In Response to Caroline

I do not think that it is only the Americans, who are looking for a “sign” from above.

Back in the old homeland, they are still waiting for the messiah to come.

As to praying Obama and the Democrats out of office, one has to debate the power of the prayer in the United States. In the 1990s, the holy mantra was the Christian Coalition but that did not mean a re-discovery of religion and with the preachers on the TV, prayer become a sound-byte in the United States and religion, all shades of it as practiced on television, is a new form of entertainment packaged with monetary values in mind and popularly commercialized.

Religion has lost its spirituality, at least from what it seemed to me, and has become a part of the popular culture. How can you ask for guidance form a popular culture? Even so, will you recognize the signs, when they appear? I think, the most telling comment on this issue perhaps belongs to the words of “Sounds of Silence” by Simon & Garfunkle, when words to the song say “…and the people bowed and prayed to the neon god they had created….”.

When I think back and remember that the song was orginally commissioned for the movie, The Graduate, an esoteric smile creeps across my face. The movie was about alienation and the anguish of making choices and we have all, at one stage or another, experienced the paralysis of indecision in our lives and is a prayer not offered, but to seek guidance to escape from a paralysis of indecision?

Is religion a chisel to the human soul which is like a block of marble and guidance the act of the Master Sculptor, who chips the stone and shapes the marble into an expression of His Will?

One has to know what one wishes for in order to ask for guidance, because otherwise a prayer is only a collection of words devoid of any sense of awe and spirituality. The fear of God and once that sentiment is lost in the hearts of the followers, is what disabuses a religion in the popular imagination and religion becomes a hollow rhetorical capstone to a social joke uttered for the sake of banality if for nothing else.

You asked “why” and my cynical answer is that with the commercialization of religion, we might have, perhaps, subsituted God with Santa Claus and like our Christmas wishes, which have more to do with our wanton sense of greed and possessions and egoism, our prayers have become a new “Christmas list” of sorts seeking and demanding instant material gratification of self-indulgence instead of a guidance to the betterment of the soul.

Then again, on a different level and from a different perspective, it is about a loss of hope and a prayer is associated with the last act performed in a situation filled with desperation. When nothing works, we revert to saying a prayer, because it calms us and reassures us and personally speaking, Americans praying Obama and the Democrats away makes perfect sense in a symbolic sense.

The American electorate suffered an irrepairable loss of belief in their political system and in their politicans after Watergate. If John F. Kennedy’s Camelot was to be the realization of the Amerian hope; Watergate was the death spasm of that hope. Watergate disassociated the Americans from the believe that the government was for the good of the people and in the subsequent events after Watergate, the political experience of the American electorate was similar to that of Alice in the Wonderland deciding between Twiddle Dee and Twiddle Dum for their elected leaders.

Hence, it was the same sentiment which the Americans expressed about George Bush, Jr. and how they could “wish” him away. It was the end of the idealism and that idealism, literally died, not when John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas in 1963, but when Robert F. Kennedy was shot after winning the California primary in 1968 and when for a brief shining moment, in the dark gloom of the Vietnam War, the dream for Camelot seemed possible and within reach once more.

Remember the words Robert F. Kennedy said, when told of the death of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. He was campaigning in the Deep South and against advice, waded into a group of a silent crowd of African-Americans and told them the news and then said some words from an ancient Greek: let us go out and tame the savage nature of this world and make gentle the life of man.

Praying Obama and the Demcrats away is like praying for rain; it says more about our own innate loss of confidence in the political system than it actually bespeaks of a religious fervour.