Word cluster of the following article.
I'm inflicting this draft of an upcoming article for The Grape on you for two reasons (1) I need to know if it's good and (2) I need to know if it needs a conclusion. Fire away, reader(s).
A quick note. I am one of two copy editors for The Grape, and am writing this for them for that reason. Also because I couldn't say this stuff in The Review, also elevating readers and all that.
Here it is.
Hide your women, and lock up your booze; Newt Gingrich is coming to Oberlin. The Honorable Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the United States House of Representatives, former professor of history, and former(?) two-time adulterer will be speaking at Finney Chapel on Wednesday, September 24.
Gingrich is best known for his role in the 1994 Republican takeover of the House of Representatives, The Contract With America, and the ensuing failed impeachment of President Clinton.
Gingrich, too, has received notoriety for his tawdry personal life; his biography is speckled with scandal, hypocrisy, and base lechery. His first wife was his high school geometry teacher whom he married when he was nineteen. He divorced her after a series of messy—and potentially delightfully kinky—affairs. Infamously, he demanded that they discuss the terms of their divorce as she lay in a hospital bed recovering from cancer surgery. He then refused to pay alimony. Fortunately for wife number one, his hometown church began collecting donations for her.
Three months after this divorce, he married wife number two. Then, after a drawn-out affair with a congressional staffer, he divorced wife number two and made an honest woman out of that lucky staffer.
But in the spirit of hating not the player but the game, it might be prudent to move away from Gingrich’s personal life; it is too easy to point out the flaws, foibles, and hypocrisies of politicians, even if they are as glaring as Gingrich’s affair during the Clinton impeachment probe. There is much more to Gingrich’s life outside of politics, much more than his hedonistic sexual predilections and his violations of (several) House ethics rules.
Gingrich has authored a number of historical fiction novels, which delve into the “what ifs?” of history. Unlike much historical fiction, which ends up ghettoized in the back “genre” aisles of Barnes and Nobel, Gingrich’s work is regularly a bestseller, and often met with critical approval. For example, disgraced ex-Marine and conservative demi-god, Colonel Oliver North lauded one of Gingrich’s recent works (with co-author William Forstchen), Days of Infamy, a retelling of the infamous Pearl Harbor attacks as, “Absolutely brilliant! Fast paced and filled with tension and suspense. Every page resonates with the momentous events and great personalities of World War II—and scenes so carefully crafted you feel like you’re there. This is a ‘must read’ for all who look at history and wonder: ‘What if…’”
Beyond his fiction works, Gingrich has written several non-fiction books, mostly declaiming the state of affairs today, and pressing for a kind of a change anathema to most at Oberlin. But Gingrich—like so many conservative politicians—does not merely push for radically rightist-christianist policies, which in and of itself would cause friction in a place like Oberlin, but he views the world in an entirely different way than we.
It is this fundamental difference in world-view that makes Gingrich such a polarizing figure on a majority-liberal campus like Oberlin, and it is sure to make his coming speech, particularly the question and answer session, a high blood pressure event. Civility, after all, is hard to achieve when one believes—as Gingrich does—that we are the enemy, not just of his policies, but of his God and of America itself.
Gingrich, in his books, demonstrates quite clearly why those who oppose his policies are fundamentally un-American. Gingrich begins his Winning the Future with a test on where the reader stands “on the great and growing gap between traditional American values [that’s him] and the secular liberalism of the Left [that’s us].” From these questions one can easily divine what he thinks of us. We are not proud to be an American. We do not believe in God. We like personal injury lawyers and have abortions for fun.
With vitriol, he frames his books such that every passage shows his disdain for his—and his country’s—enemy. He writes:
America has been divided into these two camps. In the first are those elites who find it acceptable to drive God out of the public life and who, in general, also scorn American history, support economic regulation over freedom and competition, favor a “sophisticated” foreign policy led by the United Nations, and agree with The New York Times.
But Americans in the other camp who are proud of our history know how integral God is to understanding American exceptionalism, know how vital the creative and competitive spirit is to being American, and believe that America is worth defending even if it irritates foreigners who do not share our values.
Putting aside, for the moment, the ludicrousness of putting economic regulation and freedom on two sides of a dialectic, as though they were mutually exclusive; putting aside, for the moment, the fact that neither elite nor sophisticated are insults; putting aside, for the moment, the unfathomably obtuse and downright scurrilous straw-man argument that those who opposed President Bush’s actions post-9/11 somehow believe that America is not worth defending; putting all of this aside, it is hard to read this passage without coming to the twin conclusions that, one, Newt Gingrich hates us, and, two, Newt Gingrich is an irreconcilable blowhard.
But the fundamental problem with Newt Gingrich isn’t his facile and illogical vituperation. It isn’t even his playa-wannabe sexual habits. The problem with Newt Gingrich is that he believes that God makes America great. Let me rephrase. He believes that a specific—and wholly sectarian—God is the font from which all that is good in America flows. And, as such, to claim—as many on the Left do—that there are some structural problems in America is to claim that there is something wrong with God.
The flip side of this coin is that, according to Newt, to argue—as many on the Left do—that we ought not force Newt Gingrich’s conception of God into the public sphere is to argue that we ought not to put back what makes America great.
Here is the crux of Newt Gingrich’s persecution complex, the crux of his bile and scorn. In the good ol’ days, men were men, women were women, and America, blessed by God, was a land of puppies, unicorns, and post-marital orgasms. Now, he sees that world slipping away; the elitists, the commies, the hippies, and the secular Left have taken prayer out of schools and God out of the government. And since Gingrich, and his christianist brethren, have confused piety for patriotism, the inescapable conclusion is that we have taken what is good of America out of America.
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