Every time I see the image of lemur–eyed Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan I struggle to recall where I have seen him in person before. I know that I have never seen him in person, but now I think I know why my mind struggles to make the connection: I have seen him as a type, a category, in the form of some other Roman Catholics with whom I spent some years at a Jesuit liberal arts college. It is not Ryan’s appearance, although it sports a clean-cut look, that soft ingenuous demeanor, but more than anything, it is his words that prompt that mnemonic connection.
This was all brought back to me rather profoundly when I heard these words come out of Ryan’s mouth at his speech at the Republican National Convention in Tampa the other night. He said: “We have responsibilities, one to another—we do not each face the world alone. And the greatest of all responsibilities is that of the strong to protect the weak.” It is that noble sounding language that mixes the metaphysical with the political, that his sort likes to affect. It is the kind of stuff that his speechwriter, obviously feels gives him the most approved appropriate “presentation,” but is also a kind of stuff that might be lifted right from a papal bull or some Sunday morning homily from a pulpit. It is a form of speech, long employed in political discourse, that intentionally smudges the line somewhere between the practical and moral, between Revelation and realpolitik. (It also offers a subliminal counterpoint to the Randian selfishness to which Ryan subscribes.)
That is a fuzzy phrase, that “the greatest of all responsibilities is that of the strong to protect the weak.” We used to get a lot of that in our Catholic schools; it sets you up to be “responsible,” to adopt a life of “service,” but it also conveys to you in no uncertain terms that you are destined to be “strong,” not the weak, the good Samaritan, not the guy in the ditch. The danger is that once you are convinced you are the one who is “responsible,” (not in the connotation of the term that means “culpable”) you are the one who is to be in charge, you are the one who is to decide not just how to protect the weak, but to make= judgments as to the moral etiology of their weakness.
Of course we have a pretty good idea of the forms of weakness to which the conservative/Christian/conservative/Republican perspective takes: the weakness of homosexuality, the weakness of drugs and substance abuse, the weakness of occupational lassitude, the weakness of reliance upon governmental programs or the intercession of labor unions, the weakness of believing scientists over Scripture, the weakness of going into debt, the weakness of illicit sex, and especially of its consequences in pregnancy, and even greater weakness of wanting to terminate that pregnancy, the weakness of using contraception. Such people are obviously too week in character to look after themselves.
We are now quite familiar with the weaknesses that Mr. Ryan and his like-minded right-wing Tea Party types are out to rectify, because contained within that exercise of responsibility that they are morally moved to address is the moral responsibility to be “right.” We get a good example of just how this might be exercised in some of Mr. Ryan’s other words, when in a television interview, in response to a question about Mr. Akin’s opinion about rape, Mr. Ryan used the phrase “whatever the method of conception,” as though getting pregnant by rape has a fundamental equivalency with conception that might take place in an act of conjugal love.
So one begins to see, that there is much more to see––fact is richer than diction––in Mr. Ryan’s noble utterances reasons for why he thinks we should elect him and Mr. Romney to “protect the weak” of America. It is clear, indeed documented, that Mr. Ryan holds with Mr. Aiken on the matter of not regarding rape and incest as sufficient exceptions to their general position opposing abortion, and that Mr. Ryan is quite comfortable (although not explicating such in television interviews) with his moral position on how to handle both the “weakness” of some male who needs to obtain his sexual satisfaction by forcible rape, and the “weakness” of his impregnated victim in wishing not to bear and raise his child.
Once we combine Mr. Ryan’s conservative Christian morality which his adoration of the objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand we get an interesting stew indeed, one that produces a self-centered self-assurance that leaves little room for doubt or compromise. Mr. Ryan’s “package” is the hubris of the “true believer” motivated and inspired by belief in noble responsibilities, that the Republican Party of the moment must feel is the product that will fill in the considerable blank spaces intentionally left open in the presentation of the tax dodging Mormon (ooops, I mentioned it) Mitt Romney.
That connection could, politically, conceivably succeed. No matter that it would be disastrous for the nation, a completion of the siphoning of the wealth created by the efforts of its working and middle classes into the offshore accounts of the rich, and now approaching full political control, plutocrats. The danger in having two candidates who are grounded in their respective evangelical cults that anoint them as the protectors of the weak, and the leaders of the economic class that will oversee and distribute at its moral discretion the wealth of our society is positively chilling. Indeed, it can be said that it is even more insidious, more nefarious, than the two administrations of the cowardly, dimwitted, Mr. Bush. Mr. Bush might have well believed that his God wanted him to be president, but yet at times had look about him that spoke “if this cup can be lifted from me.” It would not be the same with Romney and Ryan. If you do not believe it could be worse, one can only hope that you will never have the chance to find out.
Yes, I do believe I have seen Mr. Ryan before, in the person of those young, Roman Catholic, true believers who were taught that the imperfect world out there was set before them by their God as their responsibility to set aright, save from its weaknesses, and to acquire and safeguard its wealth and resources on its behalf. I didn’t like these guys then, and I have nothing but contempt for them now. They are men who did not admit doubt; they are, as history has shown time and again, the most dangerous of our species. Give them the power and authority and the “weak” they aim to “protect” will probably still “inherit the earth,” but only after Romney, Ryan and their greedy ilk are good and done with it.
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© 2012, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 8.31.2012)