the censoring of images of and mentions of Mohammed on a South Park episode.

The poster led to an actual campaign for an actual day–May 20, 2010–to draw Mohammed on the Internet.

The sidebar consisted of quotes from a number of people who supported the project, and one of those people was the comedian/commentator Bill Maher.

Now, let me be clear here.  Bill Maher drives me crazy. I think he’s a pompous, bullying  jerk.  Religulous was just as much of a hatchet job as I’d expected. 

As to the content of the politics, we agree on some things (abortion, for instance, probably gay marriage) and disagree on others.

But there’s disagreement and disagreement.  What Maher was quoted as saying was this:

“I’m very glad that Obama is reaching out to the Muslim world and I know Muslims living in America and Europe want their way of life to be assimilated more, but the Western world needs to make it clear:  some things about our culture are not negotiable and can’t change.  And one of them is freedom of speech.  Separation of church and state is another–not negotiable.  Women are allowed to work here and you can’t beat them.  Not negotiable.  This is how we roll.  And this is why our system is better.”

There was more, but nothing that changed the thrust.  And I could have said it myself.

And this is what I meant, a while ago, when I said there were libertarian socialists–people who supported, say, a wide welfare state but who still supported freedom of speech and all the rest of it, and who would resist attempts to make the welfare state into an instrument of violating individual rights.

If I’m in a room full of people who all agree with me and Maher up there, then whether they’re free marketers, welfare staters, or whatever, we’re all friends.  All that other stuff is policy.

The real fight is between people with attitudes like Maher’s and mine and–well, the people who were in my meeting the other day.

Maher is not a danger to my way of life, in spite of being so ideologically extreme in some ways he could make my teeth bleed.

The people in my meeting, though, are a time bomb under everything I hold dear.

P.S.:  By the way, when I said that these people in the meeting weren’t the typical English department, it wasn’t because I thought the typical English department would have thought differently than they did.

It was because no matter what the typical English department thought, it would NOT have been made up of the people in that meeting, most of whom did not have the kind of credentials to qualify.

I need tea.  And Martha Grimes.