On Soullessness

From the Lingo Corner

            Rep. Liz Cheney charged, on live TV, that Rep. Scott Perry had applied to outgoing President Trump for a pardon. The implication being that Rep. Perry felt he might be guilty of something.

            In response, Rep. Perry tweeted that Cheney had told "an absolute, shameless and soulless lie."

            Odd choice of words, soulless.

            Well, Rep. Perry couldn't very well score a point with "a big lie," because he himself is on board with one of those. "A big fat lie"? That would have summoned the ex-president's image even more substantially. A "damnable lie" would have seemed old-fashioned. "Lying like a dog"? No, people trust dogs.

            So . . . soulless? Where did that come from?

            I think of "soulless" as meaning drastically uninspired, lacking in spirit or feeling. Would Perry have preferred a soulful accusation? Let's see, who is still alive whom people associate with soul? Al Green? Or -- Stevie Wonder.

            If Al Green or Stevie Wonder had accused Rep. Scott Perry of applying to outgoing President Trump for a pardon, would Rep. Perry have been satisfied?

            I don't think so. I think Rep. Perry must have had something else in mind, when the word "soulless" popped into his head. Something I am not in touch with.

            I googled "soulless." That word, it would appear, usually crops up, lately, in the titles of what appear to be gothic romances or other shlock fantasies. The Soulless One: Cloning a Counterfeit Creation. Sort of thing. Or Soulless: The Manga, Vol 1: "The life of a spinster in Victorian London isn't an easy one on the best of days, but such a  life becomes infinitely more complicated when said spinster is 'soulless' -- a preternatural bridging the gap between the natural and supernatural . . .  "

            Surely no Congressman has enough guilty-pleasure-reading time for such material as that. So why would "soulless" come to this Congressman's mind?

            I bored down further. And this turned up:

            Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler, by Anne Harrington (Princeston University Press).

            The subject of this book is a movement, in Germany after World War I, to bring religion, and ethnic pride, back into science. That movement included proponents whose earnestly holistic descendents persist high-mindedly today. But it also felt good to the Nazi party.

            Weimar culture was accused of having "stamped out" Christianity and "effectively replaced it in people's hearts with the 'soulless religion' of Judaism that denied the afterlife." The term soulless was often attached, by reenchanters, to uncurbed rationality, to liberalism, and to Jews. In Germany, after that country's humiliation in the war and as National Socialism took over the government and the culture, the anti-soulless reenchantment of science merged with full-bore fascism.

            Which I am reluctant to bring up, in connection with an attempted coup by extremely right-wing Americans -- except that this is the same Rep. Scott Perry who said, in a speech, about Democrats: "They are not the loyal opposition. They are the opposition to everything you love and believe in. Go fight them... We've seen this throughout history, right? Not every citizen in Germany in the 1930s and ’40s was in the Nazi Party. They weren't. But what happened across Germany? That's what's important. What were the policies? What was the leadership? That's what we have to focus on.”

            Indeed.

                        And Here's Another In Our Universally

                        Acclaimed Series of Limericks About

                        Males Who Were Nincompoops or Worse

                        A pliable hard-ass named Drew's

                        Opinions are all same as Q's.

                                    He's not hipped on sanity,

                                    Gets hard for Hannity,

                        And won't be replaced by no Jews.