Patriotism is a secular religion now, one that fits perfectly with Christian religion, so in this marriage you get secularism and religion to sleep in the same bed. While most see these two worlds, secular and religious, as opposites which you both can’t obey at the same time, in the GOP Right you can simultaneously obey both commandments— obey God, obey Caesar—at the same time. Two sides of one GOP Coin.

Roy Moore is like the Zen white hot iron ball that is stuck in your throat because you can’t swallow it and you can’t throw it up. Roy and his like is the child of two incompatible languages of the mind and soul. Secular society (liberal civilization I might add) is a rational society, prose society that deals exclusive with the objective world just as science does. Religious life deals with the subjective dimension of us, our values and meaning, personal meaning, I might add, not objective meaning like what is the meaning of life. NO…what is MY meaning.

My thesis her is that the Republican Party got in bed with the Religious Evangelicals( these of the Christians most concerned with personal meaning, and if you can’t feel meaning it doesn’t really exist) back with Nixon and then Reagan. And when they got in bed together them mixed their languages. Imagine if you needed a rational manual to fix your car, and you got poetry. And the poem used metaphors that made the car your Soul, so you don’t know if you are fixing your car or your soul. This, BTW, is Alchemy, the science of the Middle Ages, where the sciences was subjectively involved with his experiments, trying to find the Philosopher’s Stone that would end suffering through chemistry. The Enlightenment and the Scientific Method ended that nonsense.

But here we are again, Middle Ages recycled. Again we can’t tell the difference between instruction of the salvation of our soul and the salvation of the nation through new policies. the Bible and the Constitution are shuffled together.

So for the believers, Roy Moore is a Moses who is going to take his people to the promised land by smiting the Pharaohs. And so is Trump, who like my martinis is a mix of gin and Vermont and you can’t separate them. So you get a little high on Trump or you get a hangover.

The Print Age ended in the 50s, and with the computer age the paradigm changes. News is hot instead of cool. Newspapers were instruments of reflection, TV is the instrument of action. In print everything moves in horizontal lines, in TV/internet everything comes as wholes. In print what happens in another state is distant; in TV/cable what happens in far away also happens on my street. The objective world is now the subjective world, both at the same time. Prose and poetry are mixed. We can’t tell them apart.