Git yer politics on

[Tungsten Gruvsten]

found this very interesting. and disturbing. and long.

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There Is No Tomorrow

By Bill Moyers

The Star Tribune

Sunday 30 January 2005

One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the Oval Office and in Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington.

Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a worldview despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.

Remember James Watt, President Ronald Reagan's first secretary of the interio r? My favorite online environmental journal, the ever-engaging Grist, reminded us recently of how James Watt told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, "after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back."

Beltway elites snickered. The press corps didn't know what he was talking about. But James Watt was serious. So were his compatriots out across the country. They are the people who believe the Bible is literally true - one-third of the American electorate, if a recent Gallup poll is accurate. In this past election several million good and decent citizens went to the polls believing in the rapture index.

That's right - the rapture index. Google it and you will find that the best-selling books in America today are the 12 volumes of the "Left Behind" series written by the Christian fundamentalist and religious-right warrior Timothy LaHaye. These true believers subscribe to a fantastical theology concocted in the 19th century by a couple of immigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the Bible and wove them into a narrative that has captivated the imagination of millions of Americans.

Its outline is rather simple, if bizarre (the British writer George Monbiot recently did a brilliant dissection of it and I am indebted to him for adding to my own understanding): Once Israel has occupied the rest of its "biblical lands," legions of the antichrist will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon.

As the Jews who have not been converted are burned, the messiah will return for the rapture. True believers will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to Heaven, where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts and frogs during the several years of tribulation tha t follow.

I'm not making this up. Like Monbiot, I've read the literature. I've reported on these people, following some of them from Texas to the West Bank. They are sincere, serious and polite as they tell you they feel called to help bring the rapture on as fulfillment of biblical prophecy. That's why they have declared solidarity with Israel and the Jewish settlements and backed up their support with money and volunteers. It's why the invasion of Iraq for them was a warm-up act, predicted in the Book of Revelations where four angels "which are bound in the great river Euphrates will be released to slay the third part of man." A war with Islam in the Middle East is not something to be feared but welcomed - an essential conflagration on the road to redemption. The last time I Googled it, the rapture index stood at 144 - just one point below the critical threshold when the whole thing will blow, the son of God will return, the righteous will enter Heaven and si nners will be condemned to eternal hellfire.

So what does this mean for public policy and the environment? Go to Grist to read a remarkable work of reporting by the journalist Glenn Scherer - "The Road to Environmental Apocalypse." Read it and you will see how millions of Christian fundamentalistsmay believe that environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded but actually welcomed - even hastened - as a sign of the coming apocalypse.

As Grist makes clear, we're not talking about a handful of fringe lawmakers who hold or are beholden to these beliefs. Nearly half the U.S. Congress before the recent election - 231 legislators in total and more since the election - are backed by the religious right.

Forty-five senators and 186 members of the 108th Congress earned 80 to 100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential Christian right advocacy groups. They include Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Assistant Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Conference Chair Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Policy Chair Jon Kyl of Arizona, House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Majority Whip Roy Blunt. The only Democrat to score 100 percent with the Christian coalition was Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia, who recently quoted from the biblical book of Amos on the Senate floor: "The days will come, sayeth the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land." He seemed to be relishing the thought.

And why not? There's a constituency for it. A 2002 Time-CNN poll found that 59 percent of Americans believe that the prophecies found in the book of Revelations are going to come true. Nearly one-quarter think the Bible predicted the 9/11 attacks. Drive across the country with your radio tuned to the more than 1,600 Christian radio stations, or in the motel turn on some of the 250 Christian TV stations, and you can hear some of this end-time gospel. And you will come to understand why people under the spell of s uch potent prophecies cannot be expected, as Grist puts it, "to worry about the environment. Why care about the earth, when the droughts, floods, famine and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of the apocalypse foretold in the Bible? Why care about global climate change when you and yours will be rescued in the rapture? And why care about converting from oil to solar when the same God who performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes can whip up a few billion barrels of light crude with a word?"

Because these people believe that until Christ does return, the Lord will provide. One of their texts is a high school history book, "America's Providential History." You'll find there these words: "The secular or socialist has a limited-resource mentality and views the world as a pie ... that needs to be cut up so everyone can get a piece." However, "[t]he Christian knows that the potential in God is unlimited and that there is no shortage of resources in God's earth ... while many secularists view the world as overpopulated, Christians know that God has made the earth sufficiently large with plenty of resources to accommodate all of the people."

No wonder Karl Rove goes around the White House whistling that militant hymn, "Onward Christian Soldiers." He turned out millions of the foot soldiers on Nov. 2, including many who have made the apocalypse a powerful driving force in modern American politics.

It is hard for the journalist to report a story like this with any credibility. So let me put it on a personal level. I myself don't know how to be in this world without expecting a confident future and getting up every morning to do what I can to bring it about. So I have always been an optimist. Now, however, I think of my friend on Wall Street whom I once asked: "What do you think of the market?"I'm optimistic," he answered. "Then why do you look so worried?" And he answered: "Because I am n ot sure my optimism is justified."

I'm not, either. Once upon a time I agreed with Eric Chivian and the Center for Health and the Global Environment that people will protect the natural environment when they realize its importance to their health and to the health and lives of their children. Now I am not so sure. It's not that I don't want to believe that - it's just that I read the news and connect the dots.

I read that the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has declared the electiona mandate for President Bush on the environment. This for an administration: That wants to rewrite the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act protecting rare plant and animal species and their habitats, as well as the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires the government to judge beforehand whether actions might damage natural resources. That wants to relax pollution limits for ozone; eliminate veh icle tailpipe inspections, and ease pollution standards for cars, sport-utility vehicles and diesel-powered big trucks and heavy equipment. That wants a new international audit law to allow corporations to keep certain information about environmental problems secret from the public. That wants to drop all its new-source review suits against polluting, coal-fired power plants and weaken consent decrees reached earlier with coal companies. That wants to open the Arctic [National] Wildlife Refuge to drilling and increase drilling in Padre Island National Seashore, the longest stretch of undeveloped barrier island in the world and the last great coastal wild land in America.

I read the news just this week and learned how the Environmental Protection Agency had planned to spend $9 million - $2 million of it from the administration's friends at the American Chemistry Council - to pay poor families to continue to use pesticides in their homes. These pestic ides have been linked to neurological damage in children, but instead of ordering an end to their use, the government and the industry were going to offer the families $970 each, as well as a camcorder and children's clothing, to serve as guinea pigs for the study.

I read all this in the news.

I read the news just last night and learned that the administration's friends at the International Policy Network, which is supported by Exxon Mobil and others of like mind, have issued a new report that climate change is "a myth, sea levels are not rising" [and] scientists who believe catastrophe is possible are "an embarrassment."

I not only read the news but the fine print of the recent appropriations bill passed by Congress, with the obscure (and obscene) riders attached to it: a clause removing all endangered species protections from pesticides; language prohibiting judicial review for a forest in Oregon; a waiver of environmental revie w for grazing permits on public lands; a rider pressed by developers to weaken protection for crucial habitats in California.

I read all this and look up at the pictures on my desk, next to the computer - pictures of my grandchildren. I see the future looking back at me from those photographs and I say, "Father, forgive us, for we know not what we do." And then I am stopped short by the thought: "That's not right. We do know what we are doing. We are stealing their future. Betraying their trust. Despoiling their world."

And I ask myself: Why? Is it because we don't care? Because we are greedy? Because we have lost our capacity for outrage, our ability to sustain indignation at injustice?

What has happened to our moral imagination?

On the heath Lear asks Gloucester: "How do you see the world?" And Gloucester, who is blind, answers: "I see it feelingly.'"

I see it feelingly.

The news is not goo d these days. I can tell you, though, that as a journalist I know the news is never the end of the story. The news can be the truth that sets us free - not only to feel but to fight for the future we want. And the will to fight is the antidote to despair, the cure for cynicism, and the answer to those faces looking back at me from those photographs on my desk. What we need is what the ancient Israelites called hochma - the science of the heart ... the capacity to see, to feel and then to act as if the future depended on you.

Believe me, it does.

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Bill Moyers was host until recently of the weekly public affairs series "NOW with Bill Moyers" on PBS. This article is adapted from AlterNet, where it first appeared. The text is taken from Moyers' remarks upon receiving the Global Environmental Citizen Award from the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School.

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

Thank God (or Higher Power of choice) for Bill Moyers. For a second, I misread the name as Bill Maher, who pushes the same point one stage further by asking why we seem to go so far out of our way to pander to religious insecurity (especially by not criticising claims based on religious principles), when it's so obvious what sorts of barbarity it leads to.

When I was hunting around years back for the one thesis topic I would have to commit to, I used to mull endlessly over a could-1930s-Germany-happen-here sort of thing; I'd been reading lots on authoritarianism there at that time, and saw all sorts of overlaps with what was happening in evangelical culture in the US (and to a lesser degree in Canada). But then I made the terrible mistake of not seeing how someone like Dubya et al. could sweep into office (well, it was rigged, but whatever); this in spite of people like James Baker that Moyers talks about above. And here we are; the parallels with 30's Germany are still obviously a bit overblown, but I don't think the basic mentally is of a different species - who knows how things could turn if the US suffered such a brutal depression (and with Chinese economic power growing as it is, just thinking about this makes me really depressed). Freud's idea of the death instinct is spot on here. Made the same oversight around India, too, thinking people there were too sensible to vote a bunch of fascist thugs like the BJP into power, but at least the Indians were savvy or jaded enough to get rid of them inside two terms. The US seems to be too drunk on power to have done that (yeah, okay, the last election was rigged too, but again, whatever). And I think drunk is the perfect metaphor - America's liver is kakked, its arteries clogged, it's hopelessly addicted with all the denial that entails, and the only happiness it seems to find is in the short-term bliss of more binges, which screws up not only itself but all its relationships as well. Intervention!

Moyers is right. People besides the idiots should take back the "What about the children?". I can weep thinking about the shite our kids are going to have to deal with.

Grr. Saw *Supersize Me* last night, and I think that's flavouring this post. Sorry if I'm rambling.

[ggrtrhhrtgg]

well, that just shows how stupid Christian Fundamentalists are... Lets just say that God did create the earth and everything that dwells on it, and you don't give a rat's ass about it?? Think you are going to get beamed up to heaven?? Stupid.

On a more realistic note: I just cannot fathom how people can just not care about the environment. Moyers hits it on the button when he talks about the future for our grandchildren. I mean, even if you just decide to not litter. Nothing bothers me more than watching people throw sh!t out of their car windows?? Honestly, you can't find a garbage can for that???

Well, its great to know that a good part of the population is thinking about the apocolypse, me, I am more interested in thinking about the future.

[SevenSeasJim]

First question all people should be asked before being sworn into office "Sir/Mame do you believe in God?"

"Yes"

"Well I'm afraid that I'm going to have to ask you to go fu©k yourself then."

[SevenSeasJim]

This link expands on the above story and more.

More.....

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

This link expands on the above story and more.

More.....

Good link!

I just wonder - do we need to become lunatics just to muster the energy and passion to stop their lunacy? In other words, is there an alternative to "The loudest noise wins"? There is a quite intelligent evangelical left (people like Ron Sider, even Tony Campolo); why can't they crack through this sh!t, and get their own house in order?

I wonder too - does anyone not help but smile when they read the name "Santorum"?

And on a slightly tangential note - I keep thinking, around this environmental science vs. theocracy issue, of Galileo - (and I'm paraphrasing) "Shall I laugh or shall I cry? These guys won't look through my telescope!"

OK, back to work....

[timouse]

okay, i did NOT need to read that. i have jokingly been telling friends that indeed the evangelicals were on to something, that god wanted dumbya in power in order to hasten the End Of Days.

but i never expected that this was a serious point of view within shrub's Base of Power.

Arrrrgh!

i'm going over to ebay to bid on a sub-etha thumb....

a somewhat slightly more distrught than before timouse

the godly must be crazy

[Vermontdave]

There's lots ofwork to do.