It was only a moment, and it has already been over analyzed by many in the media, but I remain deeply disturbed by the fact that a South Carolina audience booed Ron Paul when he suggested that the Golden Rule be applied to our enemies.  Part of me was surprised, because the reaction was instantaneous and I guess I expected at least a moments hesitation.  After all, this is a part of the world that proudly Tebows the centrality of this sentiment as a guiding principle in their lives and one would think that Paul pointing out an apparant contradiction would cause one to pause.  But there was no pause.

This moment also played out in a context where the audience cheered heartily for Gingrich's angry non-response to a question about the disjuncture between his frequent invocation of family values to criticize democrats and his own inability to love his own family or respect the women in his life.  An audience also cheered Gingrich when he, again angrily, performed his ritualistic parry of another question like this into an attack on the medium itself, an attack on the idea that ideas and consistency matter.  This question concerned his suggestion that the challenges facing African Americans today are rooted in their laziness and not in racism or a wealth gap that is a concrete legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and the first GI Bill. 

What these all have in common seems to be anger.  The audiences cheered one speaker because he was articulating, indeed performing and affirming, their own deep seated anger.  Anger rooted in communities left behind as globalization and commercialization colonize our living rooms and devasted our neighborhoods.  Real, if in this case misdirected, anger and frustration. 

And the audience booed angrily itself when another speaker suggested that love, not anger, would be the Christian response.  In one phrase Ron Paul ran into the background consensus built by peddlers of the prosperity gospel, such that what ought to have been a common sense notion, poking each of us to think a bit more deeply about ourselves, was transformed into an irrational and even unchristian and antiamerican insult...justifying an angry response constructed to feel like it was in defense of family and community, though upon reflection it appears to be exactly the opposite.  Not sure these reflections make sense, but this seems to be why I remain so deeply disturbed by that one moment in South Carolina.