by Charles P. Pierce I am confused here by John Bolton, the two-tone cannon rolling madly across the deck of the Bush administration. I hear first that Bolton was an angry boss and a devious employee. Now comes Larry Flynt -- Obligatory Serious Journalist Disclaimer: Remember, this is Larry Flynt and not a serious public intellectual like John Podhoretz. You may carry on. -- to report that, allegedly, Bolton engaged in some glandiferously spectacular wha-dee-doo-dah at Plato's Retreat (the famous group-sex emporium). If everything about Bolton can be believed, then we must in all fairness conclude that, at least at one point in his life, John Bolton worked and played well with others.
(I admit that I never thought I'd be writing about Plato's Retreat again, But, as with so many things -- the theory of evolution, Social Security, the middle class -- it took C-Plus Augustus and the Avignon Presidency to bring into discussion again things that we in the reality-based community thought long dead and/or settled.)
When I am confused, I seek refuge in my faith. As it happens, I had a Jesuit in the family: my uncle Michael, who died a few years back. It was a matter of great pride for my grandmother, who never failed to refer to her second son as The Jesuit. This usually was in the context of family holiday gatherings, which could not begin until The Jesuit got there -- something that rubbed raw my other priest-uncle, Tom, who was a Doctor of Sacred Theology but for whom we never held up Christmas dinner. At Michael's funeral, which was thickly attended by other members of The Society, Tom was heard to grumble that he had "earned the letters after his name." Up until then, I hadn't realized that there was a kind of theological one-upmanship going on among my uncles -- or that, in its grassroots internal dynamics, the Holy Catholic And Apostolic Church had a great deal in common with family-owned garment companies and multigenerational white-shoe law firms.
I mention all of this because, as a good liberal, I know now that I have to be sensitive to "people of faith." I always have been. For me, it was the family business. The first place I ever read Dashiell Hammett, and the first place I ever tasted an adult beverage, was my uncle's rectory. (The adult beverage was clear, and it was cooked up on the rectory stove by my grandmother -- a good north Kerry farm girl -- from an ancient family recipe for such homemade ordnance. My eyes finally uncrossed in May 1984.) However, as much as I want to do so, it's hard to be sensitive to "people of faith" when they seem to have turned the country willy-nilly into a festival for fruitcakes.
I mean, honestly. Rabid friars haunting hospices in Florida? Tom DeLay, appealing for salvation on a lucrative installment plan? Pat Robertson telling a TV audience that judges are more of a threat to them than are terrorists? Tim Russert, talking about "our" pope? Increasingly, "respecting people of faith" seems akin to "respecting" the cosmology of Art Bell. Once, people holding these views were limited to stapling them on telephone poles. Now there's MSNBC, willing always to send a limo deep into the private universe in which you've come to abide. One of our departed popes famously said, "Error has no rights." Well, nutbaggery at least ought to have less of a public profile.
The more I think about, the more I believe that the biggest problem with organized religion is not that it is religious; it is that it is organized. Disorganized religion worked out so much better. For example, we Christians were a lot better off when we were just wandering around, wearing sandals, hanging out with tax collectors (There go the Republicans!) and prostitutes (Oops, they're back!). It was as a disorganized religion that we ultimately turned Mercury into both an automobile and a record label and Mars into a candy bar. That's what we did when we were disorganized. We brought down the dominant organized religion of the day and the empire it rode in on.
Now we're organized, and the dominant religion in the country, and what do we have to show for it? James Dobson, trolling for Rapturists among America's fighter jocks? ("Antichrist, eleven o'clock low!" "Damn, hope y'all weren't using Finland.") Bishops like this Chaput character in Denver, talking about serious theological penalties for Catholics who vote for Catholics who vote for stem-cell research? Again, as has been the case generally, excommunication is dusted off and bandied about as easily as impeachment was back in the 1990s.
Of course, this argument leaves open the question of whether or not the stem cells would be excommunicated along with the person in whom they were implanted. After all, the stem cells are innocent human life. So if they're implanted in, say, the hippocampus of some sinner, and the sinner gets hit by a bus, does the sinner go to hell while his hippocampus goes to heaven? What kind of paradise is that, with unaffiliated hippocampi lying around everywhere, like the meat counter at Stop & Shop? Catholics like me once used to pray to pieces of the various saints, at least until the Fourth Lateran Council's Canon 62 finally regulated the traffic in sanctified giblets. So the notion of the redeemed frontal lobe is not that much of a threat, the Church having had a history of piecemeal salvation.
All of this is a result of religion's becoming organized, and of organized religion, which is always more organized than it is religious. Some things just shouldn't be organized. They should be spontaneous and undisciplined. These include religion and sex. More to follow on this, I think, but CNN just told me that John Bolton is "going to the floor of the Senate."
I hope for the sake of the children that he's down there alone.
Charles P. Pierce is a staff writer for The Boston Globe Magazine and a contributing writer for Esquire. He also appears regularly on National Public Radio.
