On election (a sonnet)

On election

In all the steady hand of Providence
guides well except if, this election year,
the party I love lacks preeminence.
Then I will cry out with many a tear:
"My God, my God, why did you forsake me!
The person I want in office has lost!
In your wrath have you forgotten mercy?
Have it on me and not the foolish host!
Did you break your promise to do my will
That was given `ere the day I was born?
Or did my requests lack a prayerful skill
that You listened not, and I am forlorn?
In all things Providence can only be
The stuff that should be convenient to me!"

Here's a little poem I wrote earlier this year but now it's practically a new poem. Why? Why because it has a new title of course. This time the title is shorter and manages to invoke both religion AND politics! What could be better?

I have heard it said that polite company does not discuss politics or religion. That proviso given, my family constitutes one of the most inveterately impolite in the Western world, since it can hardly go for long before we as an assembled group find it obligatory to talk about both politics AND religion, preferably comingling them in all the most inextricable ways possible! At least one of my uncles was a chaplain in the military so I suppose it would stand to reason. Some of my family are Protestant, some of them Orthodox, nearly all of the Republican but not all of the same stripe of Republican. My siblings and I preferred McCain in 2000 to the general horror of parents who doubted if we were even Christians for that.

Now, eight years later, Obama is the antichrist and must be stopped. Back from 1992 to 2000 I would get paranoid emails from time to time forwarded to me written by people who sincerely believed Bill Clinton was about to suspend the Constitution and institute martial law and declare himself dictator for life at any moment. And the Democrats shrieked similar things these last eight years. Can people put the crack pipes down long enough to recognize that tyranny in this country is going to have to be a truly bipartisan effort should it arrive?

It is on account of my lovely but sometime frustrating family (or just certain members of them) that I settled upon the motto that Jesus was crucified by the vote of a bipartisan committee of single issue voters. Not just my family mind you, but some friends of mine who passionatel left and right. I have had the ineffable joy of being caught between them as someone I would describe as a moderate.

One of my family would talk to me about how God is in control. When Clinton won I told her that God is in control. The response was something along the lines of "I don't know. Sometimes God lets terrible things happen." This is the time in the United States when people love to misappropriate "If my people who are called by my name ... ." That applied to Israel, who still went off into exile for centuries, by the way. If Christians just pray hard enough then the antichrist (whether it's Obama or McCain) will be defeated and the tribulation age will be averted.

This is the time when being a dispensationalist reveals itself to be insanity. It took a year or two in college talking with Protestants of various stripes and researching some of my family's favored teachers to realize that Hal Lindsay was ... how do I put it, kinda on crack. But peddlers of paranoia and terror exist on both the left and the right within Christendom so it's not as though I think we're going to hear that SURPRISE Billary had some secret trap door plan so that they really take over the country with help from the trilateral commission.

Unbelievers don't have this paranoia that the world will end about stuff like this. They may squeal about the end of all that is holy and beautiful in America ... but that's not quite the same thing. they don't profess to believe in the sovereign God who made all things and then turn around and act as though God has ceded everything to Satan just because the wrong candidate got the most votes. Stuff about voter fraud and claiming the other side is busy working to rig the election shows how paranoid and depraved both sides are as far as I'm concerned.

It has sometimes been proferred that the best of all governments is a benevolent dictatorship. This must be popular with precisely those people who go to bed at night telling themselves that they will be the most benevolent of dictators. These last sixteen years I have seen some people freak about the Constitution not being kept only so long as it was the opposition party that seemed to be ignoring it. Turn things around and the right political party has things and I have heard people complain that the President doesn't have ENOUGH power. The whole point of limited government, of checks and balances, is precisely because you're trying to imagine the Presidency having X amount of power when Y candidate, who you hate, is in office, rather than Z candidate, whom you worship. What's too much power for Y is too much power for Z and that, my fellow citizens, is a foundational precept of constitutionally limited government. Only most of the people who claim they stand for that are liars. Period. End of story.

Many Christians who are upset about the potential Armageddon that will be brought about if either the donkey or elephant prevails are revealing where their idols are. They also reveal how they circumscribe the sovereignty of God within their own convictions and not from Scripture or the historical Christian faith.

See, there's all this I wrote, or you can just go back and read the sonnet. Wasn't the sonnet more fun?