No, it's not those greedy selfish bastards who talked the Cons into deregulation so that they could then rape and pillage the country unfettered.
No, it's not the inherent weaknesses of a free-market system, with its boom-and-bust cycles.
None of those things are responsible for the financial crisis. Oh, no, my darlings: we are:
Just to add to my assessment of the pervasive influence of know-nothing Dominionism on the right, here's Daniel Henninger, a columnist paid money by the Wall Street Journal, a working writer for a newspaper with an economic focus, blaming the financial crisis on greeters who don't say "Merry Christmas" at shopping malls:
This year we celebrate the desacralized "holidays" amid what is for many unprecedented economic ruin -- fortunes halved, jobs lost, homes foreclosed. People wonder, What happened? One man's theory: A nation whose people can't say "Merry Christmas" is a nation capable of ruining its own economy.[snip]
It has been my view that the steady secularizing and insistent effort at dereligioning America has been dangerous. That danger flashed red in the fall into subprime personal behavior by borrowers and bankers, who after all are just people. Northerners and atheists who vilify Southern evangelicals are throwing out nurturers of useful virtue with the bathwater of obnoxious political opinions.
Shorter Daniel Henninger: Bad, bad secular progressives! Bad, naughty atheists! Bad, awful people of other religions! Because you forced Wal-Mart greeters to stop saying Merry Christmas, because you demanded Hallmark put out a line of "Happy Holidays" and "Season's Greetings" cards, because you forced WASPS to acknowledge that there are, in fact, people in this country who are not white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, you caused the entire financial sector to lose its morals and cause all sorts of mayhem. Shame on you!
Do you know what this fucking assclown illustrated his post with? Mad Max. Seriously. In the Wall Street Journal, we have a screed claiming that, because "Northerners and atheists" dereligioned America, that poor weak Christian majority lost its way, and since we no longer say Merry Christmas, we will end up living in a Mel Gibson movie.
"Unhinged" is a word that comes to mind, but does not begin to describe the utter batshit insanity, the rubber-room quality of the schizophrenic reasoning, the sheer foaming-at-the-mouth paranoid ramblings of this supposed Wall Street "journalist."
What I would do, if this man were in any condition to be reasoned with, is sit him down with me. Right here, in my room, I have Books. I have Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, which investigates several economic bubbles that burst. I have books on history, books on religion, and books on politics galore. I would very much like to sit Mr. Henninger down with them, and go through them page-by-page, and ask him to explain to me how, when these people were more than happy to say "Merry Christmas" and go to church and were in fact Christians in good standing, they also managed to fuck up their economies by being insanely greedy bastards?
The only problem with this scenario is, I don't invite madmen into my home. Alas.
Reading through Henninger's screed, we come to a fallacy that you've already dealt with, Dana:
ReplyDeleteResponsibility and restraint are moral sentiments. Remorse is a product of conscience. None of these grow on trees. Each must be learned, taught, passed down. And so we come back to the disappearance of "Merry Christmas."
It has been my view that the steady secularizing and insistent effort at dereligioning America has been dangerous. That danger flashed red in the fall into subprime personal behavior by borrowers and bankers, who after all are just people. Northerners and atheists who vilify Southern evangelicals are throwing out nurturers of useful virtue with the bathwater of obnoxious political opinions.
In other words, without religion there's no morality.
This guy doesn't even understand what we object to about those "obnoxious political opinions". If he were, I'm pretty sure he'd be defending his.
I think the reason we had this crisis has more to do with our country's fondness for simplistic nonsense, particularly on the part of the people who write editorials for major newspapers.