We Can Kill Them for You Wholesale

And so I want to thank [NASCAR Hall of Famer] Darrell [Waltrip] for that wonderful presentation.  Darrell knows that when you’re going 200 miles an hour, a little prayer cannot hurt.  (Laughter.)  I suspect that more than once, Darrell has had the same thought as many of us have in our own lives -- Jesus, take the wheel.  (Laughter.) Although I hope that you kept your hands on the wheel when you were thinking that.  (Laughter.)

From yesterday's post the obvious next step is President Obama's sermon at the 2015 National Prayer Breakfast.  Predictably, liberals have been enjoying the predictable right-wing response of fury that Obama would point to the less-savory aspects of Christian history; conservatives have celebrated Darrell Waltrip's remark at the same venue, "If you don't know Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior ... you are going to Hell ... I thought I was a good guy, but folks, let me tell you something: good guys go to Hell."  This is the sort of thing that sends liberals and secularists into how-can-you-say-such-awful-things conniptions, but Obama said it was "wonderful", and you can not go against the word of POTUS.  From what I know of Obama's religious beliefs, he probably agrees completely with Waltrip's theology, which is ordinary mainstream Christianity, nothing to get excited about and certainly not in the context of a prayer breakfast.

What Obama said about Christian history was nothing out of the way either, though most American Christians, conservative and liberal alike, would like to forget the historical connection between slavery and racial segregation and Christianity.  The chief reason the right would object is because Obama said these things, just as the chief reason Obama's fans can ignore his reactionary theology is because it's his.

Obama's remarks were what Roy Edroso called "ordinary, meretricious bullshit," though of course Edroso was talking about the bleats of Obama's critics, not about Obama's preaching.  Take for example: "In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ."  Obama is quite sure, it appears, that slavery and Jim Crow are incompatible with true Christianity, though mainstream Christians for over 1500 years would have disagreed with him.  Christ himself healed a dying slave and returned him to his bondage, while the apostle Paul converted a runaway and returned him to his Christian master.  In the New Testament, slavery is the model for the relationship between the believer and Christ.  If either of them ever uttered a word against slavery, it hasn't been recorded.  You can claim that despite all biblical and historical precedent, slavery wasn't what Yahweh meant at all, but that's just because believers can invent just about any position they like and ascribe it to their god, as Be Scofield wrote in the post I quoted yesterday, and as Obama said elsewhere in his sermon, cautioning his congregation against "being so full of yourself and so confident that you are right and that God speaks only to us, and doesn’t speak to others."  But this backfires on Obama, who is sure that God doesn't speak to the religious apologist for slavery, Jim Crow, or "unspeakable acts of barbarism  -- terrorizing religious minorities like the Yezidis, subjecting women to rape as a weapon of war, and claiming the mantle of religious authority for such actions."  Really?  On more than one occasion, Obama's god commanded the children of Israel to invade Canaan and burn its cities to the ground, massacring all the inhabitants and their livestock in some cases, or to leave virgin girls alive in others so that they could be raped by the invaders.  This was justified, in Scripture and by later apologists who claimed the mantle of religious authority for such actions, because the Canaanites were worshiping the wrong gods.  The New Atheists who support the new American-British Crusade against Islam basically agree: they worship the wrong god, they belong to a "death cult" (in Obama's words), so kill them all and let no-God sort them out.

Here's a good example of someone using Christianity to justify war:

The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.

That was Abraham Lincoln, draping himself in the mantle of religious authority to justify the American Civil War, the most horrific war in human history up to that point.  (Christian Europe outdid Lincoln fifty years later, also appealing to religion.) "Lincoln wasn't a churchgoer," the commenter who posted the Lincoln quotation concluded, "but I like his God better."  Lincoln's god was Yahweh Sabaoth, the god of battles and carnage, the god of Isaiah and Jeremiah and the Revelation and the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," who tramples out the vintage of human blood from human bodies -- the same god as the god of ISIS, in fact.  The commenter likes that god better than the pro-slavery god of Alexander Stephens, who'd been quoted by Ta-Nehisi Coates in his post on Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast.  But they're the same god; the god of the Bible has no objection to slavery, or to war, or to atrocities against civilians.

The real problem is not extremism.  As horrific as the atrocities of Muslim "extremists" are, they are dwarfed by the atrocities of moderate, middle-of-the-road Western, mostly Christian but Jewish as well, governments.  That one Jordanian pilot was burned alive by ISIS is horrible, but in all-too-recent history the US has burned thousands of people alive, with incendiary bombs, napalm, and white phosphorus.  Isn't that thousands of times as horrible?  Some of these victims were military, to be sure, but then so was the Jordanian pilot.  Many more were civilians.  Retail violence, the terrorism of small usually non-government groups, is easy to focus on, especially for propaganda purposes, but the wholesale violence of states is harder to see for some reason.  Partly that's deliberate, as when Western media refuse to publish or acknowledge Western state atrocities.  Aside from that there's a will not to know, the discipline of memory through doublethink which ignores that it ignores what we do, and uses the cognitive dissonance to obsess over the crimes of official enemies.

Obama himself is responsible for many atrocities, and has justified others.  When he gave his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize, for example, he said:

As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life’s work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there's nothing weak -- nothing passive -- nothing naïve -- in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King. But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their [King and Gandhi’s] examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people.

Obama has also joked about using predator drones to kill innocent people.  I don't wish to single him out, of course.  As Noam Chomsky says, if the Nuremberg principles were enforced, every US president since World War II would have to be hanged.  That's the point: killing civilians in vast numbers, burning people to death, is as American as cherry pie, and as Christian as communion wafers.

Everyone's Extreme But Me and Thee

I'm out of town until tomorrow (I hope), and Internet access is harder to get than I expected.  But I just remembered this excerpt from James Barr's book Fundamentalism that I've quoted before, and which fits in with what I wrote the other day about liberals and Fox News:

As with some other comparable social movements, there is always a position more extreme than the one you are talking with at any particular moment. A person whom an average mainstream Christian will regard as a rabid fundamentalist will often be found to consider himself rather moderate; beyond him there lie, it appears, whole tracts of belief that are much more intransigent and uncompromising. The fundamentalist polemicist thus puzzles people by assuming a pose of moderation. He affects to suppose, at least at times, that his is in fact a central position within Christianity. On the one side you have the severe distortions of Roman Catholicism, on the other you have the utter perversions of liberalism, and in the middle you have the sound, central and moderate position of his own conservative evangelicalism. There may indeed be persons who push the conservative evangelical position to unnecessary extremes, it is admitted, but the average sound conservative (i.e., the one you are talking to at the moment) occupies middle ground. It is thus not uncommon to find a person who holds absolutely all the tenets of fundamentalist belief, … but who nevertheless uses the term ‘fundamentalist’ not for himself but for some shadowy group of people who hold a yet more extreme position.

Easy enough, eh?  Let me add a complicating thought.  Sure, that crazy Fox News fan over there, or that wacked-out fundamentalist, might think he's a sensible moderate, but he's really extreme.  So far so good.  But are you, O real sensible moderate, as middle-of-the-road as you like to think?

My own answer to my question is that I'm not concerned with being either extreme or moderate.  If what I think is right sets me at odds with most right-thinking people, so what?  It's not exactly news, is it, that most right-thinking people have been wrong in the past?  Well, maybe it is, to some people.  After the dust has settled, right-thinking people like to rewrite history so that they were on the right side after all, and the crazy extremists who took the right position before turn out to have been right for the wrong reasons, like those who opposed Bush's invasion of Iraq on the grounds that it was based on falsehoods and constituted aggression.  To right-thinking people, we only thought that because we were motivated by a visceral knee-jerk hatred of Bush and of the Republican Party, plus a general dislike for military violence.  (As if any of those were bad reasons.)  The right reason, according to right-thinking people, is that the war wasn't well-planned or organized, it turned out to take longer than expected, but our hearts were in the right place.  And the same people are ready to be right-thinking again, as often as it takes.  As I've said before, it's easy to be moderate if you get to pick the extremes in advance.

On the other hand, I don't mind if I agree with most people either.  After all, if most people have the good sense or good taste to agree with me, it might mean there's hope for the human race after all.

Moderation In All Things, Including Moderation

No, I didn't go to Jon Stewart's party in Washington yesterday. For one thing, as I've already mentioned, I had a prior engagement. For another, what "sanity" does Stewart propose we restore? This country has always been batshit crazy. For yet another, Stewart early on called his project a "Million Moderate March," which leaves me out: I'm not a moderate, and that puts me in good company -- better company, I'm afraid, than Stewart.

I realize that Stewart's call for sanity may be as tinged with satire as Colbert's corresponding call for fear. But only tinged. (This morning I heard someone on NPR say piously that Stewart's closing "sincere moment" showed that satire can go beyond entertainment to have a serious meaning. Duh! Satire is supposed to have teeth, and sink them deep. If it doesn't, it's just mockery pretending to be satire.) That was shown by Stewart's early announcement (also quoted in the Times) that

The purpose, he said, is to counter what he called a minority of 15 percent or 20 percent of the country that has dominated the national political discussion with extreme rhetoric. He tarred both parties with that charge, mentioning both the attacks on the right against President Obama for being everything from a socialist to un-American and on the left against former President Bush for being a war criminal.

Numerous people jumped on that last clause. Glenn Greenwald pointed out that Stewart's exemplary extremes were bogus, citing a McClatchy story which reported that

The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing "war crimes" and called for those responsible to be held to account.

(See also this post at the Comedy Central website, and notice the second comment under it, by an Administrator.)

But, well, maybe that Army general is an extremist. But any number can play that game. To wit: Some extremists say that George Bush should be sainted. Other extremists say he should be flayed alive with hot rakes and disembowelled publicly before being drawn and quartered. As a moderate, I say he should merely be hanged, as Saddam Hussein was hanged with his approval. If you disagree with me, you're the kind of extremist who has ruined political discourse in this country.

Actually, that whole paragraph from the Times was bogus, in the Car Talk sense of the word. What is laughingly known as political discourse is dominated by the corporate media, who by dint of owning the media infrastructure and spending large amounts of money get to define and occupy the Center. The extremists would be those who "reflexively" opposed Bush's invasion of Iraq, who want a single-payer health care payment system (or better yet, a National Health Service), who now oppose Obama's war in Afghanistan, who opposed the Bush-Paulson-Obama-McCain bank bailout, who do not (contrary to recurring corporate media claims) worry about the deficit as much as they worry about jobs, and -- do a lot of yelling, but are mostly not heard except by ourselves. True, the corporate media have given disproportionate coverage and support to the Tea Party Extended tantrum, but that's because calls for "smaller" government, lower taxes for the rich, and the demolition of social services and the Commons, are part of the great Center. (Greenwald also showed that "Stewart's examples of right-wing rhetorical excesses (Obama is a socialist who wasn't born in the U.S. and hates America) are pervasive in the GOP", not just in its fringes.)

I get weary when the Tea Party is treated as if it were something new in the US. Surely I'm not the only person old enough to remember the "New Right" that gave us Ronald Reagan in 1980, that considered William F. Buckley Jr. a liberal if not a leftist, that was going to sweep away liberalism like a tsunami, stop abortion absolutely, put prayer back in the schools, make us proud of our Flag again, end welfare, limit government, and roll back Communism?

The hysteria of the Democrats, who warn that a Republican victory in November will usher in a new Dark Age, is more than matched by the hysteria of the Republicans, who gleefully anticipate the new Age of Light that will bless the Fatherland when they supplant the Democrat scalawags and give America back to We the People. Just like they did in 1994!

So my right-wing acquaintance (that's RWA1) keeps linking to prematurely triumphalist articles in USA Today, plus the usual Obama ankle-biters from the Wall Street Journal Op-Ed page and National Review Online. (That WSJ article was mildly amusing. It was an attack on some Democratic house scribe who wanted to depict Barack Obama as a philosopher-president. I hope I needn't reiterate my own low opinion of Obama's intellect, but I'm old enough to remember [as is RWA1] when the Journal was trying to present Dan Quayle as a serious intellectual, a reader of Plato and Aristotle, full of gravitas. Or as Richard Nixon told the New York Times, "He's a very different man than the intellectual midget that has been portrayed in much of the media.… I think he's going to make an excellent Vice President, and I believe that he's going to be a popular Vice President just as soon as the people of this country see him as he is." Riiiight.)

RWA1 also linked to this WSJ story on the birth of the Tea Party Movement, "a good account," RWA1 said, "of the movement without the hysterical baggage in the partisan media." It's nice to have a non-hysterical account of a hysterical movement, I suppose, though Fox News is surely "partisan media" and has been highly supportive of the Teabaggers, as have the corporate media generally. (It happens that NPR's This American Life did a show on the Tea Party, very sympathetic and non-hysterical, just today.) RWA1, who also went berserk over the firing of Juan Williams by NPR, considers himself a sober conservative (but don't they all?), but he isn't that different from someone like Jon Stewart in wishing to see himself as the reasonable, rational middle. And truth be told, they are probably not as far apart politically as either would like to think.

Glenn Greenwald also pointed out something important that I've noticed before.

One other point about this fixation on the "tone" of our politics. Political debates are inherently acrimonious -- much of the rhetoric during the time of the American Founding, as well as throughout the 19th Century, easily competes with, if not exceeds, what we have now in terms of noxiousness and extremity -- but far more important than tone, in my view, is content. For instance, Bill Kristol, a repeated guest on The Daily Show, is invariably polite on television, yet uses his soft-spoken demeanor to propagate repellent, destructive ideas. The same is true for war criminal John Yoo, who also appeared, with great politeness, on The Daily Show. Moreover, some acts are so destructive and wrong that they merit extreme condemnation (such as Bush's war crimes). I don't think anyone disputes that our discourse would benefit if it were more substantive and rational, but it's usually the ideas themselves -- not the tone used to express them -- that are the culprits.

I wrote about the acrimoniousness of American political discourse here, and about the way that liberals / moderates confuse calm tone with moderate substance here. And the firing of Juan Williams, which led to a lot of caterwauling in our political discourse, reminded me of a piece that the late Ellen Willis wrote for the Village Voice in 1990 when CBS' cracker-barrel philosopher Andy Rooney was suspended for making some stupidly vicious racist remarks -- but not for making stupidly vicious homophobic remarks. I haven't been able to find Willis's article on the Web, but her argument has stayed with me through the twenty years since. She argued that instead of suspending Rooney, CBS should have required him to have an on-air conversation -- debate, even -- with anti-racist and anti-homophobic writers and thinkers, to actually discuss the issues instead of merely suspending him and letting him make a typically empty apology for offending people. Willis recognized, of course, that such an exchange would never happen in the corporate media, who are dedicated to homogenizing, flattening out, and simply ignoring the issues the world faces. To address them would be, like, upsetting. Extreme. Better just to discuss Michelle Obama's shoulders, and complain for the thousandth time that the Democratic Party hasn't moved far enough to the Center.

[The photo at the head of this post comes from Roy Edroso's alicublog. I like the sign, which suggests that someone at the rally might have had irreverent thoughts about the undertaking. But the New York Times article I quoted above mentions that "Mr. Stewart also promised to supply the crowd with signs if they did not bring their own, including as examples, 'I Disagree With You, But I’m Pretty Sure You’re Not Hitler,' and 'Take It Down a Notch for America.'" The sign in the photo seems like more of that, but I still like it. Some other signs can be seen at Band of Thebes.]