Echolalia

William Safire used to write a column for The New York Times about language. The fact that Safire was an arch conservative didn’t make his ruminations on language any less interesting. A word he might have chosen to write about is “echolalia,” which is I discovered in its adverbial form (“echolalically”) in one of Oliver Sacks’ books. It refers to the mindless repetition of something, a pathological condition in individuals who are autistic. Remember Hoffman’s character in The Rain Man?

We’re seeing a great deal of this lately in the so-called tea party attacks on Obama—the mindless repetition of obviously false slanders by people who just as obviously believe them. Metaphorically, these folks are “autistic”–completely out of touch with reality, responding to some strange inner way of ordering reality that normal individuals find bizarre. Of course, this has been a component of American politics and life for a long time. Go back to Friday, November 22, 1963 for a moment. A full-page advertisement appeared that day in The Dallas Morning News accusing Kennedy of making a secret deal with the Communist Party. When it was shown to the president and the first lady, he turned to Jacqueline and said, “Oh, you know, we’re heading into nut country today.” Nothing has really changed since then. Obama has become the new Kennedy, the president who would sell out the interests of Americans for a few pennies.

The underlying problem, of course, is religion, and not just any religion, but fundamentalist Christianity. One of my courses at the seminary was called “The Quest of the Historical Jesus.” The idea was to discover how much of the Bible was true and to what extent it described a real historical personage. Because the gospels were written so much later than the period in which Jesus lived, they were mostly “recollections” of those who had never seen the man in person. Moreover, most of what we know about the early church comes from Paul, who was a paranoid schizophrenic, though a very talented one. Many scholars agree that if anything in the gospels is true in a literal sense, it is probably the words of Christ at the Sermon on the Mount.

Whether Jesus actually lived or not is of no real importance to me. I believe that the spirit of Christ existed, and still exists, independently of any one person or manifestation. But these are only my beliefs based on personal experience. I would never dream of making them into dogma and trying to force others into believing them.

When my son and I talked about these things last night, he said that a change of consciousness is taking place in humanity (spoken like a true Aquarian) and that this shift has been occurring for many decades now. This terrifies those who are threatened with the loss of their religion and they cling to it in amazingly dysfunctional ways. Like everything else, we as a nation will live through this, but, as in the case of John F. Kennedy, it is dangerous and highly irresponsible to use these people for political ends.