Waiting for Christmas

I hope to tell my daughter that she was born at the high-water mark for Republican dirty tricks of the 21st-century kind, that only a few months after she came into the world the dark lords of right-wing spin and manipulation were brought down by an honest prosecutor from Chicago. Much as I try not to tune in to the news, the fact that Karl Rove and “Scooter” Libby could be indicted any day is about the closest I’m going to get anytime soon to the feeling of a long-awaited Christmas or better-than-hoped-for snowstorm. So, yes, I do check the New York Times online every hour (at least) – just so Christmas doesn’t come without my noticing.

One urban legend has it that parents who try to make liberal bohemians out of their offspring are greeted with investment bankers instead, but that’s not what I anticipate. Progressive politics, it seems to me, are really just the nonreligious face of Christianity. Of course, you could say that progressivism is the nonreligious face of Buddhism – or Judaism, for that matter – and you’d be just as close to the truth. They asked the Dalai Lama a ways back what he thought of Americans converting to Buddhism, if he was in favor of it, and he said he thought the religion we had in this country was more than sufficient.

I think the essence of true, progressive Christianity is highly contagious – especially to those possessing an education (and the spiritual inheritance that comes with it). Allow me to say the fact that “conservatives” in this country have hijacked the title “Christians” for themselves is just ever so slightly annoying for those of us who know better. I know that my daughter will at least have heard from both her parents that Jesus was a liberal and that his message and example are worthy of contemplation, and I hope that the fine education she is likely to enjoy will make it hard for her to kid herself about anything as hateful as, say, Bush’s “compassionate conservatism.”

I really do hope my daughter will look back on the year of her birth and agree that it was a beautiful thing that the forces of good returned to ascendance in American politics.