Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Today in "Shit Not-Quite Presidential Candidates Say": Newt Gingrich

Ladies and gentlemen, the intellectual heavyweight of the Republican party, thrice-divorced and disgraced former Speaker Newt Gingrich.
In a speech to Texas evangelicals, Gingrich also took up the theme over the weekend, warning that unless America is saved, his grandchildren “will live in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.”
Can anyone explain to me how this would work?

8 comments:

Edmund in Tokyo (not currently in Tokyo) said...

OK, I'll give it a shot.

Educated, integrated people stop going to church and believing in God. This is the usual trend in developed countries, although the US trajectory has been a bit odd.

Meanwhile, you get a load of immigration from Islamic countries, and the radical end make a lot of noise like your current evangelical churches, except more marginalized and correspondingly drama-loving.

Doesn't seem very likely in the US, but places like Holland are kind-of trending that way.

I'll leave someone else to fill in some snark about what it once meant to be an American, but I think there's plenty about Gingrich's values that the educated secularists of the future won't get.

Nick Beaudrot said...

I think I get what you're saying. It basically relies on the idea that "American" identity revolves around the dominant ethnoreligious group. And so as that ethnoreligious group declines, others can gain more of a foothold.

That just mean it's a different sort of batshit insane; the idea of being dominated by islamist radicals is so farfetched that I'm having a hard time describing it.

Ron E. said...

The proper way to look at statements like this is not as actual English sentences that have meaning but as verbal utterances expressing tribal identity. IOW, Gingrich is just signalling that he stands with the Christianists who make up the GOP base against atheists and Muslims.

low-tech cyclist said...

The proper way to look at statements like this is not as actual English sentences that have meaning but as verbal utterances expressing tribal identity. IOW, Gingrich is just signalling that he stands with the Christianists who make up the GOP base against atheists and Muslims.

No doubt! But the root problem with Gingrich isn't Gingrich himself, but rather the love that he keeps getting from the Villagers; absent that, Gingrich would be an all-but-forgotten political figure.

The importance of a quote like this is that the next time (and the time after that, etc.) that a Villager gives Gingrich a blowjob, s/he will have to swallow this, at least if I have anything to say about it.

Stentor said...

I'm imagining something like Plato's Republic in reverse -- an elite of Islamic imam-kings advancing their Muslim agenda by convincing the masses to believe in atheism.

Dennis said...

I think your problem is in failing to translate from Republican to English. Properly rendered, the quote is that his grandchildren:

“will live in a bad country, potentially one dominated by bad people and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.”

See? It makes perfect sense!

Nick Beaudrot said...

Also if the press gives him a blowjob, he can say he never had sex with the press and still be technically accurate.

Santa Claustrophobia said...

C'mon. This is just Domino Theory being re-purposed.

I never, ever understood how some Central American country going Communist would mean that in, say, twenty years the US would too.

How does a thing like that happen if 99.99% of the country is already against it? It always felt like they were suggesting that the citizenry would just lay down and accept the new ruling overlords much like the hated French did.

Except we're better than them and don't you forget it!

Anyway, that's how it's supposed to happen. One day somebody gets up in Washington and says 'Your god sucks! You will worship Allah now!' and apparently everybody just does.