By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
Perhaps you heard that the Dalai Lama retired. That was a WTF moment for me. How do you retire from being God-incarnate? How does that work? Turns out, the Dalai Lama is just backing out of politics, no longer assuming his position as (exiled) titular head of Tibet and stepping down from national leadership. I suppose that’s rational enough in the 21st century, but somehow it doesn’t feel right. I mean seriously, the Pope doesn’t get to retire, does he? Some gigs you just don’t get to put behind you until you give up the ghost.
That was just one little blip on my rationality radar. It’s been beeping like crazy for quite a while. I’m sure you’ve noticed that rational thinking is under siege in this nation. Most days I pour my morning cup of coffee, sit down to scan the headlines and then run around with my hair on fire, screaming, “Wake the fuck up, people! The battlements are being breached!” That initial response, courtesy of my many fire signs, lasts a moment or two before I settle into a fact-finding mission to see just how absurd the news has become.
Not counting the truly terrifying, of which we’ve had more than our share lately, illogic has gotten thick out there, closing in on Dorothy’s Oz or Alice’s Wonderland. To say the joke’s on us is a kind of twisted meme since nobody’s laughing, but seriously, folks — the joke’s on us. For instance, in a rational world no one other than myself would be interested in what I do with my uterus. From Texas, where they make an art form of irrationality, Mrs. Helen Philpott — 80-something year-old blogger and national treasure — wrote of her governor’s insistence that women considering abortion be forced to listen to the heartbeat of the fetus:
I find it odd because I know that Rick Perry, the Governor of my state, is really upset about how big government has gotten. Evidently it’s not big enough, however, because ‘ole Ricky seems to think it’s small enough to crawl up my vagina with a sonogram machine and a recorder so that Ricky can tell me how to think based on what God whispers in his ear when no one else is around. To be truthful, it could just be something he picked up in church. I’m not sure. It might have happened at his office. It’s really hard to tell the difference between his office and his church these days.
Helen and I would no doubt be dear friends. In a truly rational world, my having terminated a problematic pregnancy twenty or more years ago would remain a personal sorrow but not a contribution to the holocaust of the unborn that is putting Social Security in danger due to lost workforce. The IRS would not dig into my personal life to see if any public funds went toward my procedure. In a sane world, the doctor who provided that service for me would not be targeted as a murderer, nor would legislation be considered to allow his own murder to be called an act of “justifiable homicide.”