Whited sepulchres have been around for an awfully long time.
(Jesus did have a way with words, didn't he? Or maybe it was Matthew. Either way, you won't find a more striking metaphor for hypocrisy than that image of exterior respectability, all neatly whitewashed, masking the corruption inside.)
From ancient high priests who spoke one way and acted another, to contemporary preachers of piety who prey on trusting children, public hypocrites are as common as dirt in life's passing parade.
But common as they are generally, they are even more numerous, more concentrated, in particular areas of human endeavour. Like politics.
In politics, hypocrisy is what makes things run. It's grease for the wheel. With very rare exceptions, it's simply the way things are done, with depressing regularity and mind-blowing frequency.
And it's shameless. To hang on to the power that has become their very lifeblood, its practitioners, confronted with evidence of the gap between rhetoric and reality, will look you in the eye, smile and deny, deny, deny. "I did not have sexual relations with that woman," insisted affable Bill Clinton - executive-inchief, loving husband, devoted father - possibly setting new standards for low on the deceitfulness scale.
So we should not be surprised by the latest explosions of political hypocrisy, currently bombarding us on all sides and from both sides of the border. Anyone who has observed the power-hungry legions in Ottawa and Washington for longer than a nanosecond will not be shocked.
And yet the displays still manage to dismay, depressing evidence that, well, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Consider the recent vaudeville from south of the border, where the Republican race has been the focus as Tea Partiers try to reshape the party into their own grotesque likeness.
And so we have the ever-hopeful Newt Gingrich, staunch upholder of conservatism and the principles articulated in his 1996 book, To Renew America. Among those principles, he says, are the family values that can be learned by picking up 1950s-era copies of Reader's Digest and The Saturday Evening Post. Even Norman Rockwell, however, might have found it challenging to portray Gingrich, who wrote the book just a few years before his marriage to Wife Number Three, with whom he'd had an affair while still married to Wife Number Two, with whom he'd had an affair while still married to Wife No. 1.
Gingrich is now a Roman Catholic convert. (Sigh. God save us from missal-thumping RC converts, holier than the Pope and almost as right-wing.) And he still loves mounting the soapbox in favour of traditional marriage - male-female only, please - with its fine traditional values.
We also have the spectacle of that Tea Party oracle and conservative icon, broadcaster Rush Limbaugh, calling a young woman a "slut" and "prostitute" for speaking in favour of contraception coverage in health insurance. This, from the four-timemarried man once detained at the airport for having someone else's prescribed Viagra in his luggage.
But Canada is no slouch in the vaudevillian hypocrite department, either. After all, we have a Conservative MP - our very own Rob "Van Winkle" Anders - who apparently sleeps during meetings and veterans' presentations, showers veterans with gratuitous insults, denies everything. And then observes that he has "enormous respect for the men and women who have sacrificed in the service of our country," somehow confusing this show of rank hypocrisy with an apology.
If it weren't so sad, it would be funny.
What's not funny at all in the world of double-standard politics, however, is the way Stephen Harper's government has decided to treat these same veterans. From inadequate care for physically and psychologically wounded soldiers, to financial rejiggings of disability payouts, the Conservatives are not sounding anything at all like the government that couldn't praise the "extraordinary sacrifice" of our uniformed men and women highly enough when it sent them overseas into nine years of hell.
The veterans' advocacy group Our Duty this week condemned as incomplete and deeply flawed a government report on how overwhelmingly satisfied returning soldiers and their families were with Veterans Affairs services and benefits. The truth, says the group, is quite the opposite.
And in the wacky world of political hypocrisy, what's also not funny is the screaming scandal currently hogging the headlines. Whoever authorized the use of vote-suppression (now there's a euphemism), robocalls and misdirection during the last election has committed the ultimate act of political hypocrisy. Is there another way to describe this theft than as a calculated derailment of democracy masquerading as an engagement in democracy's most fundamental exercise?
So, no, we don't need Republican clowns to model political hypocrisy for us, entertaining though they are. We're doing quite well on our own.
The sad thing is, there's every indication we'll keep plumbing the depths for a long time to come.
Original Article
Source: ottawa citizen
Author: Janice Kennedy
(Jesus did have a way with words, didn't he? Or maybe it was Matthew. Either way, you won't find a more striking metaphor for hypocrisy than that image of exterior respectability, all neatly whitewashed, masking the corruption inside.)
From ancient high priests who spoke one way and acted another, to contemporary preachers of piety who prey on trusting children, public hypocrites are as common as dirt in life's passing parade.
But common as they are generally, they are even more numerous, more concentrated, in particular areas of human endeavour. Like politics.
In politics, hypocrisy is what makes things run. It's grease for the wheel. With very rare exceptions, it's simply the way things are done, with depressing regularity and mind-blowing frequency.
And it's shameless. To hang on to the power that has become their very lifeblood, its practitioners, confronted with evidence of the gap between rhetoric and reality, will look you in the eye, smile and deny, deny, deny. "I did not have sexual relations with that woman," insisted affable Bill Clinton - executive-inchief, loving husband, devoted father - possibly setting new standards for low on the deceitfulness scale.
So we should not be surprised by the latest explosions of political hypocrisy, currently bombarding us on all sides and from both sides of the border. Anyone who has observed the power-hungry legions in Ottawa and Washington for longer than a nanosecond will not be shocked.
And yet the displays still manage to dismay, depressing evidence that, well, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Consider the recent vaudeville from south of the border, where the Republican race has been the focus as Tea Partiers try to reshape the party into their own grotesque likeness.
And so we have the ever-hopeful Newt Gingrich, staunch upholder of conservatism and the principles articulated in his 1996 book, To Renew America. Among those principles, he says, are the family values that can be learned by picking up 1950s-era copies of Reader's Digest and The Saturday Evening Post. Even Norman Rockwell, however, might have found it challenging to portray Gingrich, who wrote the book just a few years before his marriage to Wife Number Three, with whom he'd had an affair while still married to Wife Number Two, with whom he'd had an affair while still married to Wife No. 1.
Gingrich is now a Roman Catholic convert. (Sigh. God save us from missal-thumping RC converts, holier than the Pope and almost as right-wing.) And he still loves mounting the soapbox in favour of traditional marriage - male-female only, please - with its fine traditional values.
We also have the spectacle of that Tea Party oracle and conservative icon, broadcaster Rush Limbaugh, calling a young woman a "slut" and "prostitute" for speaking in favour of contraception coverage in health insurance. This, from the four-timemarried man once detained at the airport for having someone else's prescribed Viagra in his luggage.
But Canada is no slouch in the vaudevillian hypocrite department, either. After all, we have a Conservative MP - our very own Rob "Van Winkle" Anders - who apparently sleeps during meetings and veterans' presentations, showers veterans with gratuitous insults, denies everything. And then observes that he has "enormous respect for the men and women who have sacrificed in the service of our country," somehow confusing this show of rank hypocrisy with an apology.
If it weren't so sad, it would be funny.
What's not funny at all in the world of double-standard politics, however, is the way Stephen Harper's government has decided to treat these same veterans. From inadequate care for physically and psychologically wounded soldiers, to financial rejiggings of disability payouts, the Conservatives are not sounding anything at all like the government that couldn't praise the "extraordinary sacrifice" of our uniformed men and women highly enough when it sent them overseas into nine years of hell.
The veterans' advocacy group Our Duty this week condemned as incomplete and deeply flawed a government report on how overwhelmingly satisfied returning soldiers and their families were with Veterans Affairs services and benefits. The truth, says the group, is quite the opposite.
And in the wacky world of political hypocrisy, what's also not funny is the screaming scandal currently hogging the headlines. Whoever authorized the use of vote-suppression (now there's a euphemism), robocalls and misdirection during the last election has committed the ultimate act of political hypocrisy. Is there another way to describe this theft than as a calculated derailment of democracy masquerading as an engagement in democracy's most fundamental exercise?
So, no, we don't need Republican clowns to model political hypocrisy for us, entertaining though they are. We're doing quite well on our own.
The sad thing is, there's every indication we'll keep plumbing the depths for a long time to come.
Original Article
Source: ottawa citizen
Author: Janice Kennedy
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