DEMONS AND MONSTERS

In “The New York Review of Books” J.M. Coetzee reviews Norman Mailer’s imaginative biography of Hitler, “The Castle in the Forest” (www.nybooks.com/articles/19851).

Coetzee quickly raises the question: Is it possible that some humans are born evil? Or if not at birth, then when do certain individuals ‘turn’ evil? How?

These are philosophical questions, and as such they are far too rare these days in the West. That’s so because the current and only acceptable mode of our societal discourse is not at all equipped to handle such complex and fundamental inquiry. Keep it ‘simple’ and keep it on the surface: this has been the gameplan of the revolutionaries of the Left as it has been of the manipulators from the Right. Keep it simple and on the surface, and let those acceptable emotions (shock, outrage, in-your-face, etc.) roll!

The natural ‘subject’ of the National Crime State is ‘the victim’, and the ‘natural’ and now obligatory discourse of ‘the victim’ is comprised solely of retelling the cause of the pain (with or without proof) and then limning one’s feelings about what has happened to one. On the basis of this discourse, huge chunks of the foundational supports of Western, Constitutional, democratic society and culture have been ripped away; rescuing people from the Horror can be rather destructive work, as we now know from the Iraq adventure.

In response to such questions as the nature of evil in the world and the source of individuals’ bad acts, a mere recitation of one’s own alleged experiences of being badded-against and one’s consequent feelings about it are very largely ineffectual. But in reality one must, like the sturdy sea-dogs of the Age of Sail, engage the threat resolutely and efficiently and – one hopes – victoriously; so one has to face ‘evil’ and come to grips with it: where it comes from, how it works, how best to deal with it. But then, ‘sturdy sea-dogs’ are not what the National Security State, or the National Nanny State, or the National Imperial State, or the National Corporate State, or the National Crime State really want: those ‘states’ want obedient, stable, steady and unquestioning herbivores, ungulants that will eagerly swallow whatever their shepherds see fit to push their way.

And of course, if it’s hard enough to figure out what to do with any individual’s evil(s), what do we do with a government’s ‘bad’ acts? It seems that governments have arrogated to themselves in the moral realm the prerogative they enjoy in the economic realm: just as they control the money so they can’t be held to the usual budgetary responsibilities that individual citizens are, so too they can’t be held to the same moral standards that individuals are. And it seems that a lot of citizens are no longer well-prepared to perceive or to explain (even to themselves) just what it is that is wrong with that gambit.

But judging the morality or immorality, the ‘good’ or the ‘evil’ that a government does, is hard enough; courage of a special sort is required to speak Truth to Power. What happens if your culture no longer accepts that ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are acceptable categories of judgment? Or that ‘judgment’ is not an acceptable activity? Or that such abstractions as ‘good’ and ‘evil’ – let alone ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’ – don’t really exist anyway? What happens then to the already-quivering flame of Courage? And if there is no Courage to defend it, what happens to Truth? And if there is no Courage to oppose it, what will limit Power’s voracious, predatory hunt to find whom it may devour?

These are all great questions, says Coetzee, but not ones that biographers are happy to face: after all, how much can we really ‘know’ about another human being? Which is a very modest and wise question to pose. But in the long and multifarious rush to raise up an enemy or a ‘perp’ about whom we may enjoy ‘simple and pure clarity’, haven’t both Left and Right, secularist and fundamentalist, immodestly barreled right on through the flashing roadblocks? What did one need to know about ‘men’ except that they were all rapists, only that some haven’t been found out yet. What did one need to know about Muslims or Iraqis, except that they were … well, it turns out they weren’t so simply and purely construed after all. We simplified our own picture of them, but – perversely – they actually didn’t take the trouble to conform to the picture we had in our collective mind. Imagine our surprise when we actually came into their presence and …

This false ‘simplicity’, this ‘clarity’has not been achieved by the long twilight struggle of sustained effort to understand enough so as to formulate the most useful questions, and then to start the process of answering the questions. It has been achieved by the childish gambit of sweeping the troublesome pieces of the board, conceptually, and then – addict-like – surfing the ‘high’ that such a skipping-homework tactic temporarily provides.

The media, ‘journalists’, ‘the press’ have pandered to this as business and bottom-line concerns: they have turned The People into audiences and into ‘consumers’ who have to be kept happy. And this is a genuine, if untrumpeted, disaster for Us and for the Republic. And, as stated in several of the recent “Moyers” Posts here, the media started to slide in the decades of the Democrats’ desperate and blank-check pandering to the Identities and the Advocacies, resulting in ‘advocacy journalism’, which is the erection of professional imbecility into a plan: the role of the media in the Republic is not to make the case for this or that still-unsettled agenda (let alone a dozen serially); it is to report the facts and the truth as very best the reporter can discern them, and let the People deliberate. But such is not the method of revolutions, and the media had their fun surfing those waves, abandoning Truth and the Republic for fun ‘on the cutting edge’ of ‘elite’ thought.

Yet even a decade before all that, as Glenn Garvin points out in the March 2007 issue of “Reason”, Herbert Matthews of “The New York Times” declared that a reporter’s “passion” was as important as his objectivity, and on that basis, romanticized an almost powerless and isolated young Fidel Castro into a public-relations sensation back there in the very late 1950s. It is a sign of Matthews’ Bushian stubbornness (or would we want to say his manliness and persistence?) that up until his death in 1977 Matthews insisted that Castro wasn’t a Communist and that he was bringing only good to the Cuban people, even after Castro admitted candidly that he most certainly was a Communist and had lashed his steadfastly blood-thirsty regime to Moscow.

Mailer isn’t actually doing a biography here, in the accepted sense of the word. He is doing a sort of ‘imaginative’ biography; to him, the ‘truth’ reached poetically has never been inferior to the ‘truth’ reached through the observation and determination of this or that fact. Artistic license in the service of truth is a verrry potent but also potentially explosive mix: only people who really know what they’re doing should be doing it. In order to achieve a ‘truthful’ result, you have to be dedicated and long-practiced – indeed a participant in – the stream of Truth that like the jetstream itself barrels along Up there, invisible to the earthbound and the horizontally-confined. Otherwise, there is a very strong tendency to simply use ‘poetic license’ as an excuse for whatever you want to do, rather than in order to describe whatever it is that you somehow sense that Truth is doing.

And once you’ve yawed off down that path, there’s no telling where you’ll end up: if you want to be seen as a winner and so claim Unitary authority to declare major hostilities ended – say – but you really don’t know what the Truth of the hostilities might be … you could wind up spending a long long time trying to force Truth into the little box you’ve made for it, the one you want it to fit in, and wind up just making a box for yourself. Or – if you’re big enough – a whole bunch of boxes for the little people who tried to follow your path to ‘truth’ because you told them to.

Hitler, Coetzee thinks Mailer is going for, was deeply attracted to the ‘great man theory of history’. That theory – which may seem alien, and is perhaps unknown, to many nowadays – presumed that the real ‘history’, the great deeds that set the course of large events, was made by this or that ‘great man’, not by the majority, the common people, the ordinary and mediocre people, just trudging through their days. Whether Hitler was weak and trying to compensate by identifying with a ‘Great Theory’ (which would make him a sorta ‘great man’ by osmosis) or whether he was somehow ‘evil’ and his so-called ‘great’-ness was merely the morally demented power of someone serving true evil … who can tell? We can ask the same questions about the neocons, so recently seen trying to pose in Great Man (and that goes for the woman among them) poses for “Vanity Fair”. Are they cocky weaklings or evil servants of the demimonde?

But much to our enrichment, Coetzee brings up “two drifters on the fringes”: Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” and Stavrogin in Tolstoy’s “The Possessed”. In each of these two characters his respective author was trying to come to grips with those human beings “who think they can take a shortcut to great-man status by divorcing goodness from greatness and committing what they fancy to be great crimes”.

How long has it been since Americans even realized that these were the stakes and possible moves in the game? What generations of Americans can look at the sentence and even discern the issues, let alone work toward an answer? Is there a difference between ‘good’ and ‘great’? What would make ‘good’ distinct from and different from ‘great’? What would the ‘long way’ around to ‘great-man status’ be? Is it possible to “shortcut” the way? Or ‘a’ way – is there more than one way to take the shortcut? If you can be ‘great’ even if you commit a crime … what does that say about the desirability of ‘greatness’? Can you be ‘good’ even if you commit a crime? If your intentions are ‘good’? Is that even possible? Or if there’s more to you than the part of you that commits the crime? Is that possible? Even if it’s possible, is it important enough to matter? To whom?

Closely related to that gravid binary, is the Romantic conception of ‘genius’ as being a free agent, indentured neither to ‘good’ nor to ‘evil’, but existing in a realm beyond good and evil. Does such a realm exist? Can anything exist free of the ‘judgment’ of good or evil? Can any human being exist ‘there’, wherever one is free of the judgment of being ‘good’ or ‘evil’, or at least of having one’s acts thus adjudged? If all it takes to ‘achieve’ the status of ‘moral genius’ or ‘moral superman’ is to commit a crime so great that it will prove its perpetrator to be above such mediocre matters as ‘good’ or ‘evil’ … then what is the value of being such a genius or superman? Is submission to the judgment of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ a sign of mediocrity? Is the ability to function beyond ‘good’ and ‘evil’ a sign of greatness and genius? If not in a person, could it be in a government? Can governments even ‘be’ immoral? ‘Evil’? ‘Good’? Or can only people be? Why?

There was a time when the questions could as least be raised, and searching for an answer – even a provisional one – was considered a worthwhile investment of one’s time and effort. If such is no longer the case, how did it come about thus? Is it a desirable state of affairs that it has come to this? If it isn’t, how might we try to recover what has been lost?

Coetzee notes that “Hitler was obsessed with his place in history”. More tellingly, Hitler tells Speer “For me there are two possibilities: to succeed with my plans entirely, or to fail. If I succeed I will be one of the greatest men in history – if I fail, I will be condemned, rejected, damned.” I think that here we can see a hugely dangerous and toxic synergy brewing: A) Rather than focusing on the substantive challenge of mastering his own self in the present Moment in Time that he inhabited, Hitler escapes such ‘presence’ to himself by investing his energies in the (largely irrelevant) matter of how he would be judged in the (ephemeral) opinion of future generations. B) In order to prove his ‘greatness’ he sets himself a problem that is admittedly ‘great’, the better to ‘prove’ his own greatness. C) He effectively avoids the actual and classically hard work of working through the ‘great’ problem he has thus set himself – that of climbing the Ladder of Perfection toward Goodness and Greatness – by not only cutting out Goodness but by embracing the far more quick-burning and accessible primality in the human (and his own) personality: crime and evil can be just as legitimate a demonstration of ‘greatness’ as any achievement of morality and ‘Goodness’.

Thus you get to remain a moral adolescent while claiming the mantle of a long-struggling adult whose maturity has been achieved through the hard, sustained soul-work of years. This is a gambit that is hardly unique to Hitler (Dostoevsky and Tolstoy saw it, and they weren’t the first); it is also a gambit that quite obviously did not die with Hitler. It is a gambit to which American culture is particularly susceptible. As we are now beginning to realize. It is deeply similar to the immature and unripe fundamentalist psyche; it is hell and gone from the patient and persistent soul-shaping that has always been the ideal of the Kathlik vision.

And in a display of adolescent-mentation masquerading as adult strength, Hitler insists to Speer that A) there are only two possibilities and B) those are that either he utterly succeeds or he utterly fails. There is no nuance, no middle-ground, no room for the long, slow, torturous Climb that is humanity’s effort at its best. Instead there is the either-or, white-black, yes-no oversimplification that is indicative of maturational incompletion and unripeness; predictable in an adolescent, of concern in a chronologically older person; downright dangerous in chronologically older persons who have rigidly retained that incompletion and who have yet (American culture – business, military, political – enables them) attained great power: socially, financially, militarily, politically.

Hitler, Coetzee observes, surfs the Romantic notion that ‘genius’ raises one above the common herd, freeing someone thus gifted from the constraints of ‘ordinary’ life. Of course, it is one thing – and a desiderandum – to so shape one’s spirit that it can more easily respond to the invitations of Grace; like a sea captain who keeps his hull clean of barnacles, his rigging and sail in good order, and carefully steers so as to take full advantage of the wind. But – and here Romanticism ceased to work for our good – it is very much another thing to presume that a person who might thus enjoy a more vivid and palpable sense of Life’s fundamental Vitality – “Grace” as them Kathliks would say – is thereby free of all the moral restraints which classically define humanity at its best.

‘Classical’ and ‘perennial’ don’t mean ‘ordinary’ and ‘ordinary’ is not the same as ‘mediocre’ (another mistake the adolescent Boomers made when free-love was considered ‘cutting edge’ and they were young enough to make that hay while that sun was shining; but then, let’s not forget the teen generation of the 1920s). The Flatness of the postmodern world-view is now pervasive in our culture and our education through the awefull synergistic workings of the past four decades of Theory and the strategic pressures of the National Consumer State and the National Security State and the National Crime State.

Hannah Arendt famously described a phenomenon she called “the banality of evil”. Eichmann was or was not ‘ordinary’, but he was certainly a moral mediocrity: issues of Good and Evil did not seem to make an impression upon him or affect him; we might posit that he had found his ‘god’ – for all practical purposes – in an ‘organization’, and all that was then required was for him to stay within the lines set down by the organization and seek – as best he might – to advance along the course set down by the lines. So far so … typical; large numbers of human beings in complicated (not to say ‘advanced’) civilizations have instinctively sought this option as newborn creatures instinctively seek the mother’s teat. That the organization to which he attached himself was the Nazi extermination apparatus was already an issue beyond his imagination, a complication not necessary to introduce into his simplified, clarified life-plan. He would be reliable, constant, loyal – and that was more than many people could ever claim as employees and functionaries.

And therein lay the “banality”, I think. It was not Evil that was banal, nor the particular evils that he himself organized. It was Eichmann himself who was banal, morally banal. As his Fuhrer sought to avoid his own feared personal insufficiencies by seeking ‘greatness’ in ‘great things’, Eichmann sought to do so, and to impose some shape on his life and perhaps his own self, by seeking Order in a highly-organized, highly-circumscribed vision of what was and was not necessary in life; what was and was not necessary to ‘full’ humanity, human-ness, adulthood, manhood. Huge swaths of what we would call ‘human-ness’ were walled off and away in the service of a ‘life’ that he could manage. Perhaps also a ‘self’ that he could manage. Once therein ensconced, ‘the job’ – the ‘mission’ – was all that mattered. If he did that well, he would be happy enough.

That was the stuff of his banality, the locus of his mediocrity: his vision of human-hood and of his own self and (of course therefore) of other humans. The grasping of this point over the decades has been somewhat blunted by its contextual connection to the Holocaust. Otherwise it might more widely have been grasped, and early on, that many, many people in our civilization have chosen – functionally at least, although perhaps larded with religiosity or humanist sentimentality – this path, this vision, this shape for their life and their self. “Just doing my job” is surely one of the paving blocks to a certain hell, for oneself – ultimately – even as for others upon whom one’s action impose it. Indeed, “just focused on the mission” is a comment we are encouraged to hear when voiced by our soldiery. Yet as far back as the Nuremberg Principles it was clearly stated – and by a senior American jurist – that individual soldiers are indeed responsible for judging the essential legality of their orders, their ‘mission’. Even today this is being played out before our eyes in this country in the Watada court-martial case.

But if this banality is ever a threat in a highly organized and institutionalized civilization – and in a military without a doubt, then how much more toxic is this infection to a citizenry whose ‘immune system’ of a well-formed and well-informed mind and heart and character is largely compromised? What happens then?

We cannot afford mediocrity in this matter, even as we cannot afford the type of faux-‘greatness’ that refuses all harness, all trellising … and runs wild. Them Kathliks was always aware that wildness, in no matter how ‘good’ or ‘great’ a cause, was certain to bring disaster, to soul and to body, to mind and to spirit. The fetishization of wildness – stretching back in the Modern period to the Romantics and up into the Boomers and their ‘free love’ – has led to a pervasive and fundamental moral mediocrity as toxic as the Fundamentalist ‘greatness’ rantings so eerily similar to the floundering young failed artist in Vienna a century ago. And into such a vacuum far worse demons will most surely be drawn in to take up a late-ostrogothic residence in what is left of the life of the Republic. We may yet find ourselves mostly skipping the Caesars and going straight from Cicero to the edge of the Dark Ages.

It is Marxism, Coetzee notes, that doubts the ability of any individual human to impose his will on History. But then Stalin came along and changed all that, efficiently sawing off Communism’s ‘head’ and replacing it with his own; his cult of personality remains with us today in the North Korean polity, and bears a close familiar resemblance to the fundamentalistic attraction to the person of the Incumbent (is the President, in the fundy vision, like the Pope in the Kathlik vision: the designated representative of God on earth?).

Because, Coetzee sees, “the verdict of history, in Stalin’s eyes, pivoted on who wrote the history books”. Nor is that an insight that originated with Stalin, or died with him. Many individuals and – woe to us – nations, have figured that such a gambit would ensure their success, regardless of their actual record “on the ground”. Indeed, the Incumbency in those now distant salad-days of 2002 and early 2003 (as distant now as 1938 was to Berlin of 1944), asserted with prideful confidence that it ‘made’ history, and the rest of the world – ordinary and mediocre – would just have to deal with that (and accept its assigned place in the scheme of things).

“Hitler disdained manual labor because he thought it incompatible with his status”. Hitler’s status was the one he had assigned himself, as ‘genius’. One thinks of a certain more recent silver-spooned but unripe scion who disdained not only manual labor but any sort of self-exertion, any effort at self-extension whatsoever, seeking instead to surf a diaphanous wave of boozy bonhomie and of the appearance of character and competence. If you’re born rich, then you’ll write the history book, and anyway, there’s no such thing as Truth anyway, or Character, or Virtue (he had only to listen to ‘cutting edge’ Left and Democratic and Advocacy theory to pick up that particularly convenient bit of wisdom). And one could always draw into one’s life such ‘brains’ as were required: they could be hired by the family money or they might seek admission to one’s inner circle the better to admire one’s rump-ish gestalt. Hey, whatever.

Coetzee then follows that thought through (in a way Hitler himself probably never did, not being given to introspection – and perhaps wisely so). Hitler, realizing by his early twenties that he would not easily be a success as an artist, opposed socialism because he himself, raised in the status-conscious world of the Austrian and German middle-classes, feared “being sucked into a lumpen proletariat of workless rural migrants streaming into” his world.

But this also ties into Chris Hedges’ concerns about American Fundamentalists: not really ready for the hard field-work of ripening, they have declared themselves ‘saved’ (‘maturity’ being as incorrect and repugnant to their world-view as it is to the revolutionaries of the Left). On the basis of this (self-declared) ‘status’ they already seek to ‘leave behind’ all of those of whatever economic class who do not truckle to their vivid, violent, faux-‘vital’ religious illuminations. And as if that weren’t problem enough for us today, any significant economic downturn – and it is hardly inconceivable – will further threaten their self-image and their sense of status and place in this materialist American society, the Flatness of which is not effectively expanded by their signature adolescently violent fantasies that are passed off – even to themselves - as a ‘religion’ capable of ‘saving’ them a-n-d (shades of the Puritans and the Calvinists!) rewarding them in this life. The ‘ugly American’ whose face was shown to the so-called ‘developing world’ half-a-century ago is now showing its face to its fellow citizens, and if the economy tanks, then ‘ugly’ is going to be the least of the problems the fundamentalistics will pose for our society and our polity.

And on top of it all, Hitler – seeking somehow to define himself and preserve his self-image and status – determined that he would succeed “at all costs”. This phrase is also one that did not die with him. We’ve heard it not so much from the unripe macho-boyos (it’s a tad too grammatically taxing) but from the equally unripe but far-better read neocons. “At all costs” is a mind-set far too dangerous to be set loose among the give-and-take of a democracy, too antithetical to the patient, never-fully-achieved slog up the Ladder of Perfection that is the Kathlik ideal. No wonder that it has flourished as the evil-twin of the already-morally dubious Revolutionaries of the Identities, reinforcing images of imperial decisiveness and resolve and the total-dedication of the committed religious fundamentalist.

And yet, finally, as interesting and confounding as Hitler’s psyche is, the man himself would have remained only an unripe and feral oddling, never affecting the lives of more than a few equally unbalanced, certainly far-weaker personalities. But then the German economy – which had been doing a splendid turn in the mid-‘20s – tanked utterly in the Great Depression. The widespread economic destruction of most of the German middle-class, the bourgeoisie, the burghers, the well-to-do farmers, the craftspeople and the steadily-employed industrial workers … the vacuum created by the loss of the middle class and its ethos, sucked Hitler up and into the center of German politics, and with that turn of the wind – canny sea-captain – he cooperated to the fullest extent of his energy, nor did he deny himself the Romantic, great-man advantages of being freed from any concern for morality or the rights of others or loyalty or humility or subjection to any law or Law. After all, he would write the history books that would last for the next thousand years.

He lasted just twelve years, once he got into power. History will never forget him. But the question for Us today is: have we? Already?

FLOYD FIGHTS FUNDAMENTALIST FLOOD

Chris Floyd has a couple of Posts over on Atlantic Free Press; they’re related and well worth the read.

In “Catapulting the Propaganda at The New York Times” (http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/937/81) he goes after the almost fantastical (but what is – or can be – fantastical here any more?) spectacle of Michael Gordon, a Times staffer who along with Judith Miller of the same paper cheer-led the media support for Sadaam’s WMD (you may or may not recall those infernal machines; it was years ago, in the run-up to the short slam-dunk that is currently our Eastern Front … and they never existed anyway). Now comes the aforesaid and doth affide thus: Iran is just about ready to deploy WMD so … you know … Let’s do the right thing and we will be greeted as liberators. Further affiant saith naught. Yah.

Floyd notes that Gordon and – coincidentally? – the White House “are now trying to conflate the Iranians with the Iraqi insurgency.” Iraq, Iran, Potayto, Potahto. Let’s not call the whole thing off.

In a classic example of how the National Crime State feeds the National Security and Imperial State, we see here some classic ploys long familiar from our own domestic travails.

In a good cause, the ‘story’ that the government/prosecution wished to have told is pressed upon us as the only truth of the matter. No need for a judge or even serious jury deliberation, folks – just agree with us and wield your magic stamp of approval and we will smoke this bad-boy! We will toast him and we will ghost him. We will bury him. Or … them … whoever.

Then, one perp is conflated with another into a non-existent monster-perp or monstrous perp-alliance where all the perps are consulting and pooling their perpish resources to effect mega-perpery 24-7, the whole constituting a monstrous emergency that only a government with total power can deal with. Hand it over, please … now.

Then the tellers of this terrible story display an absolute indifference to reason or logic. It’s not so much what the facts are, it’s what you feel about what the facts appear to be – so let those feelings out and hand over the power, please … now. Just do it. Unless you’re actually one of ‘them’ too? …

All of the above are familiar to the careful consumers of news as major elements in the various crime-du-jour manias that have swept over the country in the past 35 years or so and especially in the most recent domestic manifestation: the sex offense stampede, that most recent rush to help effect a revolution in ‘sensibility’ that has been co-opted by the insatiable hunger of the State for power over the citizenry. And yet it’s also a set of the hallmarks of Fundamentalistic exhortations: dark and bloody tellings, baleful predictings, knee-knocking forebodings, and you can help stop all of this by sending your donation in now.

Both the revolutionistic and the Fundamentalistic try to frighten Us into giving up Our inheritance: the Republic and the Constitution and – most certainly – the Bill of Rights. It’s all kinda a lot like what the Southrons tried in 1861. Sheesh – you can’t say they aren’t persistent. Never say die! So the Left and the Right – the god-hating liberals and the god-haunting conservatives – are sisters under the skin. Who woulda figured?

And it’s true – the threat to the integrity and the authority of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and to this Republic will never ever go away. The citizens of Light must be as alert and indefatigable as the citizens of Darkness. Although such is not often the case – the Bible tells us so. But We are just going to have to prove the Bible wrong on this matter: Light must be sleepless in its struggle against the encircling gloom. We shall each of us have to be all the things that British warships once were: resolute, indefatigable, valiant, defiant, dauntless. And we must dread nought.

But we cannot forget that there is indeed a great deal to dread, encircling us in the dark just beyond the campfire’s light and warmth.

Floyd does his bit in a second piece on Atlantic Free Press (“Storming Heaven: The Rise of Peudo-Christian Fascism”, http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/938/81/), commenting at length on Chris Hedges’ recent book on Fundamentalism and Christian Fascism (see “Hedges Fasces” on this site).

As noted above, the fear-scare gambit by which the Fundamentalists work themselves up into a frenzy of ‘belief’ (which they mistakenly assume to be present if strong emotional agitation and stimulation are present) is not unique to Fundamentalists. As a tactical technique it has been deployed by the assorted revolutionists and advocacies of the past 35 or more years. It was also deployed by the National Security State since back in the earliest days of the Cold War. In both cases, fear-scare was a tactical gambit to effect widespread and disconcerting change as quickly as possible. All to Our great detriment.

But Fundamentalism takes the game much farther: fear-scare is not merely a technique, it is rather the very substance of the faith-experience, the belief-experience, the religious experience. Bleaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh!

What part of the brain is engaged or activated by fear? Not the most advanced or what we would consider the most ‘human’ part. Rather, it’s the limbic system, the earliest and the most viscerally primitive part of the brain that is engaged by fear. There is a curious coincidence here: the feminist dream of a more woman-centered society always harbored within itself the possibility that a society thus skewed would start to exhibit more symptoms of emotional lability, reactivity, and – especially in light of the physiological weakness of the female compared to the male – of those emotions such as fearfulness and anxiety, easily provoked.

Some might say that such has come to pass – not only in the stereotypical “Lifetime” movies but also in the almost stereotypical ‘victim’ scenario that is now a staple of television news and daytime television.

Fewer would have predicted what also has come to pass: this hyper-emotionalism, especially in its fear-scare ‘flavor’, has played right into the hands of the National Crime State, which has been battening and fattening at the expense of civil liberties for more than a quarter-century now. And it has provided much of the playbook deployed by the Booshistas in their run-up to the lethal Iraq misadventure. And all under the cover of your friendly local master-government, racing over the hill on a strong horse to save you and sweep you into its many-Branched arms all the better to protect you and remain with you forever! You can then go on from there with the shirt-open-to-reveal-hairy-chest bit or the Karl Rove scenario about the nicely rump-ish gestalt of the 20-something George W. Bush. Something for everyone – a tyranny tonight!

And you shall be safe from crime, safe from WMD, safe from all the stuff that the stolid lumps called ‘men’ once accepted as part of the price of conducting a life in this vale of tears; it was a man – and a Dead White European one at that – who penned that bit about “lacrimae rerum”: there is an element of tears to everything that lives, to everything in this life, in this world. Aha! They just don’t get it, do they? “Tears” can be stopped – just let the government do its thing and things will change! Yes it will; yes it has – and to some extent irreversibly, it would appear.

But as we said, where the revolutionistas and the national-security puppeteers were merely deploying fear-scare as a tactic, the Fundamentalists have made it a religion. To be fearful, to be scared, to be ‘worked up’, to hate your enemies – this is to do God’s will, this is what it means to love your God! Punish them as you would have been punished if you hadn’t gone and saved yourself! Save yourself more!

What happens to people who live in a constant state of fear? What happens to them neurochemically? Physiologically? Psychodynamically? Characterologically? What happens to their thought-processes? Their attitude toward life? Toward others? What happens to a society or a culture comprised largely of such persons or burdened with their influence?

Hedges does a tad of conflating, and not inappositely. He ascribes the fearfulness of the Fundamentalist, or perhaps the factors that predispose a person to Fundamentalism, to be socio-economic: the awefull deforming forces that were nourished and released in the Regan-era and since. Fear of personal economic collapse and failure; resentment at being ‘left behind’ economically, educationally, and culturally; rage at being looked-down-on by voracious or mediocre ‘betters’.

All of those forces – and their name is Legion – were invoked and commissioned by the Republicans starting with Reagan, and Clinton himself made only modest efforts to banish them. As a Democrat he was as indentured to the revolutionistas as the Republicans were becoming to the Fundamentalists. And of course it was the profound vacuum created to smooth the path of the revolutions that also created the sucking vortex in American culture and life that in turn raised up and then drew in the Fundamentalistically-predisposed. Will the cycle be unbroken?

But while it’s neat and it’s not inaccurate, it’s not enough. There is a deeper level to this predisposition to Fundamentalism. We are all prone to it. It is a darkness within all human beings, a dark-hot, molten, magma-like element deep-down our spirit.

A culture and a civilization that seek rather to train a human being and to support a human being in the serious art of basing the self on the less-dark, perhaps more ‘advanced’ or ‘higher’ or more ‘mature’ capabilities within – now that is a worthwhile culture. A culture that aims for that and also aims for extending the person Up further into the self’s capabilities (“the better angels of our nature”), up and Beyond the self into the realm of spiritual strength mentioned by many of the world’s greatest religious or spiritual figures … now that is indeed a mature and a life-enhancing culture.

We do not have such a culture now. It is a legitimate question whether we ever did in this country; but once upon a time – and it was not so long ago – we were trying to make such a culture, trying to train our young toward such a culture.

But that was then. Certainly, all of those elements – the Vertical potential in the self, the lower and the more primitive potentials possessed almost of an independent power for evil, the judgment and participation of some Beyond – were all deemed obstructions (or rivals) to the revolutions as well as to the State that sought total power.

Even if there were no external threats, it would be a hard job indeed to mobilize individuals to embark on a journey of self-Mastery and self-Command. There are too many temptations and they are far too active, insistent even. And we live in a society where youth is a desiderandum, so that maturity and balance and reflection and study are unavailable even if they did present some attractiveness.

The Fundamentalists were in a sense the most susceptible. But not merely because of their precarious financial position. Rather because of the history of their part of the country, that region’s subculture, its values and myths and heroes. To this, as the 20th century entered its last – and revolutionistic – decades in this country, the influx of money and influence channeled through the Bible Bhagwans and the Dominionist Dons was a true ‘Flood’ in the Biblical sense, destroying humane-ness and human-ness, and humanity. Far more than they know, and in a savage irony, many of the Fundamentalists – regardless of whether they will be ‘left behind’ in some future event – have already been left behind, and have indeed left themselves behind. And as their chosen idols – the nation, the military, Victory – slip out of focus and out of history, they will be left with less than nothing.

Having abandoned any personal Interior or any Vertical, and having collapsed the Beyond into the surfaces of their own poor Present, they live in a Flattened and Fore-shortened world, a two-dimensional slab with no past and no future. And to provide any stimulation, to elict any sensation capable of dulling the razory ache of their fear, they must fantasize a cacophonous Apocalypse where all their enemies will be snuffed by the God who will instead choose them and give them everything they want (except – we must presume – sex). And so their own cartoonishness creates and is created by cartoonish conceptions of others and of God. All to their great detriment.

And in these troubled times, to ours as well. And to Ours as a People. For none of the skills required to People this Republic are present in – or valued by – Fundamentalism. Indeed, just the opposite.

What then is to be done? We must put away the things of a child; we must put on the armor of light and walk upright and seriously as in the day. Even if it is night. And night does draw near.

WARRIOR PROFESSIONALS

The February issue of “Harper’s” contains some interesting articles on things-military. Steve Featherstone’s article “The Coming Robot Army” (not yet online) prompts further thoughts on a subject raised before on this site. His interviews raised the interesting conundrum: if we are going to need a ‘warrior’ spirit for our military [especially if the troops are to be deployed in imperial-ish ventures] what will happen if we come to rely more and more heavily on robots technology not only for surveillance but for fighting and killing? If the troops’ tasks will increasingly become the manipulation of joysticks, what will become of our military’s vaunted (if not altogether well-grounded) warrior-spirit?

That got me to thinking: do the professionals in the military (lawyers, doctors, clergy) see themselves as ‘warriors’ too, in their particular activities? This has been discussed in “Bishops Bomb” on this site. But let’s put a finer point on it: if the professional people not only see themselves as ‘team players’ but also as ‘warriors’, then all sorts of darknesses arise.

The JAGs, of course, are one of the most threatening groups to ‘go warrior’. The process of administering justice as envisioned by the Framers most surely did not envision law enforcement as a ‘war’, nor the participants (especially police and prosecutors and judges, let alone jurors) as ‘warriors’ and the accused defendant as ‘the enemy’. Yet such warrior-ization, such militarization, of our legal personnel has already taken place, deformed by hot and sustained pressures both from the putative Left (the Advocacies) and the Right as it has morphed in the past decades (the War on Drugs, the War on sex-offenses, the ‘war’ of Fundamentalists vs. ‘evildoers’, as well as the actual wars in Iraq and the Middle East). And to this we add the numbers of former JAGs now in criminal justice as prosecutors, judges, and elsewhere in the court systems and on law schools faculties (and the number of former ‘warriors’ in law enforcement). The American Bar Association, while taking some position against this or that law, has studiously avoided addressing this overall situation.

Are the medical professionals also ‘warriorized’? The prescribing of psychoactive drugs to troops in combat (and the whole of Iraq is a battlefield, every alley and street and road) might simply be a result of the (very professionally dicey) adherence to the ‘team player’ concept of the military. But the role of psychiatrists and – far more worrying in its extent and nature – psychologists in the torture and ‘robust’ interrogation techniques is so blatantly contrary to the Western concept of the ‘healing professional’ and the American concept of soldiering that one has to imagine that they must embrace not simply a protective rationalization such as ‘team playing’ but a far stronger (and more toxic) mythos such as ‘being a warrior’. The American Medical and Psychiatric Associations have taken strong formal positions on this, but the American Psychological Association has been cagily trying to keep the skids greased for its membership to stay at the table in the prisons and interrogation facilities; Stephen Soldz has been following their twisty doings over on The Atlantic Free Press (www.atlanticfreepress.com)

And what of the clergy in the chaplaincies? As we become more aware of the Fundamentalist Ascendancy in the Service-chaplaincies, we have to conclude that the Fundamentalist religious stance – especially in its Christian Dominionist uniform – is far more amenable to cheer-leading warrior-hood and war than any mainline Protestant approach. And to the cheer-leading of imperialish warring the genuine Roman Catholic ethos is nowadays almost antithetical.

Yes, in the days of a citizen-army muchly composed of Roman Catholic urban, immigrant descendees, there would be great encouragement and the solace and support of the massive Catholic sacramental system, and also the omnipresent visitations made by Catholic clergy as they went about their sacramental rounds at all levels of the organization, all fields of activity from headquarters to foxholes. But even in those heady days, the presence of the ‘priest’ was not so much to cheerlead the war or the government but rather to offer spiritual solace and encouragement to the troops. There was no facile and total identification of the government or war with God Himself. If anything, the Catholic ethos reminded troops that beyond wars and governments there was a wider Church and a God Who oversaw and judged such things. And kept an all-seeing eye on the troops themselves.

This is hell and gone from the Fundamentalist collapsing of the Divine Beyond into the flat surface of the present and into the entity of the government and, in an almost Berserker religious gambit, into the very waging of Battle and War itself. The worship of Ares Ferox and of the State are compatible and synergistic idolatries. And constitute the gravest folly. And constitute Sin.

Since the Catholic ‘vision’ and ethos is so inhospitable to the functional – might we be allowed ‘de facto’? – idolatry of the State and of War, can it be any wonder that the Fundamentalist Ascendancy has made such swift and pervasive progress in the military chaplaincies as well as among the officer corps? And the fact that the young troops of this generation have been raised with far less overt and comprehensive religious influence than previous generations of troops (the evangelical and fundamentalistic young to some notable extent excepted) then the Catholic ethos – represented by its chaplains – became far more expendable. And perhaps at least partly because of this the Catholic Archbishop in charge of military ministry recently allowed himself to mouth Pentagon talking-points on how well Iraq is going, really.

The role of the chaplains in such dark-side programs as interrogation and the imprisonment of so-called enemy combatants has not received much attention, and perhaps the chaplaincies prefer it that way. I am not thinking so much of Christian chaplains trying to provide ministry to the mostly non-Christian prisoners – which would be complex in any case – but rather the content of the ‘ministry’ they provide to the imprisoning troops, to the little folk who staff the ‘facilities’. What do the chaplains say to the troops in regard to their daily tasks and activities and actions? We can presume that almost without exception no chaplain – even one of some rank – is ‘speaking truth to power’ in front of generals, admirals, and commanding officers.

There are many Consequences now a-brooding in these matters, and they will come home to us in the fullness of time. History, especially if it is influenced by Justice and the capital-letter entities of the Beyond, will see to that. We The People must take the trouble to ‘see’ now, lest our unseeing continue, and we – as well as the troops deployed on Our authority – become blind and all hearts be hardened … to Our and the world’s great detriment and loss.

I have a copy of Chris Hedges’ “American Fascism”, just published. More on that shortly.

FUNDAMENTALS

Jeff Sharlet has a great article in the December issue of “Harpers” entitled “through A Glass, Darkly”; it’s not yet online. His sub-title explains: “How the Christian right is reimagining U.S. history”. I just made a post about NASCAR-ites, riffing a meaty piece by Robert Lipsyte. Not to beat a dead horse, but it was only yesterday that I came across Jeff Sharlet’s piece and also A) this horse isn’t dead by a stretch and B) this horse could run away with a very valuable wagon that belongs to The People. So we’re off! I’m not going to do an essay; I’ll just comment on this or that as I go through the piece, from the top.

He speaks of a Fundamentalist “mood”. It’s always worthwhile to try to imagine what the emotional or mental content of a particular person might be, working inward from what you can sense about a person. The Fundamentalist ‘mood’, based on the emotional and mental content of the Fundamentalist ‘creed’ is important because for quite some time it has been at the center of national power, in Washington. (It was stoked to white-hot intensity by, and then sucked into the vacuum created by, the Democrats’ nurturing their assorted Identities over a span of decades. This consequence of the Dems’ Revolution of the Identities was unintended, but no less real because of it.) Self-righteous, suspicious, simplistic, sentimental … impatient to gratify their abiding desire to actualize God’s Kingdom on Earth, intolerant of any ambiguity or hesitation or doubt, unwilling to weaken themselves by sympathy for sin or sinner … the very characteristics demanded of them by their ‘religion’ perfectly foil the development of the maturity needed by citizens in a democracy. And yet these people embrace America-as-it-is (or ‘was’ in some golden ‘back then’) with a fierce assurance that their version of God has made this version of America His sheriff and they – by virtue of being both born American and ‘saved’ – His deputies. And unlike the early Mormons, these folks aren’t content to set up their own shop in some empty, out-of-the-way place like 19th-century Utah. Their mindset and heartset now occupy Washington, more completely – and to more deleterious effect – than the Scientologists mentor the lost souls of Hollywood.

They no longer speak of ‘fundamentalism’ but of ‘maximalism’: they want to see every aspect of society conformed to God. Now the Catholic Church had folks like this throughout its 2000 years of existence. It allowed religious orders and monastic orders to develop precisely in order to give this type of intense belief a place to live itself out, monasteries and places removed from daily life where the voluntary adherents could create within themselves and to greater or lesser extent among themselves a ‘perfect’ Christian community. This arrangement kept the truly zealous from inflicting themselves on the rest of the population, who were trying to get on with the business of living. It mostly worked. The Protestant tradition, having been born through a violent rejection of much of the Catholic tradition, never had the monastic ‘outlet’, with the result that its most intense believers pretty much have no alternative but to realize their dreams by inflicting themselves and those dreams on everybody; or at least everybody they could lay their hands on – and having made common cause with the Republicans, the neocons and even temporarily with the Revolutions of the Identities, they were able to get their hands on an awful lot of folks, one way or the other. It made for a curious and jangly church polity among them; it bodes hugely ill for a democracy.

But then, the monks were never seeking ‘purity’; after all, what awful pride would be engendered in the soul if the seeker actually declared himself to have achieved it? No, the monks were seeking to live as best they could, ever increasing in spiritual ability if they could. But religion was a direction more than a place to them, and not primarily of this world.

The Maxis see themselves as living in ‘days of the sword’. Almost everybody is looking for a little excitement in life, and most are also looking for some purpose and meaning to their lives, and it’s always good if you can economically combine the two quests. Living in ‘wartime’, being a soldier, in God’s own army and doing God’s own work … pretty much delivers everything a body could want: purpose, meaning, excitement, status, role, place, belonging, identity. What’s not to like? But ‘war’ requires an ‘enemy’ and when many of those who are politically your fellow citizens are by definition your religious enemies, or at least are obstructions to the Great Work, then the society and the polity are in trouble. When by definition you are not allowed to compromise with them (although you may be permitted to give them a chance to convert – just the one chance) then the fundamental societal expression of democratic process is eliminated. And if you’ve had enough sleep, you may want to ponder the curious similarity between this approach to ‘enemies’ and the approach taken by each of the Advocacies to its client Identity’s ‘enemies’; and the approach taken by the Incumbency toward its enemies, foreign and domestic. The Fundamentalist/Maximalist approach has penetrated through government and up to its highest levels; and for all practical purposes it is the eerie twin of the approach taken by the godless, liberal, secular Advocacies. We are becoming more and more like France in the 1930s: her politically intolerant and fundamentally antidemocratic extremes or Right and Left each pulling apart the central fabric of the society and the polity.

They are looking for a ‘story’ that will never change, and one that will redeem and make sense of everything. Aren’t we all. It’s part of being human beings; we belong to a story-making, story-needing species. Had we not jettisoned all the dreck of dead white males in the service of the Revolution of the Identities (going on here at the same time as Mao let loose the Cultural Revolution in China) we might recall that Plato figured our need for story was an echo of the Ideal world whence we had come; and that subsequent dead white males (many of them not white at all, and all of them ‘pink’ at best) had blended Plato into the Judeo-Christian tradition, which yielded a Heaven that existed Above&Beyond ‘this life’, and was inhabited by a personal God, scads of angels (consolatory or avenging), and the souls of the Just, all of whom possessed both a burning desire for Justice and a force-projection capability that could re-Arrange the best laid plans of men and mice.

But the Fundamentalists’ twist is that the story that meets their needs must then be imposed on everybody else. It’s a sign of the fundamental lack of Interiority of the Fundamentalist approach that the full force of its energy must be directed outward, at others. Not so different from Lenin’s philosophy of things, nor from the Identities’ revolutionary watchword: the personal is political. Maybe it is, but the personal is also so damned much more than that. This makes fundamentalistics (of the Right or the Left) bumpy neighbors and worse Citizens, at least of a Republic and of a democracy such as – oh, say – America’s. It’s not them, mind you – it’s the Fundamentalist mindset, which cannot help but see compromise as surrender, tolerance as treason to the Cause, and empathy as disloyalty. It’s simultaneously a cheap and expensive way to ‘be somebody’: claiming your Mr. Big’s right-hand operative, and then whacking the world upside the head according to your lights. No Catholic patience for them. Then again, John Brown’s activities were not anything Catholic either. Go figure.

And while it’s inspiring to see someone patiently and humbly searching for the redeeming theory that will Put It All Together, it’s prideful, really, to claim you’ve gone and gotten it just by declaring that you’re ‘saved’ and then further that being ‘saved’ gives you the right to whomp on all of God’s other children. Of course, our Fundamentalist brethren and sistern will not accept that the un-‘saved’ are God’s children in the first place, which is sort of a more vividly unsettling version of the Revolutions’ assertion that so many ‘just don’t get it’ (and therefore that they deserve to get it, right where it hurts).

It’s fine to distinguish between ‘kairos’ and ‘chronos’, between God’s time and temporal time, the former being defined by the quality of its presence to God and the latter being defined as merely that measurement by physical laws of those activities not directly contributing to God’s Presence or Plan. But it’s a life-full of work to attune yourself personally to ‘kairos’, to calibrate your transmitter to operate on that frequency – so to speak. To claim you’ve mastered it through self-declaration and then further claim that you are now authorized to start re-arranging God’s world for Him … that smacks of impatience, pride, and cannot but open up avenues for Violence. But then, if you’re His deputy, then your Violence is God’s Violence; a secular echo of that perverse sentiment was essayed by the noted theologian, Richard M. Nixon: if the President does it, that means it’s legal. Echoing through the chronos of the past 30 years, that sentiment has wrought far more damage in the hands of an even lesser man. And yet it’s as Fundamental as apple pie.

And of course, Fundamentalists are not about to make the mistake the Mormons made. Those poor benighted whackjobs invented an entire different history of the world, and wound up living out in the 801. No, the Fundoozies restrain themselves (for once) and limit themselves to the history of the United States, but – irrepressibly - they claim that the history of the United States has always been Fundamentalist (“Christian” is the catspaw code word) although that clear fact has been hidden by a massive secularist conspiracy. The quality of this assertion is on a par with the assertion that Beethoven stole his musical genius from other folks; not ‘copied’ their skill, but stole it – out of their collective heads – like an alien with a probe, such that suddenly he could do reely great music and they couldn’t. It is completely in the democratic spirit to politely hear such stuff out, even though one is educated enough to know that such an assertion is daffy. But to ensure that the citizens are not sufficiently educated as to be able to tell the difference between Truth and daffy, or even able to sense the difference, or to have been ‘educated’ into all the reasons why making such a distinction is ‘bad’ … that is a guarantee for the destruction of democracy. Whether the Fundamentalist or the Revolutionary mindset get us to EndPoint first … well, that’s the horserace of the coming age. And while there is much theorizing that God will rescue His own just before the end of Time, there is no scholarly consensus that He will rescue His own before the end of Democracy. And it will be a hallmark of their folly that while they are certain they will be able to identify and oppose the Anti-christ, they will most likely be blind to the arrival of their first Fuhrer, and will welcome him with loudful cheers. And the Politically Correct will whimper.

The Fundamentalists say that the sacred and the profane are coming together. But God and His Creation (to use their own theological presuppositions) are not ‘the same’. God is fundamentally different from (although not hostile to) His Creation. The two can’t ‘come together’ completely; there will always be a difference between them, and thus a distance. Christ took on flesh, and spirit takes on matter at every human birth. But it’s incorrect and hugely dangerous to imagine that what Ought to be and what Is are one and the same thing. It flattens existence by taking the Vertical and Future dimensions out of it, leaving us not with genuine religious effort but with religious posturing, an imitation, a religiosity that is ungrounded in any efficacious cooperation with God. And it opens up the path to much ‘mischief’: if God is becoming identified with what Is, then those humans who are a little bit ahead of the rest become a sort of ‘vanguard elite’ in the old Communist sense, authorized by their insight and dedication to drag the benighted masses to Perfection. Communism and Democracy are not historically known to be compatible.

It’s also curious, since Jesus is clearly recalled to have recommended letting the wheat and the tares grow together, and let the Harvester separate them at the end. Otherwise, one might rip up the wheat with the tares, their roots being entwined. But such is not the Fundoozie way: they prefer to consider themselves Deputized to imitate the Harvesting Angel rather than toil the long, patient toil of humans farming, watering wheat and tares together (which is the Catholic view), until the Harvester comes to take over from the human farmer. In this hubristic insistence on separating the wheat from the tares and the sheep from the goats the Fundoozie mentality resembles nothing so much as those who in the eyes of the foolish would appear to be on the total other end of the American spectrum: the Revolutionaries who insist on dividing up the world into those who ‘get it’ and those who don’t, and – more recently – those who offend and those who do not. You couldn’t think this stuff up.

“Those who control the past, control the future” one preacher says. So eerily familiar to the early-war Washington honcho’s boast that the U.S. makes history now, and the rest of the world can just watch and adapt. But you can’t control the past; you might be able to ‘control’ peoples’ perception of the past, but that’s not at all the same thing as controlling the past itself. And DITTO about the present: you can control perceptions about it, to some extent; but you can’t control reality itself. If you could, then huge columns of American spin-meisters and PR flaks would be issuing forth from the gates of the Green Zone in satellite TV trucks, instead of the frazzled patrols of over-rotated troops in under-armored, over-used Humvees. George Orwell said you could control the past, but we haven’t gotten to that skills-level yet. And Abe Lincoln said that you can’t fool all the people all the time, which doesn’t mesh so well with Orwell, who didn’t grasp just how much Americans have refused from the get-go to be boundaried by the limits of what is commonly accepted as ‘reality’. “Don’t fence me in”. Not an unwise request. But fences give a certain shape as well as take away some freedom to do something or go somewhere. Americans have never been able to hold a shape, like a lost spirit trying to inhabit this world, or someone caught in a busted transporter beam on Star-Trek. But to all those who ever snickered that the Americans weren’t really all here (or all there), well … we showed’em in Iraq, dint we? We dint? We better. Whatever.

Fundamentalist textbooks are now being marketed for the home-schooling parents. Who can argue with the idea of parents making the education of their kids a priority, given the alternatives bestowed by the Revolutions? Still, while it’s a huge step forward to valorize (as they say) parental involvement in the maturational preparation of their children, it still requires some solid material in order to complete the circuit. “Who can doubt that the United States of America has been a thought in the mind of God from all eternity?” Nicely put, and you wouldn’t have any trouble running this question by the Pope of Rome and all the cardinals therein. But the kicker is “a”: the USA may very well have been “a” thought in the mind of God from the get-go, but not THE thought. God has a capacious Imagination – it must be imagined – and is not easily limited; nor does He obsess or become besotted. Unlike humans. Regardless of their religious assertions.

“God loves the righteous who fight in His name.” Quick now, and no peeking: is this a quote from a jihadist of Bin Laden’s or a fundamentalist icon?

“Law is King”. “Lex rex” as the DWMs would have put it. So said John Witherspoon, the only pastor to have signed the Declaration of Independence. It’s a splendid dictum: establishing the principle that not men but Law will govern the American polity. Thus: the Rule of Law. But current Fundamentalist interpretation is that Witherspoon was of course speaking of the Law of God: “Lex Dei Rex”. But Witherspoon didn’t say “of God”, he just said “Law”. But what’s factual evidence to a true believer? Or a witch-hunter? Or an offender-hunter? Once you have jammed the judgment of human beings as the central factor in between God and Law, then the Rule of Law goes, because “God” is filtered through this or that human and “God” trumps everything. And there goes the Rule of Law. So there is indeed a certain genuine lawlessness at the heart of the Fundamentalist enterprise. And can it be a complete coincidence that it is in the administration of this recovered-addict Fundie-panderer that the country starts to see the Executive and the Legislature abandon all but the merest pretense to following the Rule of Law. And with the Rule of Law gone, what’s left to protect us? Will it be a Fuhrer who will have a rubberstamp legislature pass a Law for the Protection of Nation and People? Well, that law is already here. Did we miss somebody’s arrival in all the excitement of the past few years? Not the Antichrist but the anti-democrat.

A painting is reproduced: A ghostly Washington and Lincoln flanking Bush, each with an arm on his shoulder, as he leans on the Presidential podium, the Stars and Stripes (omnicompetent brand, indispensable prop) rippling behind them. Now there was a time not so long ago when such a motif would have been as normal as apple pie, and perfectly acceptable with a straight face, even by schoolkids. Three things happened. Vietnam was the first thing: could Washington and Lincoln really be held responsible for such a massive, dishonest U.S. cockup? Almost immediately after Vietnam, the second thing was the Revolutions: there is no God (or at least such a purported entity shouldn’t be discussed publicly) and no Beyond from which the likes of Lincoln and Washington could return; and anyway, they were dead white males so why invite them back? And the third thing was Bush: the only way a decent person could seriously accept the painting nowadays would be as a picture-prayer that Washington and Lincoln would indeed come back and either knock some sense into Bush or give him the Vulcan death-grip. And would Bush ever really take advice from anybody?

And why would anyone want to imagine a U.S. president as being particularly attuned to the Divine Mind or responsive to the Divine Will? Isn’t that what Popes are supposed to be? What Fundamentalist of sound mind would ever get near this conceptual badness? But it’s almost as if in the absence of any better alternative, Fundamentalists hallow the nation. Which is a curious borrowing from the likes of Mussolini and … others like him. The point could well be made that once the Old South was discredited in the Civil Rights era, the Fundamentalists had to find some other vessel to bear their (desperate?) need for Status, Role, Purpose, and Belonging. They latched onto the American government – and called it Good. Bush has replaced Robert E. Lee, and doubles in the public forum for the now-banished God. Whether Gore would ever have been accepted as the clear embodiment of God’s Will is a fascinating counterfactual. How they accept Lincoln – given what he did back there during the, ah, ‘sectional dispute of the mid-19th century’ – is almost a question for social psychiatry. In fact, it is. But it will have to wait its turn; questions much like it are lined up like incoming flights over O’Hare on Christmas Eve afternoon. “Put not your trust in princes” was apparently meant for some other bunch of believers. And, literally speaking, America is not governed by “princes”, one or several, but by a President. But things can change, God being God and the human mind being … what it is.

The ‘history’ toward which they look yearningly and by which they judge the present is pre-1947. It has always fascinated me how anyone can look back for the ‘good old days’ and come up with an actual date. Among American traditionalist Catholics the date is pre-1958, the date of the last suitably popely Pope, Pius XII. Or, in the alternative, the High Middle Ages, safely beyond the ferocious Dark Ages but not near enough to the dissipations of the Renaissance or the outrages of the Protestant Reformation. Multiple popes, interminable war, the Plague … these factors the traditionalists discount. So too the Fundamentalists discount the events that even by their own scale must be judged ‘bad’: the widespread cheap ‘hooch’ of the Prohibition era, women getting the vote, lynching … well, come to think of it, none of those was quite so bad, perhaps.

Nor does God require the services of the ‘great’, only of the ‘willing’. This takes them off a huge hook. Willingness can easily be claimed and is a hell of a lot easier to mimic than ‘greatness’ which – sooner or later – is going to prompt folks to ask for a demonstration. Thus ‘greatness’, perhaps any achievement, is not only a distraction but a positive disqualifier for doing God’s will. A neat solution for folks who think the world was created six thousand years ago in the blink of an eye.

“The powers that be are ordained by God.” Can it be any wonder that the vastly literate Founders didn’t quote this passage from Romans? Can there be any doubt that nobody with this mindset is going to have any easy time of it in a democracy that began itself with a revolution and sustains itself through the critical reflection and mutual discussion of the Citizenry? The mistaking of sacred and profane, the sacralization of the profane, lead them to idolatry of the nation, fundamentally. As the Revolutions rely upon the engorgement of the police power of the government in order to protect what they have managed to do, the Fundies’ worship the power of the government as an article of faith. And the government accepts all their offerings. And did some of their most saintly icons – Stonewall Jackson, for example – kill innocents? They were required to do so and in doing so proved their faithfulness to God; they were – wait for it – just following orders. Why do I think Bush already figures he will use this defense when his own reckoning comes along. Commander-in-Chief and Unitary Executive though he was, he’ll claim that he was just an underling, taking orders from – wait again – God . One recalls Billy Wilder’s marvelous line in “One, Two, Three”, uttered by a threatening newsman in late-1950s Germany: “Ja, I vass in ze SS … bahhhhht I vass only a pastry chef!” But hey – the symbol of the State is the sword, not the spoon. “Obedience is our greatest weapon” bawls a so-called Christian coach to his football team; possibly he had translated that from the original German of the SS motto: Loyalty is our Honor. Their loyalty thus assured, they had no need to worry about their Honor being compromised by dishonorable acts, since no such type of act could exist for them – whatever they did was ‘honorable’ by definition. And whenever the President does something, then if the President does it it’s legal. Yah.

All in all, we have as much to fear from the Fundamentalists – now that they have achieved social influence and political power – as from the Revolutionaries of the Identities. Neither wishes a democracy, really, because a democracy would require them to tolerate and respect those who differ with them, those who ‘just don’t get it’. Better that the End come quickly, and that, if it be somebody’s will, they help it along.