Favorite Articles  Joe Bageant

The Covert Kingdom

Not long ago I pulled my car up alongside a tiny wooden church in the woods, a stark white frame box my family built in 1840. And as always, an honest-to-god chill went through me, for the ancestral ghosts presumably hovering over the graves there. From the wide open front door the Pentecostal preacher's message echoed from within the plain wooden walls: "Thank you Gawd for giving us strawng leaders like President Bush during this crieeesis. Praise you Lord and guide him in this battle with Satan's Muslim armies."

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Prince of a Different Peace

In an ancient rural county in West Virginia on Christmas morning, a bent old man with a face like gentle twisted wildwood will raise the American flag in the frost. Then he will go back indoors, sit down quietly amid the smells of cooking, light his pipe and dream.

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Back to the Ancient Future
 

Here’s the short course: Global die-off of mankind will occur when we run out of energy to support the complex technological grid sustaining modern industrial human civilization. In other words, when the electricity goes out, we are back in the Dark Age, with the Stone Age grunting at us from just around the corner. This will likely happen in 100 years or less, assuming the ecosystem does not collapse first. And you are thinking, “Well ho ho ho! Any other good news Bageant? And how the fock do you know this anyway?”

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Hung Over in the End Times

It was recently pointed out to me by a psychotherapist that each of the three major Middle Eastern Bronze Age religions, Christianity, Judaism and Islam, has a screwjob that is central to its narrative---a messiah, or prophet who got the schnickle while here on earth. He is symbolic of the travails in our own graceless, uninspired lives. But as luck would have it, those prophets and messiahs left a divine promise of redemption from this earthly life of car payments, bitchy wives, kids on dope, or in the case of the Christian fundies, the utter boredom of being a religious zealot. It is called Faith. The faithful can identify with the founding patriarchs, and be redeemed by surrender to Jesus, a jihad, or a covenant, a b’rith. A redemption fulfilled, unfortunately, at the end of the world. So the best hope is the end of all life on earth. (You never catch a break from these people.) But it is the only deal on the table for most of poor suffering humanity.

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What the Left Behind Series Really Means

“Jesus merely raised one hand a few inches and a yawning chasm opened in the earth, stretching far and wide enough to swallow all of them. They tumbled in, howling and screeching, but their wailing was soon quashed and all was silent when the earth closed itself again.”

-- From Glorious Appearing by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins

“The best thing about the Left Behind books is the way the non-Christians get their guts pulled out by God.”

-- 15-year old fundamentalist fan of the Left Behind series

That is the sophisticated language and appeal of America’s all-time best selling adult novels celebrating the ethnic cleansing of non-Christians at the hands of Christ. If a Muslim were to write an Islamic version of last book in the Left Behind series, Glorious Appearing, and publish it across the Middle East, Americans would go berserk. Yet tens of millions of Christians eagerly await and celebrate an End Time when everyone who disagrees with them will be murdered in ways that make Islamic beheading look like a bridal shower. Jesus -- who apparently has a much nastier streak than we have been led to believe -- merely speaks and “the bodies of the enemy are ripped wide open down the middle.” In the book Christians have to drive carefully to avoid “hitting splayed and filleted corpses of men and women and horses,” even as the riders’ tongues are melting in their mouths and they are being wide-open gutted by God’s own hand, the poor damned horses are getting the same treatment. Sort of a divinely inspired version of “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.”

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Sleepwalking to Fallujah
 

I cannot remember a time when the American public ever asked any important questions of its national leadership. In the American scheme of things, that is the media's job, media frames the question and the public asks it, after having been appropriately bludgeoned over the head with it. That's our system by damned, we love it, and it has even been known to work on occasion. Which would be fine, except that Edward R. Murrow has been dead a long time. Since then, the American psyche has been hardwired into a new world communications order, one in which global corporations now pay the freight for national television. Halliburton, Boeing and Sprint ain't Geritol and this ain't Ted Mack's Original Amateur Hour. Content with selling us chewing gum or Chesterfields, early television sponsors were not players in the Pentagon defense contract game and never slept with the government to obtain more bandwidth.

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Dining With the Rhinos

Thanks to an online friend, I recently rediscovered Eugene Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros—the one about being fully human in a totalitarian state. Berenger, the play’s protagonist, is a humanist stranded in a society slowly becoming monsters. Rhinoceroses to be exact, a symbol for a herding mindless ugliness in an unthinking stampede. Ultimately Berenger is the last pink flesh and blood man left in a stampeding rhinoceros herd, and comes to grasp that the stampede itself is what it is all about. It is the stampede, the mindless charging off together that causes the metamorphosis of people into rhinos.

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The Borderer Legacy Haunts America

You may not meet them among your circle of friends, but there are millions of Americans who fiercely believe we should nuke North Korea and Iran, seize the Middle East’s oil, and replace the U.S. Constitution with the Christian Bible. They believe the United States will conquer the entire world and convert it to our notions of democracy and fundamentalist Christian religion. And that will happen says my Christian neo-conservative friend Dave Henderson, “when win we elect a man with the balls to use our nukes.” You may not believe me, and if you don’t I cannot blame you for never having been exposed to such folks.

more Bageant and others

Dissidentvoice.org

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Joseph Sobran

The Jewish Establishment

It’s permissible to discuss the power of every other group, from the Black Muslims to the Christian Right, but the much greater power of the Jewish Establishment is off-limits. That, in fact, is the chief measure of its power: its ability to impose its own taboos while tearing down the taboos of others — you might almost say its prerogative of offending.

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The Jewish Faction

Within the Tribe, one of the worst sins a Jew can commit is to become a Christian, as witness Jewish hostility to Jews for Jesus. An irreligious or atheist Jew may claim Israeli citizenship at any time, but a Jew who has converted to Christianity may not. This antagonism is so predominant that the Tribe opposes not only government endorsements of Christianity, but even the public exaltation of the Old Testament (as in displays of the Ten Commandments on public property) because Christians have adopted it too. The “Judaeo-Christian tradition” is a sentimental myth, treasured by many Christians but by very few Jews.

Joseph Sobran on a variety of issues

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