Santorum Sees a Guillotine

[xchrom]

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2012/02/santorum-sees-a-guillotine.html

“They are taking faith and crushing it,” Rick Santorum said at a rally in Texas yesterday. The words need to be watched: Santorum pantomimes squeezing something in his hand, as though he were taking the life out of a mouse. He was talking about the Obama Administration, which, in the story he told, was not just careless about religion but actively out to get it. (As David Remnick writes over at Daily Comment today, that narrative, of a President who for some strange reason has a thing against Christians, has been tangled into a fight about insurance coverage for contraception.)

If the crushing doesn’t get you, the cutting will. Santorum says that Obama is leading us all to “the guillotine”—maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon. The guillotine is coming because “the French Revolution” is being reënacted. This suggests some historical confusion. Did Obama and his allies swear some sort of basketball-court oath, and then seize the White House? Is Guantánamo the Bastille? (If so, these revolutionaries skipped the storming-the-prison part.) And who’s Marie Antoinette? What is Santorum talking about?

He’s talking about God and man, and “what we used to read in high school”—namely, “Democracy in America,” by Alexis de Tocqueville:

He came from a country, they had a revolution, too…. Their constitution by the way was very similar to the American Constitution. But it was one difference. Their constitution was based on three principles. Liberty—good. Equality—good. And fraternity—brotherhood. Brother-hood. But not fatherhood. The rights came from each other. Came from the government. Not inalienable rights that came from God.

It is, first of all, intriguing that Santorum goes after “fraternity”; hasn’t “equality” been regarded as the more dangerous word, when seen from the right, what with the implications of levelling and forced conformity? And it is depressing, in a speech that traffics so readily in the language of faith, to see the idea of fraternal fellowship so scorned. One can argue that what got the French to the guillotine was precisely the abandonment of fraternity—of the senses friendship and fairness, kindness and even love that are folded into that word. (Deploying and distorting Tocqueville in every possible manner is nothing new; see James Wood’s essay in The New Yorker for more.)

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2012/02/santorum-sees-a-guillotine.html#ixzz1lynuEWZ0

[eppur_se_muova]

1. That's one sick rantorum. nt

[bemildred]

2. Two hundred and thirty years on, and the French Revolution still freaks the money boys out. nt

[Doctor_J]

3. Not enough, unfortunately.

And Santorum is confused about where he'll be when the guillotines are fired up.

[bemildred]

4. Just "confused" works pretty well for me. nt

[DCKit]

5. Gibberish. No Historical Context. No Structure. F nt

[MisterP]

6. the real question is, why's a Catholic reading Chick tracts?

[yurbud]

7. if he really thought it was true, he would santorum in his pants.

[Mopar151]

8. He would'n miss his brain if it became detached. n/t