AMERICANS AND THEIR POLITICS OVER THEIR MANY GODS

Today in Forbes, I read Tear Down This Reagan by Bill Whalen , a worker on the payroll of the Hoover Institution. In this work, Whalen describes the ugly underneath politics over a statue of former U.S. president and California governor Ronald Reagan. It seems a recalled California Supreme Court judge Cruz Reynoso has a grudge against Reagan.

Worshiping statues chiseled from stone or forged from bronze is the stuff of superstition. Rejecting the gods of one people to be replaced by the gods one favors is the stuff of savages. And yet this is what Cruz Reynoso has urged Americans to do. We're living in the 21st century, right?

If only Americans from long ago through today would have embraced naming of cities, states, bridges, schools and so forth after beliefs Americans ought to hold sacred rather than naming everything after dead politicians and dead presidents, maybe America wouldn't be in such a state of retrogression. Today, then, rather than Lincoln High School, Americans would have Bill of Rights High School. Instead of the George Washington Bridge, Americans would have the Liberty Bridge. Instead of the Kennedy Space Center, we would have Americans Paid Taxes for this Indulgence Space Center.

Over the centuries, U.S. congresses and the state houses have created their own polytheistic religion. To indoctrinate all Americans into their religion they have conjured up prayers — the Pledge of Allegiance — and moments to their gods — Mt. Rushmore, the Lincoln Memorial and so forth.

Naming things after dead law givers and putting up statues of them works as persuasion in a kind of propaganda. Everywhere you go, you get reminded that law givers were living gods in their times and that your prosperity, luck and life gets owed to these gods.

Americans need more statues like the State of Liberty and no statues of dead law givers. After all, liberty, the French word for the English word freedom, means the absence of law in the presence of law givers. Americans need to abandon their superstitious polytheistic religion.


We're living in the twenty-first century. The goal should be to have the least governance as needed rather than the relentless pursuit of the most governance as tolerable.