Wolfgang von Skeptik

THE SILENCE OF THE NUMB: A TURNING-POINT

NOT THAT I DON'T still bear the Democratic Party an enormous and multifaceted grudge. Once a "lifelong Democrat" -- formerly even a Democratic precinct committeeman -- the fact remains I was driven from the party not only by its fanatical opposition to the right to keep and bear arms but also by its increasingly generalized yet ever more implacable hostility to blue-collar and working-class concerns in general. The latter goes far beyond personal experience; it is a party-wide malaise first noted by the late Jack Newfield -- one of the Left's most astute political journalists -- nearly 40 years ago. And many many times worse (indeed as far as I am concerned ultimately unforgivable) is what the Democratic Party and its policies did to me personally: by facilitating the imposition of gender quotas on social services in my residential state of Washington -- quotas imposed in compliance with the radical-feminist doctrine that all social services to male Caucasians should be punitively embargoed until women and minorities have absolute economic parity -- the Democrats literally destroyed my life, their quota-mongered denial of vital treatment turning a temporary disability permanent, condemning me to spend the rest of my years in inescapable, ever-worsening poverty.

(For those of you who have followed my present-day struggles to stay afloat economically, it is increasingly apparent that nothing I do -- nothing whatsoever and no matter how diligently -- will suffice to rescue my journalism career from the abyss into which it was flung by the welfare bureaucracy 18 years ago. I have no other abilities, journalism skills do not transfer well into any other accessible realm, and in any case the requisite work is simply not available -- at least not to me, no doubt largely because of my age, my obvious talent be damned. Certain bankruptcy, probable homelessness and the terminal silence either one will impose now seem inevitable, though I will continue writing here for as long as I can -- that is, until this computer burns out, my creditors pull the plug or I drop dead, whichever happens first.)

But while I will never forgive the Democratic politicians and bureaucrats their trespasses against me and my life, I am at last willing to set aside the lingering anger that prompted me to vote Republican in revenge. The subversive dangers of radical feminism (its "freedom is slavery" attack on the Constitution and its viciously anti-intellectual war against Western Civilization), our national cowardice resulting from pacifist erosion of the right to self-defense -- these are but vernal zephyrs compared to the gathering tempest of Christianity's Dominionist onslaught. The Republicans -- now unabashedly the party of Christofascism -- have become the greatest threat to liberty in the history of the Republic.

Proof of the extent to which this is true lies only partly in the ever-more-disturbing disclosures about the horrors of Dominionism or "reconstructionist" Christianity (for which see "A New Threat to American Liberty," here, plus the several revealing reports available here). The ugly truth is even more apparent -- glaringly so -- in the evidence provided by the outcome of the recent Pentagon investigation into runaway Dominionist viciousness at the U.S. Air Force Academy. In a word, the probe was a brazen whitewash, a defiant cover-up that -- given the realities of chain-of-command -- could never have happened had the Bush Administration not specifically ordered it.

Quoth The New York Times:

A Pentagon inquiry's finding of no overt religious discrimination at the Air Force Academy strains credibility, considering the academy superintendent has already acknowledged it will take years to undo the damage from evangelical zealots on campus. Indeed, amid its thicket of bureaucratese, the report by an Air Force investigative panel goes on for page after page describing cases of obvious and overt religious bias. But it tosses all of these off as "perceived bias," as if the blame lies with the victims and not the offenders, and throws up a fog of implausible excuses, like "a lack of awareness" of what is impermissible behavior by military officers.

The Times editorial, dated today, is entitled "Obfuscating Intolerance." (It is linked here, though registration may be required.) . It continues:

This muddle stands in stark contrast to an earlier investigation by Yale Divinity School that found widespread problems with intolerance at the academy. That study described faculty members, chaplains and even the football coach as pressuring cadets toward Christian beliefs and hazing them about divergent views on religion. The Pentagon study insisted that this did not amount to a widespread problem for non-Christian cadets who complained of ranking officers encouraging an evangelical fervor.

I would have not been so cravenly deferential to the administration as The Times' editors were, and I would have given the editorial a somewhat less euphemistic head. Perhaps "Obfuscating Theocracy" or more aptly "Theocratic Cover-Up" -- for that is precisely what it is.

Nor do I doubt for an instant the "evangelical zealots" were infinitely more vicious than the Pentagon allowed to be reported. Growing up as I did mostly in the South -- my schooldays belonged mostly to a father and stepmother who lived below the Mason-Dixon Line, my summers to a mother who lived far above it -- I know all too well not only the stench of Christofascist oppression, but the bruising power of evangelical fists and the threat of Fundamentalist gun-muzzles also -- the oft-confirmed need for armed defense against the latter a primary reason I am such a staunch supporter of Second Amendment rights. As parochial school students, my schoolmates and I were frequently attacked as "idolators" who "worship an abomination," the Virgin Mary. Though our nuns forbade us fighting, the eager knuckles of the Fundamentalists left us no choice but to strike back, just as generations of Irish Catholics have had to protect themselves from equally militant Protestants, Irish and otherwise. Indeed I cannot count the number of times I had to "write lines" ("I will turn the other cheek...") as a result of after-school rumbles with Fundamentalist bigots. Later, as a young adult associated with the Civil Rights Movement, I lived under constant threat of retaliation by that singularly American death-squad known as the Ku Klux Klan: an organization so inseparably linked with Southern Protestant Christianity -- Fundamentalist and main-stream as well -- its gatherings were known colloquially as "the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class." And as a young newspaper reporter, one of my stories so enraged the Klan its minions deluged me with telephonic death-threats and even poisoned my dog, a black-and-tan German shepherd I had named Brunhilda, a beloved companion of memorably sweet disposition, a four-legged friend I had raised from puppyhood. In those years I never went anywhere -- not even to bed -- without a suitably large-caliber handgun, loaded and ready and always within easy reach.

Though I lived also in Florida, Virginia and West Virginia, and was stationed in South Carolina, Maryland and Georgia before the Army shipped me to Korea, I spent most of the southern part of my life in East Tennessee, the beautifully mountainous end of a state where the teaching of evolution was not only illegal (and may still be, for all I know) but was vindictively prosecuted in the infamous Scopes "Monkey Trial," for which Google. But as I have already implied, the Fundamentalist malice on exhibit in Dayton, Tenn., was only the tip of a very cold iceberg indeed: throughout the South, the Fundamentalist preachers were the defacto political commissars in a malevolently fascist system the intent of which was to shackle coal miners, agricultural laborers, textile-mill workers, all their blue-collar brothers and sisters (and even their white-collar cousins) forever in serfdom to the mine operators and the other members of the ruling oligarchy. It was Fundamentalist "gospel" (and the fire-and-brimstone "fear of the Lord" so induced) that terrorized Southern workers into permanent bondage: the plutocrats were "God's anointed leaders," the robber-barons "favored by the Lord"; everyone else was doomed to the earthly perdition of permanent impoverishment -- this in lifelong punishment for sin and sinfulness -- and not just the sins spelled out in the bible.

Among the deadliest of these extra-biblical sins in the South of my boyhood years was the sin of being "uppity" -- aspiring to rights, dignity and comforts beyond those prescribed for your class. One of the most lethal forms of "uppity" was unionism: joining a union could literally get you killed. But an even more fatal risk was being "uppity" for integration and civil rights. In fact I don't think anybody has ever calculated the combined death toll the oligarchy inflicted on both movements, all in the name of suppressing the lower classes, whether black or white. But given the dread commonplace of atrocities such as the killings of organizers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, or all the deaths such as those in the Coal Creek War, the dead themselves surely cannot number less than thousands.

And -- lest some Northerners become too self-righteous -- never forget such casualties aren't limited to the South. Add in horrors like the machine-gunning of striking textile workers in Massachusetts, not to mention all those industrial "accidents" that resulted from management's indifference to worker safety (like the Fraterville Mine Disaster in Tennessee or the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in New York City) -- and the casualty list nationwide may reach to the tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands. All murdered for the "sin" of wanting better lives for themselves, their spouses, their children. With the Bible-thump preachers blessing the plutocrats as "God's elect" and the plutocracy's vigilantes as "servants of the Lord."

Sound vaguely familiar? It's American History -- the history they don't teach in school, the history you can find only in the better textbooks or on the Internet, the history of Fundamentalism the preachers like Pat Robertson don't want you to know or remember. It's history that portrays precisely the kind of society the Dominionists want to re-impose on the entire United States -- and President George W. Bush and his Republican Party are helping them do it. They may not machine-gun us in the streets any more -- at least not yet -- but downsizing, outsourcing and the loss of health insurance can kill us just as dead.

I believe the dangers of this time cannot be overstated, but I also believe that because we are Americans, we may yet awaken and avert them all: the external onslaught of jihadist Islam, the now seemingly petty domestic threat of Leftist authoritarianism, and the looming unspeakably malignant jeopardy into which every principle and institution we value has been placed by the would-be tyrants of the Christofascist Right. But we are just now too many of us still benumbed by dread and confusion -- the legitimate fear of terrorism , the equally legitimate horror of poverty, the fretful confusion inflicted by perhaps the most obfuscatory political campaign ever waged by the worst candidates ever nominated, the myriad daily worries that yammer at the edges of our minds in a constantly worsening economy that is increasingly destructive to both the family budget and the planetary environment. Just now we are numbed to silence, all the more so by the extent to which we working folk have been betrayed by the DemoPublican politicians of both parties. But I like to think that eventually realization will prevail, that little-by-slow we will begin to wake up and speak up -- and perhaps even take appropriate action. The last time there was such a needful awakening -- such a great speaking-out -- we elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt our president. May the Holy Mystery some call God grant us at least such a savior again.

Posted by Loren at June 23, 2005 07:30 PM