Are you ready for the country?

A few months ago, because the family car has a huge dent in the passenger side that traps air and kills gas mileage, this environmentally-conscious (meaning "I'm aware of it," not "I wear sandals") city boy took the electric train out to Downer's Grove, where an aunt picked me up and drove us out to her farm. I believe it's in Ogle County, outside a very scary little hick town called Oregon, which is pronounced by Illinoisans as "Or-a-GON," in a funny twisted understanding of words that also sees them say "Peru" as "PEE-roo" and "Cairo" as "KAY-row."

To get to Ogle County one must traverse all of Dekalb County, which is right in the heart of Dennis Hastert's own 14th congressional district--which goes from the far western suburbs of Chicago all the way to Iowa.

On the way, my aunt, who moves in fairly conservative circles (including Bush pioneers and other such wanks), began telling me about a lawyer she used to work with who is now Hastert's towelboy (or maybe she said chief of staff or something of that nature?). Anyway, the story was a true tale of the South, except it was set in rural Illinois: Hastert returns to his district at every opportunity; he's legendary for his folksiness and familiarity. His constitutents know they can always find Dennis at a certain diner on Saturday morning, hammering down porkfat gravy, with pork biscuits, pork meat sides, and a pork shake. And apparently it's delightful, delightful! how his plain-spoken supporters give him an earful every time about property taxes, that fag liberal media that forces them to watch "The Birdcage" on the Sunday Night Movie and they just can't turn off that dadblamed TV, and the price of gasoline for the ol' 1955 Chevy pickup with no headlights and a large exhaust problem. Hilarious.

The thing about this experience that comes to me now, now that Hastert is on television defending himself by proclaiming a conspiracy by George Soros, liberal bloggers, and everyone who didn't vote Bush last time, is how utterly creepy the whole thing is. Like Hastert's bloated, waxy, I'm-already-in-the-first-stages-of-cardiac-arrest face, or the assumed simple humanity of people who must lead double lives--like Hastert--as both interpreters of the dirtfucker's complaint but also power brokers in DC.

Or maybe it's the place itself. Country Illinois is as bad or worse than country South, if only because there is a certain grimness to the place. These are resigned, beaten people, who will scrape along either as the fastidiously-washed lower middle class of Aurora, or else live and die as puritanical, hypocritical farmers who kill the earth even as they work its soil. That lower middle class, though, it is the larger part of the problem, because it's spreading. After an hour in the car, we were about 80 miles from Chicago and it was sod farms as far as the eye could see. And little crackerbox houses every so often off in the distance. But there was massive road construction on that Sunday morning empty highway, because white people by the hundreds of thousands are moving to the farmland and commuting into the city some 4-6 hours a day. Apparently, the backup begins about 50 miles from Chicago and lasts from 7am to 10am every morning.

Where did we lose the point, though? Hastert has recalled for me the horror of realizing that the better part of the state we live in is composed of proudly backwards people who know in their hearts of hearts that Republicanism is a lie, but who demand that people like Hastert tell them the familiar lies to ease their pain. There is no talking or reasoning with them, because they won't be reasoned with. They like tyranny in ideas, and they aren't under any illusions--they are not the victims of false consciousness who need our liberal educated powers of clarification and rescue.

There is, I am now certain, no evangelical movement in this country worth speaking of. Millions claim to have found inspiration in Jesus, but all the evidence says that they are openly trying to kid you. They pray and weep, wail and shake, but they also wink at you right before skimming from the till, putting on the white sheet, or pulling the lever for the GOP straight ticket.

These are people of one mind, not two. Their actions are entirely explicable by one rubric: they are liars. And they like to be led by other liars. Sincerity is not a Republican value, nor decency, charity, humanitarianism, or anything else that would not readily combine with an utter disrespect for honesty.

It has become a curiosity to me that the word "liar" is never used in American political discourse, even when a Republican evangelical stands in front of the public and lies in the most insulting fashion. Could it be because the very word is like holy water in Hell? Or has a majority of the public just embraced dishonesty as the coin of the realm, rendering obsolete the words we used to use to condemn the avaricious?

Anyway, the point, to come the long way around, is that Hastert has nothing to fear from his constituents: they will continue to support him and vote for him until he keels over from one too many porkfat sandwiches. The lesson to be learned from his obvious pandering to his personal constituents in response to this scandal is that all politics is local; but as progressives we ought to be very afraid of the weight that such crude and disingenuous pandering carries.

But more than that, epiphany has been reached: given Dobson's characterization of Foley's pursuit of sex with teenage boys as "just a joke" perpetrated by the pages themselves (which begs the question "why did Foley resign?"), it is time to drop the respect, if we still have any, for born-agains. I don't know why it happened only now, but Hastert and Dobson together have finally allowed me to see that the Christian Party--I mean, the GOP--is NOT worthy of respect and study, it is NOT worthy of reasonable discussion, it is NOT, nor are its members, worthy of being treated like anything more than a pack of liars. The distinction so many on the left have tried to make, that evangelicals and Republicans (which for this purpose are the same, since the secular minority of the GOP feeds off of the fear and respect generated by what I believe to be the majority of the party, the self-identified Christian right) are worthy of our time and effort to understand how a group can be of two minds, simultaneously both pious and venal, is false.

There is only one conservative mind, and it is empty of all save one idea: preserve power.

When a God-fearing Republican speaks to you in lies, you need not look under every rock and shrub to find the reason why. You need not believe that there is a complex reason for it. You may rest on the evidence as your eyes and ears give it to you. These people aren't that deep or complex, by their own admission. And they're proud of it.