By Selwyn Duke
It's hard to imagine Al Gore faring very well on the game-show Jeopardy. For sure, I haven't detected too many areas of expertise in Plastic Man's repertoire. I remember when Gore called Bosnians "Bosniacs" in a speech. I remember when he glanced at busts of the founding fathers during the inauguration and queried "Who are those people?" Then there was the time when Gore was scoring Bush the elder and said "A zebra can't change his spots."
But I wouldn’t brand Gore as stupid simply because of his continual, elementary, bush-league [or should it be Gore-league?] mistakes regarding what is common knowledge to most home-schooled twelve-year-olds. It wouldn’t quite rise to the level of labeling someone a dolt for misspelling the word potato, but it wouldn’t exactly be fair either.
No, I call Gore stupid because he’s . . . well . . . stupid.
Of course, Gore might be in his element on Jeopardy if the category were propaganda, but not if it was honesty or decency. Then again, he would be completely befuddled if the category were world religion or, more precisely, Christianity, but would proceed with aplomb if it were stereotyping.
All these contentions were borne out recently in an interview that Gore gave to The New Yorker magazine. Among other things, Gore impugned President Bush’s faith, stating that it shared much with fundamentalist Islam and that it emphasized “vengeance” and “brimstone.”
Now, I don’t want to get bogged down in the minutiae of theology, so I’ll content myself by saying that I guess it escaped Gore’s notice that fundamentalist Christians don’t believe in decapitating infidels or in conversion by the sword. They don’t believe that a man has the right to bury his daughter in desert sands if she dishonors the family, or in preventing women from showing their faces. They also aren’t the ones who don and detonate bombs or fly planes into buildings in the hope of going to a hereafter harem with seventy-two virgins.
But Gore’s stereotyping is indicative of the superficial understanding possessed by liberals who brand any Christian with traditional views – a Christian who refuses to drink deeply from the cistern of political-correctness spiked Kool-Aid – as a “fundamentalist.” They have no idea that fundamentalism originated with twelve small volumes titled “The Fundamentals,” written by anonymous authors between 1910 and 1915. And they are oblivious to the fact that these writers espoused a literalism to which most Christians wouldn’t subscribe. For instance, the authors stated that the Creation account must be regarded as being literal and not metaphorical. Now, while I take issue with neither perspective given our current state of knowledge, the fact of the matter is that most Christians aren’t fundamentalists. Moreover, I tend to doubt President Bush is either.
None of this, however, stopped Gore from drawing a specious and invidious comparison between Islamic Fundamentalists and Christians of the President’s stripe. He said, “It’s a particular kind of religiosity” and that “They [the fundamentalist versions of Christianity, Islam and other faiths, as defined by Gore] have many features in common.” Mayhap so, Al, mayhap so. But a learned person would understand that while similarities would have to exist, the differences between things could amount to either the completion of a formula or a poison pill. For instance, the Wright brother's invention bore an ever so slight resemblance to a bird, just like the failed heavier-than-air machines that preceded it. But the difference is that the bicycle mechanics’ plane possessed what those gadgets did not: the elements it needed to soar.
To further illustrate the point, Al, you have many features in common with an honest man. You both talk, for example. But your lips speak not truth. You also have features in common with a wise man; that you both imbibe information is one of them. But he’ll draw sage conclusions while you’ll play the fool. And like an intelligent man, you eat, drink, sleep and your neurons fire with regularity. But you are not an intelligent man.
There’s also a certain type of starkly stupid hypocrisy evident in Gore’s sentiments. He and his ilk would be the first ones to preach the comparative religion error of the moral equivalency of all faiths. And on that basis they would bristle at the claim that the Christian faith is morally superior to the Muslim one, but would then claim that their modernistic, waste-from-distillate Christian faith is superior to the two-thousand year old one.
This is just another reminder of how lucky, to use modernistic terminology – or blessed, to use that of traditionalists – we were that the liberals weren’t able to steal the two-thousand election. I suppose it was what Gore might call dodging a leopard or . . . er . . . lodging a bullet . . . or, well, you get the idea.
