home > archive > 2008 > this article

The dream team

By Michael Moriarty
web posted June 16, 2008

"Landagoshen!" my grandmother would declare, "After a Jesuit education my grandson won't even know how to tie his shoes."

My grandmother was a Protestant who eventually divorced my Catholic grandfather.

My father, a lapsed Catholic, was equally dismayed by the Jesuits and their "obsessions" with Latin and Greek.

Four years of Latin and two years of Greek gave me a very elitist and isolating vocabulary. It also left me pretty much as my grandmother and father thought it would: an extraterrestrial.

After that full immersion in ancient languages I really had only two, vocational alternatives: the priesthood or the theatre. I chose the stage where ancient Greece's greatest gift to the arts, its drama and comedy, could actually be felt and tasted.

Now, with my main concentration on this year's election, the great Greek tragedians, Sophocles and Euripides, seem to hover above not only this year's political battles but their dramas repeatedly echo all the way back to the tragedies of Kennedy, Lincoln and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

With an African-American and a white, female candidate publically coming to terms with their own racism and sexism … within their own "politically correct" Democratic Party well, these sometimes ugly ironies within political ambitions carry ominous overtones that could very well grow in volume to an actual, Greek tragedy.

Then, of course, with both candidates claiming to be Progressive Christians, we're obliged to bring up the Bible … and some of the more unfortunate sermons of a Reverend Wright … or the Progressively Protestant advice of a few Clinton advisors, such as Rev. Vaught, who assured his congregation that "God has nothing against abortion".

This rewriting of the Bible certainly contains versions of "Thou shalt not kill" and the Golden Rule that I, as taught by the Jesuits, could barely recognize as Christian, let alone Catholic. Not to mention its revolutionary "all men are gestated as possible candidates for abortion" … and that's part of the new human rights paragraph of the Declaration of Independence?

A pro-life libertarian like myself certainly can't be a Catholic … but, to paraphrase another graduate of the Jesuits, James Joyce, I haven't so lost my mind that I'd become a Protestant.

Despite his own Jesuit education at Georgetown University, President Clinton chose to remain a Progressive Baptist. He knew all too well that Catholics, like Kennedy and Cuomo, seem born with severe, sometimes terminally harsh limits placed upon their political ambitions in America. Those limits are sometimes the stuff of Greek tragedy.

With Obama likened to a "new Kennedy" … well, you can see a few worrisome implications. Complicate the Obama White House with the holy wars or jihads of Islamic extremists -- and then the possibly prolonged inability of America to capture Osama bin Laden -- after we had to first disable an Iraqi Army in order to capture Saddam Hussein … it's, well, almost Biblically absurd, an Old Testament madhouse, mixed in with mythic invulnerability, the stuff one expects from the Greek gods.

Can our Progressive Christian candidates also have a bit of that invulnerability? Or is their grasp for power going to enmesh them in tragedy?

The "Dream Team" of President Obama and Vice-president Clinton … hmmm … oh, they're both working now to defeat their common enemy, John McCain; but should they win, what then?

With the "world picture" as it is what does the Dream Team face?

We now have Islamic expansionism with extremists like bin Laden still a living, breathing inspiration to the entire Muslim world, Communist China supporting African genocide and neo-Soviet Russia, under the "strongman" leadership of Vladimer Putin supporting Ahmadinejad's Iranian quest for nuclear weapons. That is what the Dream Team would be staring at.

What period of history most resembles the plight in which America now finds itself?

It is America in World War II, but with no Soviet Russian ally, with oil, the blood of war, at extortionist prices and a very precarious reliability within the nations of a very Progressive European Union.

Kamikaze Islam dropped 9/11 on New York in the same way Imperial Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Now, seven long, nerve-wracking years later, the economic war with China, Meganomicism's out-sourcing and the Russian protectionist policies with Iran, these all leave the United States increasingly isolated. Add Islam's Nazi-like anti-Semitism and what is missing from this almost exact replay of World War II?

There is no end in sight … and much of the enemy is within.

For instance, Progressivism might well become as intense a federalism as Communism is.

On top of that there's the matter of Roe v. Wade. Can legalized abortion remain more permanent than legalized slavery? The feminists, rather like the Confederate South, are more than willing to prove that permanence, and … well, if legalized abortion lasts as long as legalized slavery did, we'll have another fifty years of it.

Therefore, are we slowly but steadily being sold a seemingly more palatable but eventually heartless tyranny?

As a Jesuitical "extraterrestrial", I see re-runs of ancient Greek and Biblical drama throughout Third Millennium America. History always repeats itself, but ancient history, at least according to the New Testament, has an endgame.

We may very well be in the ultimate endgame now.

Michael Moriarty is a Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning actor who starred in the landmark television series Law and Order from 1990 to 1994. His recent film and TV credits include The Yellow Wallpaper, 12 Hours to Live, Santa Baby and Deadly Skies. Moriarty is also running for President of the United States in 2008 as a candidate for the Realists Party. To find out more about Moriarty's presidential campaign, contact rainbowfamily2008@yahoo.com.

Home