Why
are leftists so fucking afraid of God?
-- Joe Bageant -- World News Trust
(Editor's note: Joe first submitted this story April 27, 2007)
Six or seven years ago I wrote my first essays about how
America’s fundamentalist churches had gone batshit crazy, were casting demons
out of car engine blocks and making covert plans to exchange the Constitution
for the Book of Revelation. Those few readers I had at the time, mostly
in urban liberal strongholds, tended to think, “Well, these hayseeds out there
in the hinterlands are scary fuckers, but Joe overstates the case a bit. The
god whacks can never put together the kind of political power he’s describing.”
The political landscape has changed since then, and there are now more books
and documentary films sounding the alarm than you can shake a stick at. Which
warms the gin soaked cockles of my heart (whatever the hell heart cockles are.)
It even looks as if the mighty Pinhead himself stands a chance of being
impeached. Which will make about as much difference as when Clinton was impeached. Zilch. The financial
mobsters will still continue tunneling their way under the national treasury.
American “progressives” will continue to catalogue empire’s crimes across the
blogosphere, preaching to the already coverted, and the worst elements of
fundamentalist leadership will still be licking pencils and crafting
legislation that will allow public stoning of queers and street buskers.
But in looking back, I realize I’ve used a very broad brush
in painting American fundamentalism… over simplified some complex things,
because painting any big picture of a big nation must necessarily be rendered
with the largest brushes in the artists’ bundle.
Yet, broad strokes or not, America is an extremely religious
nation, especially for an alleged member of “The First World,” with all the
implications of social progress the term implies -- or once did. And we
will remain a religious place for a long while yet. So when it comes to social
change, a religious country is what we have to work with. Not a socialist
nation, not a particularly moral nation, and certainly not a spiritually
liberated nation, but a religious one that seems especially prone to fervid
kitschy expression (hell, what in America isn’t kitsch?) such as being “born again
in the blood” or “raptured up” or mega-churches that resemble Wal-Mart stores,
but with lousy parking arrangements.
Nonetheless, even as half of the voting public has come to
gag at the term “born again,” millions are genuinely “born again” in the spirit -- that
same spirit that so many educated American leftists who talk of world
liberation deny exists. It’s OK for Latin Americans to practice fundamental
Catholic Christianity with great devotion (brown peoples are suckers for that
superstitious stuff) but white American fundamentalists, well, that’s another
matter. As the left sees it, what they need is a good public stoning.
The implication among the thinking classes is that,
collectively as a people, we are above such archaic “superstition” as religious
fundamentalism, although they are willing to allow that modern American
fundamentalism may indeed resemble Hitler’s nationalized Christianity that so
appealed to the Germanity of a homogenic bunch of 1930's fundamentalist
Lutherans with a prejudice against the most obvious minority available, the
Jews. We are probably far too diverse for that, no matter what the holocaust
industry says. Let me say I am not a Jewish media conspiracy freak. I simply
believe that some groups have come to excel in certain American endeavors, and
some have come to excel in others, owing to dint of history, culture and
circumstance.
When it comes to excelling in certain endeavors, my own
people, the Scots Irish, excel at killing dark skinned peoples on distant
shores and being intractable lovers of the surliest forms of freedom, plus
worshipping a fundamentalist God that means real business. We all have our
talents and liabilities. In any case, we mean-spirited seed of John Calvin, who
produced George W. Bush of Kennebunkport, Texas, not to mention nearly
every stump jumping redneck demagogue preacher and politician in American
history, should at least get credit for producing Mark Twain and Robert
Mitchum. Bill Clinton and Jane Fonda too, though both are starting to smell a
little too gamey to claim of late.
We’re all Americans, some of whom attempt to think and some
of whom refuse to, which in either case leads to its own prejudices, depending
upon the socio-political pressures of the times. It appears now that among
thinking Americans the last acceptable prejudice is anti-Christian
fundamentalism---along with anti-redneckism, (but we ‘necks could give a shit
and have even become defiantly proud of the label. Question: How many NASCAR
Jesus born again American flag stickers can fit on the bumper of classic “I
don’t have the money to restore it yet” Ford Galaxy? Answer: twenty one, if you
overlap them at the edges. I’m not shitting you here. That’s an actual count.
The result of redneck exploration of spatial relationships.
Choices in learning: Starbucks or Sing Sing?
Joke as I may though, I have witnessed men and women be
quite convincingly born again, shed old selves and become different and better
human beings for the rest of their lives. The most recent was a one-eyed ex-con
crack dealer named Jerry who studied nutritional science in prison, then upon
release lived with his mom while he worked as a dishwasher and fry cook to
accumulate money so he could go to Africa and
save babies from malnutrition. Now if a man like Jerry, who is a Charismatic
Holiness Pentecostal -- which is about as fundamentalist as you can get -- can be
that born again, moved to genuine ecstatic and absolute belief in the promise
of liberation through the elimination of human suffering, (which, by the way,
is a fundamental Buddhist principle) then others can also be born again into
on-the-ground liberation of the kind we lefties claim to admire, the kind that
is shaping a new Latin America.
Jerry has done just that. He says, “My liberation came while
I was in solitary lockup, after raping a white dude so I could stay protected
by my gang.” Today I called the bar-restaurant where he washed dishes.
The manager said he’d left the country, but didn’t know where to. Jerry is
proof that any man may arrive at inner liberation by his own solitary path, but
most are led to it, and all arrive along one of humanity’s many roads of human
suffering, both material and inner, that instill inner peace and compassion.
Upon surface observation these days, it is difficult to
believe that not all American fundamentalist Christians are lacking in the
compassion their leadership only mimics on the television screen. Yet
millions of them donate billions toward what they are told provides heath care
and sustenance to the world’s indigenous peoples, but which is used to sponsor
religious demagoguery in unseen corners of the world. This is not to say there
aren’t plenty of fundamentalists solely interested in conversion of vulnerable
Second and Third World strangers, plenty of “churchy folks” who cannot get
enough of video footage of their sponsored missionary’s ministry unto the
Hottentotts or “Keechee” Indians of Latin America. “Look at’em eat with their
fingers, Janet, and they let them little babies run around with their ding dongs
hanging out.”
In the world’s big picture, however -- the unedited version
we are never allowed to see in American media -- most American fundamentalists
are being screwed blue by the same global economic pillage as, say, the
Quiche Indians of Guatemala. Working class American fundamentalists suffer
extractive capitalism’s vampirism the same as the Third
World, but by a more incremental yet nonetheless relentless
process. A scam is a scam and while you may blame the victims for
ignorance, you cannot blame them for trust and good will toward men.
Now hold onto your drawers and get this. Some working class
fundamentalists are beginning to get a sense of what even the most educated of
Americans seem congenitally blind to -- the inevitable brutality of capitalism’s
march through history -- mainly because it is marching in their direction this
time, creating bankruptcy, lost homes, credit meltdowns, and job insecurity for
the hardest working, most obedient and faithful people in America -- the
traditional working class. Just like their brothers in the Third
World, the economic "cures" they are subjected to
always turn out to be worse than the sickness. Some now notice that when
unemployment rises, so does the stock market, and when real wages drop the
“economy” soars, according to the news reports. All sorts of folks are
beginning to disabuse themselves of the notion that the American economy and
the American people are the same thing. As in: “I work like hell, get paid and
I buy stuff and I pay taxes. Ain’t that the fucking economy?” Or as one very
dedicated local blue collar fundamentalist put it a while back when I was
writing my book, “The big guys have always had it all over the little feller,
but it’s gettin’ entawrly out of hand. Sooner or later somethin’s gotta be done
to give a workin man a chance again. This ain’t what Our Lord intended.”
Even Catholics get the blues
Now if we can get past the damned “Catholic thing” that is
so lodged in American heads regarding liberation theology, and overcome modern
science’s poo-pooing of theology and all things spiritual, we can see a
distinct linkage of liberation and theology, and the need for it in
America. If devout Catholic villagers in Ecuador, Venezuela, Lima, Bolivia
and Oaxaca
can rise up, as they indeed are, then so can Christians in a Christian nation.
Maybe not in droves -- hell, even Catholics didn’t pull that off -- but it’s not
only probable, but eventually inevitable, as ecological and economic collapse
accelerate around us. The fundie End Times stuff can only be stretched so far
before it snaps and hard core reality slaps fundamentalist Christians across
the chops. Such catastrophe is just as visible from the First
Baptist Church
as it is from the Greens headquarters here in Virginia (where you might be surprised to
know that we have conservative “Christian Greens,” in favor of auditing the
Pentagon, a light rail system and balancing the budget).
Reckoning will come though, and it will come like it always
does for the human race, too late, and long after the princes of the earth have
absconded with the goods. For Americans it will come when the secret militias
in this country start cracking open their basement arms caches, and exercise
those skills learned in Iraq, Afghanistan
and along the perimeter of the Empire’s last desperate efforts on behalf of the
richest of the rich. By then, however, it will be too late for a thin network of
firepower and explosives to do much except add its members to the official
terrorist list, along side scores of Muslim cab drivers and halal meat vendors.
Good news for working mooks
The good news is that genuine human liberation for ordinary
humanity can come much sooner than catastrophe. And in coming it will require
real leaders, born of and among the lost and wasted lifetimes of toil -- not
from the political theorists, nor the meaninglessly educated hothouse plants
from the managing classes. Working class liberation leaders are beginning to
evolve from the sons and daughters of Baptist truck drivers or 55-year-old Wal-Mart
greeters with varicose veins and no health insurance. I get emails from them
and I find them in corners of American politics such as West Virginia’s emerging but understandably
as yet disoriented Mountain Party. Liberation’s future leadership is out there
right now, stocking the shelves of the supermarkets tonight, buffing the floors
of the nation’s universities and banks, checking on the calf-cow pairs in the
late season snows of Montana, and likely as not they are gun owning, non-drinking Christians doing solitary
jobs with lots of time to think. And they experience things like loneliness,
modern alienation, and an inner emptiness within that now quaint concept called
the soul. Which drives so many of them to the last place that even addresses
the souls of people such as themselves -- fundamentalist churches.
Cheer up dammit! It’s only the end of the world.
If we want to practice or actualize liberation, we gotta do
it on liberation’s own turf -- the soul of man. Which is rooted in this earth
and nowhere else. Morality and justice is an organic thing, not a legal, or
political or philosophical one. The reptilian brain takeover of America is not
the entire movie, just the most savage scene near the end of our national
production of a secular techno-illusion. For fully sentient Americans,
entertaining electronic diversion and the illusion of material abundance cannot
relieve the unbearable pressures of life in a techno-secular nation, one
divorced from the organic morality and spirituality that comes with contact
with the natural world.
Busting through the delusional veil of any imperial state
culture always spells acceptance of more tough news for its clueless citizenry.
In our case means reconnection with the earth, and embracing the suffering and
eventual death it provides every living thing as a matter of physics and cosmic
order. That’s where it begins and ends. Everything in between, the NGOs (non-governmental agencies), the
Internet, the theologians, and all the political theories in the world are just
the signal static, the self-enforced interference between ourselves and the
only worthwhile goals left in a doomed Empire -- and all empires eventually meet
their doom -- humility, compassion and reconnection with the spirit.
After all, it is not the coursing energy of the human spirit
that is doomed. It never has been and never will be so long as a single newborn
baby still squalls out, “I AM!” immediately upon its delivery, even into
this most recent issuance of “the world” we have allowed to happen in the name
of reason, progress, science, democracy -- feel free to pick your own pious
scientific, political or religious excuse. It does not matter. The animating
forces of the universe seem unmoved by the collision of planets and implosions
of supernova, much less the outbreak of a temporarily virulent virus called man
on a speck of cosmic dust we call earth.
As it happens, today is “Earth Day,” that media trivialized
and co-opted celebration of our bio-planet. Earth Day 2007 would have passed
unnoticed in my household but for our local newspaper’s announcement that “The
Winchester Host Lions Club will create an American flag of blooms,” and that
six other organizations will be planting red, white, and blue flowers in the
park, “As part of the statewide celebration of the 400th anniversary of the
founding of Jamestown
.” Mother Earth is evidently associated in the local mind with an English joint
stock company exporting a gaggle of armed English farmers and Polish woodcutters
to a malaria ridden Virginia swamp, with the idea of turning a profit from
their miserable toil and deaths. By the time Thomas Jefferson was born they had
managed to turn hundreds of thousands of acres into a burned out wasteland of
soil erosion (both Washington and Jefferson ’s biggest agricultural problem) and eliminate
several native species, including some human ones.
Exactly one month prior to this Earth Day 2007, I was
standing in the coral sand of a tiny atoll in the middle of the Caribbean Ocean at night amid several other
vanishing species. Less than a hundred feet at its longest point, its sands
were scattered here and there with the bleached skeletons of ancient lobster
traps and sea turtle shells, and etched by the tracks and tailings of turtles,
small birds, and all sorts of strange crawlies from the tide pool. Swarms of
translucent little crabs with huge black and white target-like eyes on stems
coming out of their heads scurried furtively, avoiding the cormorants and other
kinds of birds hugging the atoll against the same sturdy winds that once
carried disease and guns into the new world and Spanish gold away from it.
During the day the sun on that sand was blinding. But at night there was just
that wind and absolute blackness with millions of stars and the cries of birds.
Seldom have I ever felt the presence of the earth's spirit
and the terrible beauty of creation so strongly, where the world flourishes and
struggles and dies right before your eyes. Thousands of colorful worms go by in
the shallow water, winking on and off and schools of tropical fish are plainly visible
right at the water’s edge, their fate hanging with the frigate birds suspended
overhead.
And while standing there -- frankly, taking a nocturnal piss -- the wind rose and
grew stronger. And as I closed my eyes against the billowing coral sand, that
wind blew away all the flesh from my bones. Then blew away the very bones
themselves. And what I was left with the core of selfness, just the
awareness of awareness… that center of humanness that exists in pure duration
before any thought or word is even formed, the unarticulated stuff that exists
in the womb of woman and in that great frothing amniotic soup of the mother of
us all -- the sea. It was just me and the overarching black canopy of the world,
as if god’s own infinite bowl of stars itself had been overturned, dumping them
upon my fallible and pitifully meaningless outer self -- the one presently
engaged in pompous scribbling about the liberation of man, yet unable to save a
single one of those tiny crabs or glowing sea worms in the tide pools from
their own destinies, from their return to the sea via the gullet of a vanishing
petrel.
Western civilization began by smashing the faces of beasts
with stones, determined to “conquer the wilderness,” hammering at both matter
and mind on the anvil of the millenniums until finally, we pulled down
mountains and made atoms scream in tortured orbits. Now the day of
deliverance comes, casting our shadows in merciless hydrogen light, illuminating
not only our latest war crimes, but also crimes of trade and finance and greed
during what has come to pass for peace, when our darkest commercial cannibalism
feasts upon the naked wondrous bodies of the innocents. And now destruction
dances in infinite rooms, singing in dark chords for the brute who smashed open
the celestial clock, hungry to eat the ticking heart of god.
For all that the study of history could have taught an
amnesiac America
about the fall of empires and civilizations, it is doubtful it can prepare
anyone for what is fast coming upon us, because it has never happened before
and by definition can only happen once. Though the Wiccan priestess, the
fundamentalist preacher, the rabbi, and environmental biologist call it by
different names -- as if renaming an apocalypse made much difference -- we need a
liberated theology, epistemology, or ontology (again, that obsession with
naming rather things than doing things). Something to liberate “the within” of
we who find ourselves traveling together amid gathering darkness toward the
long promised kingdom of sanity and justice. That kingdom which rests at the
end of no mortal road, but was always within us. Just like Jesus and Buddha and
the Pentecostal preachers of my childhood said it was.
***
About Joe
Born 1946 in Winchester VA, USA. US Navy Vietnam era veteran.
After stint in Navy became anti-war hippie, ran off to the West
Coast ... lived in communes, hippie school buses... started writing
about holy men, countercultural figures, rock stars and the American
scene in 1971 ... lived in Boulder Colorado until mid 1980s ... 14
years in all ... became a Marxist and a half-assed Buddhist ...
Traveled to Central America to write about third World issues...
Moved to the Coeur d'Alene Indian reservation in Idaho, built a
cabin, lived without electricity, farmed with horses for seven years
... tended reservation bar (The Bald Eagle Bar), wrote for regional
newspapers... generally festered on life in America ... Moved to
Moscow, Idaho, worked on third rate newspaper there ... Then moved to
Eugene Oregon, worked for an international magazine corporation pushing
insecticides and pesticides to farmers worldwide.
Then back to hometown of Winchester VA to settle some scores with
the bigoted, murderous redneck town I grew up in. I love'em but they
need a good ass kicking.
Died in 2000 when George Bush got elected ... died along with 275
million other Americans ... Plan to rise again from the dead when he is
tossed out ...maybe reincarnate as a Commie terrorist on Wall Street
... maybe as a sex worker in Amsterdam ... can't decide ... both have
their advantages.
Joe Bageant
Send me an email -- This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
JoeBageant.com