12 August 2011

A Terrible Mind is a Thing to Lose - Bachmann Disapproves of the Renaissance

Here's a curious conspiracy theory for you.

What if the people behind Michele Bachmann's campaign were merely trying to bring in a candidate who would make Sarah Palin look informed by comparison? And what if even they never dreamed that Bachmann might be a front-runner?

As it turns out, Bachmann does not just believe that constitutional amendments should not be forced onto the states. She thinks that the Renaissance represents a wrong turn in the history of the West. Read this if you're prepared for some mind boggling. An excerpt:

Tea party queen and Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann is convinced that America is sinking into tyranny. Why? In a remarkable profile of the candidate appearing in the Aug. 15 issue of the New Yorker magazine, the artistic flowering of the Italian Renaissance takes a beating for having done away with the god-fearing Dark Ages.

It would be hard to condense more ignorance into one thought than to doubt that the Renaissance was a great thing. During medieval times lives and people were short and brutish, even priests often could not afford Bibles to read, witches and heretics (essentially anyone who suspected of thinking independently) were burnt at the stake, and even a serf's right to take his bride's virginity might be challenged by the lord who ruled the land to which he was bound. The Dark Ages were unrelentingly wretched and it was the Renaissance and its package of trade, exploration, reliance on the empirical, spread of books, and emergence of law and order in the form of the nation-state that changed this.

I wonder if anyone has asked Bachmann what her position is on reviving witch trials.

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