As you may know — unless you rely on the corporate media for your news, of course — yesterday the U.S. Senate unanimously declared that Iran was committing acts of war against the United States: a 97-0 vote to give George W. Bush a clear and unmistakable casus belli for attacking Iran whenever Dick Cheney tells him to.
* Persia must be destroyed. A take-off on Carthago delenda est, Carthage must be destroyed.
Senator Barbara Boxer said “Impeachment should be on the table” on the Ed Shultz Show, 7/11/07.
I just received an email/press release from Boxer, mostly about the Defense Authorization bill, now before Congress:
In the opening of an unprecedented, two-week debate on the Iraq war, U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) today spoke out on the Senate floor and challenged those who have made statements against the war to follow it up by voting for real, binding measures to bring our troops home.
(And here I must gloat a bit, I’m not only a Boxer constituent, but I also live in Henry Waxman’s district. I’ve lived in other parts of the country where I mostly cursed or rolled my eyes at the people who represented me, and so I’m extremely aware of how fortunate I am to have people like Boxer and Waxman working for me. I took the advice of the great conservative hero, President Ronald Reagan, who advocated, "vote with your feet" and I have never regretted it).
Highlights of Boxer’s speech are here. No mention of impeachment.
Another powerful woman, Cindy Sheehan is on her Summer of Love ’07: Journey for Humanity, marching from Crawford TX to New York City, by way of John Conyer’s office in the House of Representatives. She’s scheduled to reach Conyer’s office on July 23, to encourage him to take the lead on impeachment.
I have no idea whether Sheehan will be able to channel and focus the groundswell of anger in this country for impeachment, or whether this will be yet another ineffective replay of 1960s demonstration tactics. A majority of the public supports impeachment of Cheney (at least), and so the energy is there, it’s just a matter of whether Sheehan (and others) can acquire and demonstrate the skill to focus it. If you’ll forgive the very crude analogy, it’s a bit like watching neanderthals about to figure out how to use fire, for the first time, wondering if this will be the time that they get it, if they ever do.
As maha wrote in Protesting 102, the question is whether they’re "still caught up in the romance of being Outcasts and Rebels, and Speaking Truth to Power, and are not serious about taking and using power to effect change". A further question for Sheehan is whether she can move beyond her own personal loss, and identify more broadly with the international (and intentional) tragedy that is the Bush Administration.
I happened to catch Fox "News" report on Cindy Sheehan’s challenge to Nancy Pelosi, where Sheehan promised to run against Speaker Pelosi if Pelosi did not get behind impeachment, and pronto. Setting aside whether this is a good idea or not, what was striking about the report was how Fox portrayed the two women. They showed a still photo of Sheehan that looked as if she hadn’t slept in days – she looked terrible, every bit the fringe wacko strawman that the right relishes standing up and knocking down. By contrast, Pelosi looked radiant, while the "newscaster" helpfully explained that Pelosi enjoys 80 % approval in her district – well, she probably did before her refusal to consider impeachment.
This parallels the relentless focus by the conservative media on John Edwards’ hair earlier this summer. They spent weeks distracting us with this trivia instead of reporting on the substance of Edwards’ proposals. To my knowledge, no other Democratic candidate got this kind of treatment from the right. And let’s not forget the other sideshows of Paris Hilton and Anna Nicole Smith. One gets the sense that they must actually hold auditions for these distractions, deliberately seeking them out.
The powers behind the right wing media know they’re likely to lose this time around, and so they are doing everything they can to deep-six anyone on the left who has the potential to rock the boat. Winnowing the field. Our field.
WASHINGTON (AP) – A new threat assessment from U.S. counterterrorism analysts says that al-Qaida has used its safe haven along the Afghan-Pakistan border to restore its operating capabilities to a level unseen since the months before Sept. 11, 2001.
A counterterrorism official familiar with a five-page summary of the document – titled “Al-Qaida better positioned to strike the West” – called it a stark appraisal. The analysis will be part of a broader meeting at the White House on Thursday about an upcoming National Intelligence Estimate.
Down in the Engineering Sub-Basement at the White House, a voice barks from an intercom: “We need more power!” A man with a Scottish accent yells back: “Cap’n! The reality-distortion crystals are almost fused after that speech in Cleveland. I canna give ya no more power or the spin engines will IMPLODE!”
“Dammit, Scott! I need maximum spin, and I need it NOW.”
At his news conference Thursday, President Bush acknowledged the report’s existence and al-Qaida’s continuing threat to the United States. He said, however, that the report refers only to al-Qaida’s strength in 2001, not prior to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The group was at its strongest throughout most of that year, with well-established training camps in Afghanistan, recruitment networks and command structures.
Bush used the new threat assessment to show his administration’s policies are the right course.
“Because of the actions we’ve taken, al-Qaida is weaker today than they would have been,” he said. “They are still a threat. They are still dangerous. And that is why it is important that we succeed in Afghanistan and Iraq and anywhere else we find them.”
Yes, I suppose that in some sense, colossal failure does indicate why it is important to succeed. But as I recall, back in September of 2001, just about everyone in the civilized world agreed that success in dealing with those who had attacked us was a good thing. Even many who loathed you, Mr. Bush, and thought you’d stolen your office, agreed that we as a nation should succeed in defeating that threat, and supported you toward that goal.
So why is it, six years later, that what you have to show is a reiteration that they are dangerous?
Why is it, almost six years to the day after your infamously ignored daily briefing entitled “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US”, you are being handed a document entitled “Al-Qaida better positioned to strike the West”?
It seems to me there was a tall, horsey-faced guy running around a few years ago, complaining about a place called Tora Bora, and shifting focus onto Iraq. Huh. How about that?
We’ve now spent somewhere around a trillion dollars on our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. That’s a one followed by twelve zeroes. It’s a room full of a million boxes, and when you open each box, inside there is a million dollars!
And yet, six years and a trillion dollars later, the President himself will admit that “They are still a threat. They are still dangerous.” Does he say this in his resignation speech, shamefully acknowledging his failure, before being allowed to honorably retire behind closed doors with a revolver?
No! He does it in irrational defense of his own policies, and in the same breath asserts the importance of success!
Mr. Bush, we all agree about the need for success. That’s what you’re being paid to deliver, and why you were re-hired in 2004. Success against al Qaeda.
Where is it?
Meet Drew Westen, author of The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation:
Drew Westen, a genial 48-year-old psychologist and brain researcher, was talking to a rapt liberal audience about the role of emotion in politics, how to talk back aggressively to Republicans, and why going negative is not to be feared.
It was Day 2 of the progressive Take Back America confab, and those who had crowded into a meeting room of the Washington Hilton were about to discover why Westen, a psychology professor at Atlanta’s Emory University and former associate professor at Harvard Medical School, had quietly become the great rumpled hope of Democrats who believe their candidates should have won the last two presidential elections.
Example: When President Bush recently refused to allow Karl Rove to testify under oath about his role in the sacking of federal prosecutors, Westen said, Democrats blundered. Instead of insisting Rove testify under oath, they simply should have said (over and over), "Mr. Bush, just what is it about ‘So help me God’ that you find so offensive?"
Read the whole article here. The problem Westen’s work addresses is well known: The Rs have learned how to effectively communicate to the gut, and run rings around the Ds who talk to the brain (recall the Bush-Kerry debates). Westen is the guy who looks like he could change this.
I usually try to steer way clear of self-fulfilling prophecies, and so this is a subject that I’m hesitant to add any energy to, but it’s also important to be clear about it. Here’s a quiz:
Which presidential candidate said the following, on June 20:
The American military has done its job. Look what they accomplished. They got rid of Saddam Hussein. They gave the Iraqis a chance for free and fair elections. They gave the Iraqi government the chance to begin to demonstrate that it understood its responsibilities to make the hard political decisions necessary to give the people of Iraq a better future. So the American military has succeeded. It is the Iraqi government which has failed to make the tough decisions which are important for their own people.
Here’s a clue. It was a woman, and a Democrat. As William Blum writes in the Atlantic Free Press (loads slowly, be patient):
Right, it was the woman who wants to be president because … because she wants to be president … because she thinks it would be nice to be president … no other reason, no burning cause, no heartfelt desire for basic change in American society or to make a better world … she just thinks it would be nice, even great, to be president. And keep the American Empire in business, its routine generating of horror and misery being no problem; she wouldn’t want to be known as the president that hastened the decline of the empire.
And she spoke the above words at the "Take Back America" conference; she was speaking to liberals, committed liberal Democrats. She didn’t have to cater to them with any flag-waving pro-war rhetoric; they wanted to hear anti-war rhetoric (and she of course gave them a bit of that as well out of the other side of her mouth), so we can assume that this is how she really feels, if indeed the woman feels anything.
There’s more in Blum’s article about how conservatives are seeing Hillary as their best chance to get what they want:
Now we hear from America’s venerable conservative magazine, William Buckley’s "National Review", an editorial by Bruce Bartlett, policy adviser to President Ronald Reagan; treasury official under President George H.W. Bush; a fellow at two of the leading conservative think-tanks, the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute; you get the picture. Bartlett tells his readers that it’s almost certain that the Democrats will win the White House in 2008. So what to do? Support the most conservative Democrat. He writes: "To right-wingers willing to look beneath what probably sounds to them like the same identical views of the Democratic candidates, it is pretty clear that Hillary Clinton is the most conservative."
We also hear from America’s premier magazine for the corporate wealthy, "Fortune", whose recent cover features a picture of Clinton and the headline: "Business Loves Hillary".
Most of the liberal netroots doesn’t ♥ Hillary, and I hope I haven’t ruined your day. I want to talk a bit about Empire, which Blum briefly alluded to, above. It’s a vast subject, and one that the DC establishment struggles with, especially back when Bush and the neocons were in ascendance, although this discussion hasn’t really filtered down to the average American.
But oh, how we pay for it. We can’t have decent health care in this country, but we must have our stealth aircraft, our worldwide network of bases, and a permanent standing military. Military hardware is one of the few things our industries still make well, and service in the military has become an increasingly compelling venue for young people to advance themselves. Our media promotes fear, which discourages us from seeing any other choices in how we operate on this planet. It’s really the subject for another Michael Moore movie all by itself. Most of his films touch this theme on the way to making their main point. Chalmers Johnson has probably done the most work in popularizing the subject, and Can We End the American Empire Before It Ends Us? is a good introduction to his ideas.
It’s not that America hasn’t used its might as a benevolent force in the world, it has. These last six years however, have brought out the shadow side of our country, the monumentally bad consequences when its might is misused when placed in selfish and thuggish hands.
Empire has enormous costs, both in terms of dollars, and in terms of fidelity to the original principles of this country as laid out in the Constitution. We see this everyday in our country. It’s possible that a Hillary Clinton presidency will use our might for good in the world, but it’s also unlikely that she has any intention of scaling things back. As Mel Brooks famously stated, “It’s good to be King”. This is part of the reason why conservatives are warming to her.
Update: Pentagon Planet: How the Pentagon Came to Own the Earth, Seas, and Skies will amaze you with the vastness of our Empire:
…to begin to grasp the Pentagon’s global immensity, it helps to look, again, at its land holdings — all 120,191 square kilometers which are almost exactly the size of North Korea (120,538 square kilometers)…
As you might have noticed, I’ve (temporarily) turned the blog over to Donna, moonbat, and biggerbox, and tomorrow I’m going to fly home to the Ozarks to visit kinfolk. Since it’s unlikely I’ll be find high-speed Internet where I’m going, I’m going to take a break from blogging until Monday. So be nice and don’t trash up the place too much while I’m gone.
In case you missed it, I posted a new episode of The Wisdom of Doubt earlier today.
See ya next week!
I was watching Senator Jim Webb (D-Virginia) last night on the news say that our country’s intense focus on the Middle East has caused us to neglect other areas of the world. Webb had Southeast Asia in mind, and noted that this is a very important region to us economically. Of course, Webb is right, but I would argue that our Mesopotamian myopia has had some other interesting side effects, beyond intensifying the glaring hatreds and competition between the jihadists of all sides – theirs and our own.
If you look closely, some voices of reason are starting to make themselves more widely known. They’re having the effect of teaching the West something about this mysterious, complex, and misunderstood area, and some things about ourselves. Sara Robinson over at Orcinus recently posted Why People Hate America?, which was triggered by this recent Pew poll, and was largely based on the writings of Ziauddin Sardar, who is…
…an orthodox British Muslim of Pakistani parentage…one of the UK’s more visible public intellectuals. In recent years, Sardar has made a career out of explaining the Muslim world to the Brits, mediating and translating between the Western and Near Eastern cultures on the pages of the Observer and The New Statesman and frequently on BBC news shows as well. (It’s interesing that nowhere in the US media do we have a similarly trusted Muslim media figure who can help us bridge the most important cultural chasm of our times. Wonder why that is?) A iconoclastic outsider, Sardar is unsparing in his critiques of both cultures, issuing insights, warnings, and alternatives on either side that have made him indispensable to a European audience that increasingly sees itself caught in the middle.
I encourage you to read her whole post (as well as the comments). We have had the invaluable Juan Cole for some time now, and it’s good that others are gaining a wider audience, even if this is at times, only through blog writings such as Sara’s.
In a doctor’s office on Monday, I came across an aging issue of Time Magazine, which featured Queen Rania of Jordan. In typical, brief, upbeat, and to the point Time Magazine style, the Queen was asked Ten Questions, and I found some of her answers to be freshing and hopeful:
Q: Do you think that women will ever truly have equal rights in the Middle East?
A: Absolutely, I believe they will. I think that mind-sets are changing in the Middle East. Poll after poll is showing that men see the value of greater female participation and empowerment. We still have a long way to go, but Islam should not be used as a scapegoat. The obstacles that face women today are more cultural. It’s not about the religion.
Q: Will the Arab world ever be free of the kind of mindless violence occurring in Iraq?
A: The Middle East is not just about Iraq. The Middle East has both challenges and opportunities. Many countries in our region are experiencing a massive economic boom. It’s a very youthful region, and the young by nature are hopeful, optimistic and innovative. The world shouldn’t overlook our successes and achievements.
Q: What is the biggest negative about the U.S. invasion of Iraq?
A: The civilian suffering. This conflict has spared no one. It’s incredibly sad to see such a proud and great country broken.
Q: What’s the solution to the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians?
A: First, start with will on both sides–not just the political kind but the kind that comes from the conscience and the heart. To achieve a lasting peace in the Middle East takes guts, not guns.
I was so impressed with these answers, but of course it’s difficult to know how widely held they are, and how much influence people like the Queen have in this region. Her outspokenness and quiet wisdom is emblematic of the rise of the feminine, worldwide, over the last century or so. Our country is part of this, beginning with the suffragettes earlier in this century, followed by the energizing of the feminist movement in the 60s and 70s, and culminating recently in the election of women to high office, such as Nancy Pelosi, and, in the future, possibly our first female president in 2008. I hope to write more about this shortly, and I hope I can do it justice.
(Maha has graciously also offered me a set of keys to her place while she’s away. It looks like it’ll be a party! So before I go to digest the latest in her Wisdom of Doubt series, below, and the tech support leave town, here’s my post, cross-posted from my regular playpen, Ratiocination. –Paul, aka biggerbox)
——
The National Weather Service has issued an Excessive Heat Warning for my home city today. But in reading the news, I see there should also be a warning about excessive heat in Washington, DC. Specifically, at the Department of Justice, in the area around the Attorney General’s pants. They are, once again, quite visibly, on fire.
From the Washington Post:
As he sought to renew the USA Patriot Act two years ago, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales assured lawmakers that the FBI had not abused its potent new terrorism-fighting powers. “There has not been one verified case of civil liberties abuse,” Gonzales told senators on April 27, 2005.
Six days earlier, the FBI sent Gonzales a copy of a report that said its agents had obtained personal information that they were not entitled to have. It was one of at least half a dozen reports of legal or procedural violations that Gonzales received in the three months before he made his statement to the Senate intelligence committee, according to internal FBI documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.
The acts recounted in the FBI reports included unauthorized surveillance, an illegal property search and a case in which an Internet firm improperly turned over a compact disc with data that the FBI was not entitled to collect, the documents show. Gonzales was copied on each report that said administrative rules or laws protecting civil liberties and privacy had been violated.
Spinmeisters at the DOJ lept into action, assuring us that perhaps Mr. Gonzales had not read the notification that his pants were flammable, that everybody’s wearing flaming pants these days, and besides, they aren’t really large flames.
Justice officials said they could not immediately determine whether Gonzales read any of the FBI reports in 2005 and 2006 because the officials who processed them were not available yesterday. But department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said that when Gonzales testified, he was speaking “in the context” of reports by the department’s inspector general before this year that found no misconduct or specific civil liberties abuses related to the Patriot Act.
“The statements from the attorney general are consistent with statements from other officials at the FBI and the department,” Roehrkasse said. He added that many of the violations the FBI disclosed were not legal violations and instead involved procedural safeguards or even typographical errors.
Oh, typographical errors? Well then, nothing to be concerned about, eh, Mr. Buttle?
Gonzales received another report of an NSL-related violation a few weeks later. “A national security letter . . . contained an incorrect phone number” that resulted in agents collecting phone information that “belonged to a different U.S. person” than the suspect under investigation, stated a letter copied to the attorney general on May 6, 2005.
At least two other reports of NSL-related violations were sent to Gonzales, according to the new documents. In letters copied to him on Dec. 11, 2006, and Feb. 26, 2007, the FBI reported to the oversight board that agents had requested and obtained phone data on the wrong people.
Now, I realize that I have a reputation for being a mite tetchy about the rights my ancestors fought the British for, but if I were to find out that the FBI had been snooping around my phone records, without a judge’s permission, for no reason other than a ‘typographical error’, I’d be pretty ticked off. It seems like the very definition of an unreasonable search.
You know, the kind of unreasonable search that the Fourth Amendment says I am to be “secure from”, by a right that “shall not be violated”. I don’t know where Mr. Gonzales starts his enumeration of civil liberties, but me, I think the Bill of Rights is a good place to begin.
Now, odds are that it wasn’t my phone records the Feds were snooping through. Though I don’t know. Somebody, or rather several somebodies, had FBI agents prying into their lives for no good reason. It might have been me. It might have been you. That’s the point. We are not ‘secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.’ The safeguards that have been in place to ensure that right shall not be violated have been removed.
In March of this year, the FBI inspector general released a report detailing many abuses. As TPMmuckraker reminds us, at the time, Attorney General Gonzales was quoted as being “incensed”, and order FBI director Robert Mueller to clean it up.
But, as today’s news shows, he’d been receiving reports of such abuses and violations for years by then. And yet, like Louis in Casablanca, he seemed shocked -shocked!- by the news in March.
How could it be that the Attorney General of the United States would tell Congress what he did, and how could he have been surprised by news in the spring of this year that had been being reported to him for years? It seems impossible.
Until one remembers that the legal brains of the Bush administration went to the Lewis Carroll School of Law:
Alice laughed: “There’s no use trying,” she said; “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
There is hardly an example of a mass movement achieving vast proportions and a durable organization solely by persuasion. Professor K.S. Latourette, a very Christian historian, has to admit that “However incompatible the spirit of Jesus and armed force may be, and however unpleasant it may be to acknowledge the fact, as a matter of plain history the latter has often made it possible for the former to survive.” It was the temporal sword that made Christianity a world religion. Conquest and conversion often went hand in hand, the latter often serving as a justification and a tool of the former. Where Christianity failed to gain or retain the backing of state power, it achieved neither a wide nor a permanent hold. “In Persia . . . Christianity confronted a state religion sustained by the crown and never became the faith of more than a minority.” In the phenomenal spread of Islam, conquest was a primary factor and conversion a by-product. “The most flourishing periods for Mohhamedanism have been at the times of its greatest political ascendancy; and it is at those times that it has achieved its highest accession from without.” The Reformation made headway only where it gained the backing of the ruling prince or the local government. … Where, as in France, the state power was against it, it was drowned in blood and never rose again. [Eric Hoffer, The True Believer (1951)]
Religion and government have been closely entwined going as far back as history goes. Every ancient civilization I know of was governed through an alliance of priests and kings. The priests sanctified the power of kings and assured the support and favor of gods for their policies; kings, in turn, saw to it the priests enjoyed protection and status. As a rule, the political/religious establishment accepted no challenges. Gospel accounts of Jesus’ Crucifixion suggested the Powers That Be in Jerusalem saw him as a potential threat to their authority.
In the first three centuries after the Crucifixion, Christianity went from being a small Jewish sect to a loosely organized movement made up broadly scattered communities, mostly gentile, with diverse beliefs. But the patronage of the Emperor Constantine sent what had been a minor religion up to the Big Leagues. In 325 CE Constantine convened the council of bishops at Nicaea to agree which doctrines would become the foundation of Christian orthodoxy to this day. From the reign of Constantine until modern times, Church power and political power in Europe were closely linked. Many of the Church’s most infamous acts of religious oppression were conducted in partnership with political power. In fact, the Spanish Inquisition operated completely under Spanish royal authority, not Rome’s.
My point is that religious authority and political authority have been drawn to each other throughout human history. And I argue that much of the Really Bad Shit attributed to religion really occurred in the nexus between religion and politics. As noted in Wisdom of Doubt, Part IV, history shows us that when authoritarian religious institutions form alliances with political power, the results can be nasty.
In the 15th through 19th centuries Christian Europe explored and colonized much of the planet. Countless atrocities were committed by both Church and crown in the process. By the 19th century the process had taken on a veneer of gentility, however, as Christian missionaries became the (sometimes) unwitting advance troops of capitalistic exploitation. The missionaries gained the trust of the people, challenged and weakened long-established local authority, and taught the “natives” European languages and manners. Then came Money — European and, increasingly, American — and before long the now-Christianized native people were enslaved on plantations and in mines, stripping away the natural resources of their own native lands to enrich far-away moneyed interests. And when the resources were gone and Money walked away, very often warlords and despots stepped in to fill the power void.
In America, religion salved the consciences of slave owners, who reasoned Africans were better off enslaved on plantations than free in Africa because here they’d be Christians. Mary Chesnut, wife of a plantation owner, soothed her own apparent discomfort with slavery by imagining herself a white missionary in an African village.
In 1901, Mark Twain took aim at the collusion of religion and money in his famous essay “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.”
Extending the Blessings of Civilization to our Brother who Sits in Darkness has been a good trade and has paid well, on the whole; and there is money in it yet, if carefully worked — but not enough, in my judgement, to make any considerable risk advisable. The People that Sit in Darkness are getting to be too scarce — too scarce and too shy. And such darkness as is now left is really of but an indifferent quality, and not dark enough for the game. The most of those People that Sit in Darkness have been furnished with more light than was good for them or profitable for us. We have been injudicious.
The Blessings-of-Civilization Trust, wisely and cautiously administered, is a Daisy. There is more money in it, more territory, more sovereignty, and other kinds of emolument, than there is in any other game that is played. But Christendom has been playing it badly of late years, and must certainly suffer by it, in my opinion. She has been so eager to get every stake that appeared on the green cloth, that the People who Sit in Darkness have noticed it — they have noticed it, and have begun to show alarm. They have become suspicious of the Blessings of Civilization. More — they have begun to examine them. This is not well. The Blessings of Civilization are all right, and a good commercial property; there could not be a better, in a dim light. In the right kind of a light, and at a proper distance, with the goods a little out of focus, they furnish this desirable exhibit to the Gentlemen who Sit in Darkness:
LOVE,
LAW AND ORDER,
JUSTICE,
LIBERTY,
GENTLENESS,
EQUALITY,
CHRISTIANITY,
HONORABLE DEALING,
PROTECTION TO THE WEAK,
MERCY,
TEMPERANCE,
EDUCATION,
— and so on.
There. Is it good? Sir, it is pie. It will bring into camp any idiot that sits in darkness anywhere. But not if we adulterate it. It is proper to be emphatic upon that point. This brand is strictly for Export — apparently. Apparently. Privately and confidentially, it is nothing of the kind. Privately and confidentially, it is merely an outside cover, gay and pretty and attractive, displaying the special patterns of our Civilization which we reserve for Home Consumption, while inside the bale is the Actual Thing that the Customer Sitting in Darkness buys with his blood and tears and land and liberty. That Actual Thing is, indeed, Civilization, but it is only for Export.
An interesting record for a religion whose chief deity-prophet proclaimed that love of money is the root of all evil.
Which brings us to the present. In the last episode of the Wisdom of Doubt, I quoted a speech by Bill Moyers in which he laid out the devious plan of the Right to take total control of America. In brief, the economic plan is to exploit labor and reward the rich and the political plan is to control news media. Next comes the religious plan:
Their religious strategy was to fuse ideology and theology into a worldview freed of the impurities of compromise, claim for America the status of God’s favored among nations (and therefore beyond political critique or challenge), and demonize their opponents as ungodly and immoral.
At the intersection of these three strategies was money: Big Money.
This is a power play as old as civilization itself: The “priests” sanctify the power of “kings” and assure the support and favor of “gods” for their policies; kings, in turn, see to it the priests enjoy protection and status. I think we’ve seen this before.
We could speculate if people are self-aware of their own machinations or if, like Mary Chesnut, they’re mostly bullshitting themselves. I suspect many of those 19th century Christian missionaries were idealists who really believed they were doing God’s work, just as I suspect much of the rank and file of the Christian Right really believe their leadership and their cause are sanctified by God. The leadership itself is a far more interesting stew of denial, repression, and greed, but I’ll leave that alone for now.
What’s most fascinating to me is the way today’s Christian Right has so cheerfully subordinated itself to the causes of political power and “free market” capitalism, neither of which even remotely connect to Jesus’ teachings. It’s as if after all these centuries of compromising Jesus to attain favor and prominence, Christians step into the same old role without a second’s thought. As noted in the previous Wisdom of Doubt episode, disciples of the late right-wing theologian Rousas John Rushdoony are taught that God favored America with the blessing of “biblical capitalism,” and before his downfall the Rev. Ted Haggard used to preach that free market capitalism is the fulfillment of God’s Plan.
The Center for Religion, Ethics, and Social Policy at Cornell University has a web page called “Economics from the Religious Right” with quotes and links showing how the Christian Right has adopted the exploitation of labor and the accumulation of great wealth into their grab bag of “sacred” doctrines.
Hmm, now what was it Jesus said? “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:25, New International Version). Does anyone on the Christian Right ever actually read the Gospels, I wonder?
But now let’s flip this discussion over and look at the other side. For two millennia Christians have engaged in real charitable work. Eight centuries ago Saint Francis of Assisi resisted the violence of the Crusades. In the 16th through 18th centuries Franciscan missionaries in North and South America worked tirelessly, often at great personal sacrifice, to protect native Americans from the exploitation and cruelty of other Europeans. Many generations of Catholic nuns dedicated their lives to caring for the sick. In fact, nursing was so closely associated with nuns that until the past 30 or so years professional nurses wore starched white caps whose design evolved from the nun’s coif.
And, yes, at times monasteries and convents housed acts of cruelty also. Religious people are still people. Much of the quality of religious orders, I suspect, depends on whether they are protected by civil authority or must answer to it. And, of course, the non-religious also do good work, and heal the sick and care for the exploited. I’m not one who believes that “they’re nice to other people” is one of religions’ chief claims to fame. Religions, like people, and government, and like any other human institution, are a mix of good and bad, idealism and corruption. If anything, religion seems to have an amplifying effect, bringing out the best in some people and the worst in others. I say any absolute position anyone takes on religion — that it is either entirely bad or entirely good — is one-sided and fanatical.
But, whatever you think of it, religion is not going away. Religion has been with us since we’ve been a species. Many of the arguments of evolutionary biology are probably valid. And many of the arguments against religion by crusading atheists like Richard Dawkins are also valid. However, the notion that if only people could be talked out of believing in God they’d see the light of Reason and Logic is, um, fanciful.
I want to discuss religion as a revolutionary force versus religion as preserver and defender of status quos in a future edition of The Wisdom of Doubt. Right now I just want to note that, historically, institutionalized religions tend to soak up the values and morals of whatever culture they are institutionalized in, and then they reflect those values and morals back at the culture, and so act as positive reinforcers of whatever is clanking about in that culture, good or bad. The Religious Right is doing such a good job of reflecting the ugliest and greediest aspects of American culture that they’ve just about erased Jesus entirely.
Here’s a great example, via Mike the Mad Biologist. Charles Marsh writes:
The worldwide Christian opposition seems to me the most neglected story related to the religious debate about Iraq: Despite approval for the president’s decision to go to war by 87 percent of white evangelicals in April 2003, according to a Pew Charitable Trusts poll, almost every Christian leader in the world (and almost every nonevangelical leader in the United States) voiced opposition to the war. …
… By the time American troops began bombing Baghdad before sunrise on March 20, 2003, the collective effort of the evangelical elites had sanctified the president’s decision and encouraged the laity to believe that the war was God’s will for the nation. Evangelicals preached for the war, prayed for the war, sang for the war, and offered God’s blessings on the war.
Sometime after Operation Iraqi Freedom began, I made a remarkable discovery. I had gone to one of my local Christian bookstores to find a Bible for my goddaughter. On a whim, I also decided to look for a Holy Spirit lapel pin, in the symbolic shape of a dove, the kind that had always been easy to find in the display case in the front. Many people in my church and in the places where I traveled had been wearing the American flag on their lapel for months now. It seemed like a pretty good time for Christians to put the Spirit back on.
But the doves were nowhere in sight. In the place near the front where I once would have found them, I was greeted instead by a full assortment of patriotic accessories — red-white-and-blue ties, bandanas, buttons, handkerchiefs, “I support our troops” ribbons, “God Bless America” gear, and an extraordinary cross and flag button with the two images interlocked. I felt slightly panicked by the new arrangement. I asked the clerk behind the counter where the doves had gone. The man’s response was jarring, although the remark might well be remembered as an apt theological summation of our present religious age. “They’re in the back with the other discounted items,” he said, nodding in that direction.
This takes us back to the quote by Eric Hoffer at the beginning of this post. “It was the temporal sword that made Christianity a world religion,” Hoffer says.
But in another part of the same passage, Hoffer also wrote (in 1951) “The threat of communism at present does not come from the forcefulness of its preaching but from the fact that it is backed by one of the mightiest armies on earth.” It isn’t just religion that is spread by sword and gun. Remove religion as an excuse, and mankind will find more excuses.
The corruption of Christianity in America today is paralleled by the corruption of republican government. Right now, America must choose between being a republic or an empire; I don’t think it can be both. By the same token, Christianity has to choose between what sort of power it wants to be — political or religious? I don’t think it can be both.
Separation of church and state isn’t just a liberal plot to keep Christians out of power. It’s what’s best for religion as well as the state. Separated from the temptations of temporal power, religion is free to be religion. Can evangelicals be made to see the truth of this, however?
Also: See Digby.