When a political activist friend who runs an extensive email distribution list sent out this photograph over the weekend, many on her list mistakenly understood that she’d said it was taken in the US Congress and rushed to correct her.  In fact it was “only” Connecticut’s House of Representatives. The trouble being that it might be too representative:

Note that in addition to the two solitaire-playing legislators sitting side by side (the irony of that!), the guy sitting in the row in front of them is on Facebook, while the guy behind is checking out baseball scores.

The photograph is indeed real.  And old. It was taken on August 31, 2009, in the final session on the Connecticut budget, as Minority leader Larry Cafero (R – Norwalk, standing at right) was holding forth at length.  Jack Hennessy (D-Bridgeport,  center foreground) at least issued a letter of apology to his constituents, and has doubtless since undergone solitaire detox.

But as my friend noted in a follow-up email, at a time when our screens are full of images of the tsunami in Japan, when nuclear reactors there are on the verge of meltdown, when Ghadafi is bombing his own citizens in Libya, when Saudi Arabia has sent troops into Bahrain, when the Supreme Court has given corporations the right to fund US elections, and, as they say, much much more, this photograph is what the politically concerned people on her list chose to get really worked up about.

She wondered angrily if this reaction was a sign of paralysis, of feeling helpless to do anything when it feels like the world is in free-fall.  “So many of you put your good brainpower to work to let me know that this is not the U.S. legislature,” she said.  “Did I imply that it was?  Sorry.  Regardless of whether it is state or federal, the state of the political sphere is beyond belief.”

She’s right to be angry.  People in the Middle East and elsewhere are literally dying for a taste of democracy, while here in the US we take it so for granted that half the electorate doesn’t even bother to vote.  And quite clearly, dumb voters elect dumb representatives.  I mean, they could at least have been playing chess…

If the headline read “Pat Buchanan:  Not Enough Muslims on the Supreme Court,” that’d be something.   Instead, what we get is the utterly predictable:  “Pat Buchanan:  Too Many Jews on the Supreme Court.”

Surprise surprise, Pat’s been Jew-counting.  Those damn Jews are taking over our most sacred institutions.  When all else fails — and the lesbian “smear” campaign against Elena Kagan is clearly faltering (amazing that it’s 2010 and we still talk of “accusations” of lesbianism) — there’s always good old antisemitism to fall back on.   As Jean-Paul Sartre put it:  “If Jews didn’t exist, antisemites would have had to invent them.”

Count ’em, says Buchanan from his current perch as a commentator on MSNBC.  Three of ’em if Kagan gets the nod!  Out of nine.  It’s a calamity for Christian America — a separate little cabal there on the bench, out to corrupt the purity of Christian values.  What do you mean, Judeo-Christian?  Nobody pays any attention to that Judeo bit.  That’s just another sop to the Jews, adulterating Christianity.  We have to put a stop to them.  We have to stand up to this canker in our society.  Who the hell do they think they are?

None of the three are religious?  Ha, you don’t believe that, do you?  It’s in their blood — the stain, as Philip Roth put it, the fatal flaw, as bad as being black.  And hey, if they’re not religious, that makes it even worse.  What do they believe in?  Abortion?  Gay marriage?  Civil rights?  The Antichrist?

Thank God (as it were) we have no less an authority than Richard Nixon’s assurance that Buchanan is neither an antisemite nor a Jew-hater (the precise distinction clear only to Nixon), but “a good patriotic American.”  The Nixon seal of approval is always reassuring.

Is it worth pointing out that only four Jews have sat on the Supreme Court before?  That a third of all justices have been Episcopalians, who are 1.7% of all Americans?   That the Constitution upheld by the court forbids discrimination on the basis of religion?   No — that’s only stooping to the level of Buchanan demagogery.

Come on, Obama:   rock Buchanan’s world and  nominate a Muslim next time.

Or even — gasp! — an atheist.

Two strips of metal deep in the Mojave desert split the Supreme Court this week by a predictable 5-4.   The strips form a seven-foot-high memorial cross, put up privately on federal land in 1934 to honor American soldiers who died in World War One.

In 2001, when a federal judge ruled that the cross violated the First Amendment (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”) by conveying “a message of endorsement of religion,” Congress did a quiet little two-step.  It arranged for the acre on which the cross stood to be sold to a veterans’ group, making it private land in the middle of a national park.  But the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco recognized the ploy for what it was and said the cross had to come down.  Thus the case reached the Supreme Court — whose majority has just ruled, astonishingly, that the cross is a universal symbol representative of all religions.

Some say that this manifest absurdity on the part of the five conservative justices — Kennedy, Scalia, Roberts, Thomas and Alito — is because they are blinded by their Catholic faith. That may be part of it, but I’d say it’s due as much to their being blinded by the power of advertising.

Their brains have been washed by the most successful logo ever created.

The cross is so simple, anybody can make one.  Two scratches in the sand with a stick, two fingers held up across each other, or just one body with arms outspread, and there you go.   Abstract and figurative at the same time, it’s brilliant.   The Star of David and the Crescent Moon are graphic failures by comparison.   Only the Nike swoop (the simple tick copyrighted as a trademark) can compete for elegance, and I think it’s safe to assume that Nike will not last as long as Christianity.

The power of the cross is embedded deep in the superstitious psyche of the West.  Cross your fingers, touch wood, don’t walk under a ladder — all these are based on the ‘original’ cross.  Never mind that it wasn’t the original one.  Or that Jesus of Nazareth was only one of tens of thousands of people crucified by the Romans.  Or that the Assyrians were busily crucifying people when Rome was still a mere village.

Christianity adopted it as a symbol, and because that symbolic power is so entrenched, you don’t have to be Christian for it to get to you.  The seemingly endless rows of white crosses in the World War Two killing fields of Normandy, cited by Kennedy, Roberts, and Alito, are indeed deeply moving, though the ones that get to me most are the hand-made ones by the side of the road all over America, small altars to family members, usually teenagers, killed in car crashes.

But Kennedy, Roberts, Alito, Scalia, and Thomas — I’d use the title Justice if I thought it still fit — should know this:  if I die in a war or by the side of the road, erect no cross for me.   If you do, I swear I’ll come back and haunt you, a copy of the United States Constitution in my right hand, and a medieval Jewish amulet against evil in my left.  To you your symbols, to me mine.

Odd, though — I would have thought the Constitution was one of theirs too.