Hung Over in the End Times
If liberal society is
to survive the rise of the Godwacks, we need to start by
calling them what they are
by Joe Bageant
www.dissidentvoice.org
November 16, 2004
Since
George Bush’s reelection, the Christian nutjobs have mounted
an assault on my block. In the five years I’ve lived in this
neighborhood I’ve never had so much as one Jehovah’s Witness
knock at the door. But last Saturday morning my neighbor
Tinka-the-wool-weaver called to warn of approaching Bible
thumpers working the doorbells on my side of the street.
Sure enough, out the window were two women in long skirts
with bad Bible hairdos headed my way. “Incoming Jesus freaks
at nine o’clock high!” I yelled to my wife. We jumped back
into bed and let 'em pound on the door and drop tracts in
the mailbox while Barb read the Washington Post and I caught
another 20 zees. That, we thought, was the end the end of
it. But the next day while walking my dog Bingo -- a black
pisshound of dubious origin -- a white van cruised alongside
us slowly, as if confused about directions. I asked if I
could help, and BAM! I should have know better. It was
evangelist sucker bait. The Christian church logo on the
driver’s baseball cap (any time you see a cross, flames and
a sword in a logo, run) told me I’d stepped
into a fundamentalist ambush. The driver had one of those
delirious smiles only a fundie can muster, and that glint of
mad zeal that gives one the heebie jeebies. I yanked Bingo
away from a good piss and we wheeled off. “Jesus wants you
to have a nice day,” I heard over my shoulder, thinking to
myself, “Then why inna hell don’t you make like Jesus and
let me have one.” Somehow I suspect we’ve not seen the last
of these god-crazed bastards and that Bingo and I will have
to start taking our walks in the alleys instead of the
streets. And maybe move the weekend cocktail hour up to 3pm
just to spite the fundies.
As the
elections proved for once and for all, Christian fanatics
are plenty thick in the good ole U S of A these days and can
no longer be written off as Dogpatch religionists.
Historically, they have always been around and in about the
same numbers too, just less visible. But currently they are
hopped up about god giving them their own president and even
their own political party. Of course in a country limited to
two parties -- the Republican Party of Heavy Imperialism and
Democratic Imperialism Lite -- this spells trouble for those
of us who do not handle snakes or wash other people’s feet
during church services. It is one thing for them to have it
in for their enemies, and quite another to have their own
president, cabinet, Supreme Court, and newly established
Department of Fatherland Surveillance backing them up. Not
since the days of Andrew Jackson’s populist hog and hominy
presidency have these people seen one of their own farting
at the Oval Room desk. And as usual, the fundies have blood
in their eye, this time for liberal humanism, free thought,
Trojan rubber products and the number 666.
Given the
near-fascist nature of U.S. governmental behavior lately, I
do not think it is overstating the case to observe that we
liberals seem to have become, at least to some degree, the
new Jews of the rising Republican Reich. You remember the
old German theme about a certain kind of people being
responsible for everything wrong with an otherwise perfect
white Christian society. It took a Republican mind to figure
out that “elite” liberals constituted exactly such a threat
to our national way of life. Remember that the German public
saw the Jews as being against its “values” too, and that
they had declared cultural and legal war on the Jews long
before Hitler came along to galvanize the most nationalistic
elements among the German people. Just as the Jews were used
in Nazi Germany to rally Christian Germans, American
liberals were used in the last election by the ultra-right
to rouse Fundamentalist Christians -- people who were
previously uninterested in the GOP political agenda but got
quite excited when it was pointed out to them that their
anti-Christ was, lo and beshit! right among them. A godless
homo-loving stem cell sucking liberal elite right here in
Riverdale! The fact that we are at least one half of the
population prevents us from being an “elite” somehow escaped
everyone in the excitement.
In Germany
it came down to jealousy of the Jews’ success in capitalist
society by a group of Christian white people who believed
they had been excluded. In America it came down to
supposedly being culturally excluded by the liberal elite,
plus the voting rights of fetuses and allowing gay people to
wear wedding rings. We can safely assume the fetuses don’t
really care one way or another. The gays are still pissed.
In both cases, however, the German and the American,
Christianity is a form of political ideology masquerading as
religious faith, deploying the ultimate force of government
to root out the “evil” and dominate with its own particular
delusion.
Meanwhile,
it’s hard to tell who is controlling whom. Do the Christian
Fundamentalists in this country now have significant control
of the Republican Party? Or were they simply duped into
backing the latest U.S. capitalist imperialist grab for
empire and exploitation of ordinary working Americans. My
guess is that the big Republican capitalists do not give a
fuck, so long as they can grab the money and run when the
lights are shot out, and that the Christians don’t care as
long as they get a shot at swapping the Constitution with
the Bible.
On one hand
the Republicans want to own the world. On the other the
godwacks want to dominate it, or destroy it if they can’t:
“Ya bow to my god buddy, or we blow this whole pop stand off
the map…take everybody out…startin' with the Middle East.”
As near as I can tell, fundamentalists in every religion
have this in common -- destroying the world to bring on
their brand of paradise. The majority of Americans disagree
with Christian or Jewish fundamentalist ideas, but there is
no way to call the fundies on it because their agenda is
couched in religious language and symbols. And we all know
for crap sake that America stands for religious freedom.
Even fruitcake religious freedom. So we do not challenge the
Christian or right wing Zionist freaks among us (It’s open
season on Muslims however.) We few who do challenge religion
are declared satanic secular humanists, anti-Semitic or
anti-Islamic. All of which works well for only one group --
the rightwing political crazies who, in their quest for oil,
capital, territory, or whatever, use god rhetoric to drive
these zealots like a pack of blind slobbering dogs. This
story is so old that it is sometimes hard to have much faith
in the human race at all, isn’t it?
The Sacred
Screwjob
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.
Freud would
have said this magical thinking and heavenly spook stuff is
our cultural ideal, the glue that gives us a common identity
and holds us together as a people. Our mythology. Which
would have been just fine with most of us if the
fundamentalists could leave it at that. But ignorant mouth
breathing fundamentalists who cannot read without moving
their lips take it all literally as a reading of history,
one that harkens them to political action. Myth as charter.
When your mythology happily calls for the end of the world
to bring on a paradise no one has ever seen, well, it makes
for some piss poor politics. I think we can all agree on
that. And as if that weren’t enough of a headache for the
rest of us, it calls for our conversion to their delusion,
elsewise be destroyed as infidels. You are either with them
or against them. Most of us would rather be away from them,
but the world is too small to run from these days.
At the same
time, the faithful presume themselves to be aggrieved holy
victims, every last damned one of them. And when you are a
victim, whether it be of the removal of the Ten Commandments
from your white cracker court house by onanist liberal
heathens “frum up nawth,” or the refusal of the Great Satan
Kansas School board to add humus and sheep’s eyes to the
school lunch program, you are entitled to revenge in the
form of taking down the entire world. What the hell? God is
gonna do it anyway at the end time, which anybody who reads
the Good Book knows is any day now. Just look around at the
amount of thigh showing these days, or the lesbians jumping
little school girls in the Oklahoma high school restrooms
(according to republican Senate candidate Tom Coburn.) Sure
signs of the end times. About the only thing all three gods
agree on is that exposed belly buttons and young folks
having too much fun leads to the end of the world. So blow
it the fuck up now. Start a nuclear war, then watch Jesus
return to earth and turn feckless liberal eyeballs to jelly.
Just like in the Left Behind series. And even if these turn
out not to be the end times (again) what the hell good is a
religion if you don’t get to kill somebody or at least have
a certified infidel to make miserable?
None of
this would be possible without religious ecstasy---otherwise
known as psychotic hysteria. Always there is a hysterical
conversion in which you get taken up in jihadist frenzy, or
born again and never have to take responsibility for your
own life or happiness, never have to think---which I must
admit is halfway attractive to me, but I’d rather get drunk
to do it. Once you succumb to religious delusion, thinking
is replaced by incomprehensible texts, magical images and
exhortations. Best of all, you do not have to die. Not
really. When the Rapture comes, you go floating right up out
of your car, sailing heavenward naked as a jaybird and
bathed in that Cecil B. Demille lighting (When the Rapture
comes, I’m getting a brand new Volvo from one of these
floaters. Hey buddy, leave the keys in the ignition.) Or you
pop right up out of the grave looking like you did when you
were twenty one. Or wake up with Allah and a couple dozen
virgins with you-know-what on their minds.
Christian
dialogue my sweet ass!
But to be
more serious for a moment, and a damned brief one I
promise…You cannot talk to these people and you cannot reach
them with words or language. Not unless it is Biblical or
Koranic or otherwise scriptural. Dialogue is impossible even
though, publicly at least, they claim to want dialogue.
(Take it from me. What they want is to convert you. I’ve
wasted years on that dialogue gig.) Their only language is
religious rhetoric and that’s damned narrow stuff. Combined
with the emotionalism of the born-again consciousness state,
it reduces them to incomprehensible psychotics, especially
when they feel threatened, which is constantly. Calm
psychotics, but delusional and unreachable people
nevertheless. I have hundreds of emails from liberals who
were born into fundamentalism whose parents have cast them
out of the family, so be assured they will have no trouble
persecuting secular humanist strangers, given the chance.
As a life
long student of human consciousness through both the
literature of consciousness plus countless homegrown
experiments with every kind of mind bending dope I could get
my hands on, let me say this: Religious fundamentalists
experience archaic states of liminal consciousness of a type
long atrophied or lost to most of us. Vestigial ecstatic
states such as adoration, and ecstatic rapture, states that
probably still reside down inside human hardwiring, but are
little accessed by modern humans. States that lie outside
reason and logic, and are indeed antithetical to them. Thus,
there can be no dialogue because that which is not born of
reason cannot be reasoned with. These people not only do not
negotiate, they cannot even hear you. Most liberals have yet
to figure this out.
But most
liberals will never figure it out because they will never
set foot in a fundamentalist church. It’s one of those
things you have to experience to understand, maybe even be
born into. For example, having been raised in
fundamentalism, I am still prone to those states, which is
why I do not go to church with relatives of friends here.
Given enough of that electrifying overamped spiritual group
think fervor, I’m as likely as anyone there to speak in
tongues. My heart always pounds and I always break into
tears. You probably would too, given enough exposure, though
I’m sure you don’t believe it. It is some primitive social
submersion thing and you are not as strong as you might
think. Something ancient and primary happens when one is
“seized by the holy spirit,” a group psychosis that over
time cannot be resisted. And it has nothing to do with how
smart you think you are, which is why so many reasonably
educated people seem to fall under its spell. There is a
powerful sense of emotional and spiritual release, beautiful
anxious joy and well-being, and yes, love. The
fundamentalists of course attribute this to the spirit of
god. But I have also experienced it on LSD in settings that
permitted self-examination of the phenomenon, and I would
have to say there is a cultish element of mob psychology
involved in the Christian fundamentalist manifestation of
this state. Cultish especially in the sense that you have to
stay with the cult (congregation) to sustain the
fundamentalist consciousness state. Otherwise it wears
off---you “fall away from God’s church.” Each fundamentalist
church is its own cult, (which is why there are so many
fractious doctrinal disagreements between them) and the
benefits are sustainable only as long as one is a cult
member. This is also why each church perceives itself as
being outnumbered, stranded in the secular world around
them. They are. However, in their cultural isolation---and
by culture, I mean real culture, not the culture industry
crap---they perceive themselves as threatened, so they go on
the offensive. The only thing threatening them is the
ordinary changing world, which they see as evil because A—it
does not adhere to a 2000 year old world view, and
B—everything is reduced to good and evil, period.
My friend,
Scott Ross, talk show host on Pat Robertsons’s Christian
Broadcasting Network, (don’t laugh, he’s got 50 million
viewers, knows Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan and is married to
one of the Ronettes) recently proved to me once again that
not all fundamentalists are bent on world domination (called
dominionism in fundie speak.) It is only fair to say that
fundamentalists fall along a spectrum, and not every
fundamentalist, as the milder ones are quick to point out,
is spoiling for a world war to bring on Armageddon. However,
the same nihilistic eschatological theme runs throughout
fundamentalism (you are born shit in the eyes of god and
unless you cop to His program, you will remain shit, after
which you will become a sack of burning shit in hell.)
binding their outlook and, as we have seen, their political
agenda. Their differences with us are the difference between
the blackest Old Testament doomsday thinking and that of the
Great Enlightenment, with which began the unraveling of
these ancient hard-assed religious regimes (in Europe at
least.) Maybe I should put it more simply: Old Testament
Christianity is an essentially blood worshipping, war making
religion (whose symbol is a bloody man on a wooden pole) and
I have seen too many times that when they get anywhere near
politics they fuck over anyone who resists seeing things
their way. As for the supposedly more moderate
fundamentalists, you’ll never hear one of them speak up
against such outrages. They vote with the mob. (Sorry
Scott.)
There
should be some logical point to this rambling screed, but I
cannot think of one, other than this: Don’t kid yourself
about making peace with these people. And for god’s sake
don’t believe the pundit’s horseshit as to it being about
“values.” It is about a minority among us who want to stamp
out all the advances made during the Enlightenment---take us
back to Biblical Law, wars and rumors of wars. And it is
about a band of dyspeptic, neoconservative money grubbing
bastards who knew how to exploit our most ancient and
destructive legacy, the war making Calvinist fundamentalism
brought here by the Scots Irish and still smoldering across
the heartland. By now most of you who live where you can buy
a copy of the New York Times without special ordering it, or
feel free to walk down the street arm in arm with a lover of
another race, are starting to wake up. All I can say is that
you have worse enemies than you know, and they will still be
around next election. If there is one. And they can crush us
if they manage to align themselves with the same kind of
oppressive bastards they did this time. Which they will.
They never cease, proof of which is that what we saw last
November was the culmination of twenty years of organizing.
What to do about it is still being debated, but to my mind,
publicly calling these people what they really are would be
a damned good start.
I am often
accused of middlebrowing some very complex topics, politics
and religion chief among them. I don’t deny the charge honey
child. But most of the world’s big issues are over my head.
Yours too, I’m willing to bet. Fortunately though, we can
find solutions for the smaller abuses the fundamentalists
vest upon us. Take those Pentecostal door thumpers intruding
upon my Saturday morning hangover. It seems my dog Bingo has
a bladder problem and excitedly pisses on the shoes of
visitors at my door. I just can’t wait until the next fundie
comes a knocking.
Joe Bageant is a magazine
editor and essayist living in Winchester, Virginia. He can
be reached at
bageantjb@netscape.net. (C)
Copyright 2004 by Joe Bageant.
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