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Good Day, Everyone!
Here it is Saturday morning before this ezine is due you, and I’m as restless as a pet pup sensing a storm approaching. It appears when things get rough, we humans become more aware than usual.
I’ve been mulling a couple of ideas recently: humans really like to point fingers of incrimination, and some people are better than others for unconcealing proper blame; and, at times, humans want to be somewhere other than where we are, so we yell ‘let me outta here!’ These are historic times, and people mustn’t take things personally, because impersonal systems of media are in full swing by casting theocratic spells polarizing people’s imaginations, producing ever more psychological upsets pumped from corporate capitalists’ caldrons.
There are vast numbers of people whose personal cosmologies embrace war as do highly ranked leaders; leaders as hood ornaments are exchanged for others, but USA designs have been war engines for over two hundred years with no end in sight.
The most easily recognizable USA officials, who’ve been in power for almost eight years, will be remembered as those who drew up the curtain to expose the presence of totalitarianism on center stage. However, there were people in Europe shouting as loud as they could to Americans, alerting us not to allow our leaders to permeate war in Iraq.
I wish I had kept those photographs seen in 2003 of thousands of people in European streets demonstrating their disdain for despots. Many USA citizens, including congressional and cabinet leaders, and journalists and reporters and editors, were too ready to favor alliance with a reckless, puppeteered despot in 2003.
A Kind of Salvation
How many times would human Earthlings admit to silently screaming ‘let me outta here!’? Enter Greek literature and its drama. According to reports, Greeks invented a theatrical device, a boom or crane that transported a character off stage to full presence on stage. The character’s purpose was to suddenly appear from ‘on high,’ to intervene in some baffling or seemingly unsolvable difficulty. Once the character’s message was delivered as a kind of salvation in portending matters, the character might have disappeared the same way it arrived: it raptured or ‘rose up’ by way of the crane. How manly! To arrive, issue a message, and up, up and away he goes out into the ethers, shouting heavenward, ‘let me outta here!’ ¹
Rapture is a literary and theatrical device par excellence! As a youth in training for all things religious, I wondered how rapture could occur; now I wonder how patriarchs cloaked in Western monotheism will manifest the prophetic ruse. It boggles one’s mind to imagine the psychical contrivances women and men have endured through dismal, vicious religious governing in the recent five hundred years.
In spite of injurious retaliations perpetrated by men, today women of numerous ethnicities are able to train each other for governing. In ways unbeknownst to us men, and perhaps many women, females are caring for each other; crying out to end embedded cycles of subjugations and mental tyrannies of women and children on Planet Earth.
Behind closed doors to save face, religious trained combatives are probably witnessing first hand some spit in the eye while silently screaming ‘let me out!’ From a long history of shrewd warlord collusions between nation states warns the debilitating buddy system that a kind of salvation could eventually occur when hierarchal cycles fold in on themselves. If the sciences of nature’s natural cycles alert males to just one thing, it is
History is a vast early warning system.
~ Norman Cousins (b 1915), political journalist, author, professor
Route to Power
The next three sections are personally transcribed excerpts from a Google video of Chris Hedges’s lecture presented by WGBH Forum Network in partnership with The Cambridge Forum, April 4, 2007.
Introductory synopsis from video: “Do seventy million evangelical Christians attending two hundred thousand churches in America today remind us of the early stage of fascism in Italy and Germany in early nineteenth century? Chris Hedges explores that frightening prospect... Hedges comes to this insight after attending evangelical conferences and meetings across the country where he learned first hand about the radical Christian movement known as Dominionism that promotes faith and patriotism as a means to gain political power.…”
[Hedges begins] “… These values, democratic and Christian, are being dismantled by a movement that has appropriated the language and moral arguments from evangelicals and fundamentalists as well as American patriots. But they are distinct from traditional evangelicals and fundamentalists in that they seek to use religion as a route to power.
“This movement properly called Dominionism or Christian Reconstructionism is a radical mutation that believes American Christians have been mandated by God to rule. And this movement shares many similarities with classical fascist movements. What the desperate sects in this movement share is the obsession with political power. Dominionists preach that Jesus has called them to build the kingdom of God on Earth.
“America becomes in this militant biblicalism an agent of God. And all political and intellectual opponents of America’s Christian leaders are viewed quite simply as agents of Satan. Under Christian Dominion, America will no longer be a sinful and fallen nation, but one in which the ten commandments will form the basis of our legal system; Creationism and Christian values will form the basis of our educational system and the media; the federal government will be reduced to the protection of property rights and homeland security.
“Some Dominionists would require citizens to pay tithes to church organizations empowered by the government to run our social welfare agencies; and, a number of influential figures within the movement advocate the death penalty for a host of moral crimes including adultery, sodomy, apostasy, blasphemy, and witchcraft. The only legitimate voices in this state will be Christian—all others will be silenced.”
Fantastic Utopia
“The engine that drives this radical movement, the most dangerous mass movement in American history is not religiosity, but despair. It is a movement built on the growing personal and economic despair of tens of millions of Americans…
“This despair crosses economic boundaries, of course, enveloping many in the middle class, who live trapped in huge soulless excerpts, where lacking any form of community rituals or centers, they also feel deeply isolated, vulnerable, and lonely.
“Those in despair are the most easily manipulated by demagogues, who promise a fantastic utopia whether it is a worker’s paradise—fraternité, liberté, égalité—or the second coming of Jesus Christ. Those in despair search desperately for a solution.…
“During the past two years of work on American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, I kept encountering this deadly despair.… Driving down a highway where gas stations, fast food restaurants, and dollar stores… forgetting if I was in Detroit or Kansas City or Cleveland. There are parts of the United States, including whole sections of former manufacturing centers, such as Ohio, that now resemble the developing world with boarded up store fronts, dilapidated houses, pot holed streets, and crumbling schools.
“The end of the world is no longer a distraction to many Americans. The stories the believers told me about their lives before they met Christ were heart breaking. These chronicles were about terrible pain, severe financial difficulties, struggles with addictions, or childhood or sexual abuse; profound alienation and often thoughts about suicide. They were chronicles without hope; they were chronicles borne out of a nation where the top one percent now controls more wealth than the bottom ninety percent combined.
“This movement is a reflection of these gross inequities and injustices visited now on many Americans. The real world, the world of facts and dispassionate intellectual inquiry, the world where they were left out to dry, betrayed them. They hated this world, and they willingly walked out of this world for the mythical world offered by these radical preachers: a world of magic, a world where God had a divine plan for them and intervened on a daily basis to protect them, and perform miracles in their lives.…
“These Americans now lie locked in hermetic closed systems of indoctrination provided by Christian schools, home schooling, and Christian radio and television. All news, health and beauty tips, entertainment, and spiritual guidance is filtered through this disturbing, ideological prism. Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism of this drive by all totalitarian movements to shut followers off from the real world.
“Before they seize power,” she wrote, “and establish a world according to their doctrines, totalitarian movements conjure up a lying world of consistency, which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself. In which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home, and are spared the never ending shock which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations. The force possessed by totalitarian propaganda, before the movements have the power to drop iron curtains to prevent anyone’s disturbing by the slightest reality the gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world, lies in its ability to shut the masses off from the real world.” ²
“Despotic movements harness the power of modern communications to keep their followers locked in these closed systems. If this long, steady poisoning of the civil discourse is not checked or challenged; if this movement continues to teach neighbor to hate neighbor, eventually the civil society in American will collapse. Christian broadcasters along with Christian schools and colleges are indoctrinating and inciting followers in the name of Christ and American values to tear apart the nation. They preach, in short, civil war.” ³
Tolerance a Virtue
“I do not deny the right of these Christian radicals to be, to believe and worship as they choose, but I will not engage in a dialogue with those who deny my right to be; who delegitimize my faith and denounce my struggle before God as worthless. All dialogue must include respect and tolerance for the belief, worth and dignity of others including those outside the nation and the faith. When this respect is denied, it is no longer a difference of opinion, it is a fight for survival. This movement seeks in the name of Christianity in American democracy to destroy that which it claims to defend.
“I do not believe America will inevitably become a fascist state, or that the Christian Right is the Nazi party, but I do believe the Christian Right is a sworn and potent opponent of the open society. If ideology bears within it the seeds of a religious fascism, in the event of a crisis, the movement stands poised to ruthlessly reshape America in ways that have not been seen since the nation’s founding. All Americans, not only those of faith, must learn to speak about this movement with a new vocabulary, to give up passivity, and to defend tolerance.
“The attacks by this movement on the rights and beliefs of Muslims, Jews, immigrants, gays, lesbians, women, scholars, scientists, those they dismiss as nominal Christians, and those they brand with a curse of secular humanist, is an attack on all of us—on our values, our religious freedoms, and our democracy. Tolerance is a virtue, but tolerance coupled with passivity is a vice.” º
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