Republican Soul,

Convergent Series

 

Republicans are fighting for their party’s soul, which may be welcome news to those who wondered if it had one, but distressing to whole generations of political journalists who are accustomed to easy work reporting on the squabbles between Democrats and Republicans:

 

 WASHINGTON – Democrats in the House said the moon was made of green cheese today, but Republicans declared it evidence of undue influence by the cracker lobby.  All that kind of political journalism took was pairing an absurdity from the Democrats with another from the Republicans -- and both parties were eager to keep you supplied.

 

Now, political journalists are confronted with a Republican party that seems determined to argue itself out of existence, hell-bent on excluding those whose ideology isn’t pure. The current purity standard is agreeing with the Test Committee’s views.

 

The Test Committee, of course, consists of Rush Limbaugh, a radio commentator whose volume is inversely proportional to his intellect, and Dick Cheney, whose pioneering work on the Adjustable Moral Compass speaks for itself.

 

Now the Test Committee is trying to hustle Colin Powell out of the party, saying his endorsement of Barack Obama over John McCain was the final straw. Informed sources say previous straws included Powell’s belief that the Earth is round and revolves around the Sun.

 

All of which, the Test Committee says, amounts to ample reason for excluding a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, National Security Adviser and Secretary of State from discussion of serious Republican matters. Even if he says he’s a Republican and all that service was under Republican presidents.

 

So the debate pretty much comes down to whether the Republican party is more comfortable in Ronald Reagan’s Big Tent, where it lived in the 80s, or in the much more exclusive Cheney-Limbaugh Club, the one with the prominent  Members Only sign.

 

The Cheney-Limbaugh founders have made it pretty plain that they don’t want Powell around, and Powell has made it pretty plain that they can stick that in their ear. (Ever rational, Powell chose ears as the receptacle after clear evidence that neither Cheney nor Limbaugh could find the other obvious place with both hands.)

 

Backers of the Cheney-Limbaugh Club say their faction will win the dispute and that the Republican party will become smaller but purer and go on forever. And in that, they may be more right than they know.

 

In 1979, science fiction writer Larry Niven published a story in which a demon intent on collecting a soul may only reappear within the confines of a pentagram -- which the protagonist cleverly draws on the demon’s belly. Every time the demon tries to appear, it’s too big for the pentagram, and so shrinks itself and tries again -- and again, and again, since each time it shrinks itself smaller, it makes its target smaller still.

 

Niven called the story Convergent Series, and there’s squiggly-line math about the concept, but the important thing to remember for Republicans is that it’s a story about eternal shrinking.

 

However big the pentagrams on the Cheney-Limbaugh bellies look now, Republicans should think twice about appearing there.

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