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Election
day in Everson, Washington. This was sometime in the late 1980s or
early 1990s, close enough to the fire I was still distraught
over the death of my career, hence didn't bother taking notes
or keeping records. But I remember the tech data. The camera was my
Olympus RC – the best pocket camera I ever owned – loaded with
Kodak 400 ASA color negative film. It was rainy and windy and cold,
typical winter weather on the Pacific Northwest coast, near noon, yet so
dark I was working at the lower limit of the RC's electronic shutter
and lens, probably 1/15 of a second at f/2.8. Posterization with Gimp
software adds an illusory sharpening to an image blurred by
inadvertent
camera motion. Click on image to view it full size. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2010.
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AMONG THE GREATER IRONIES of
present-day politics is the fact those of us whose rights are most
jeopardized by the One Percent's lavishly financed
efforts to impose Christian theocracy
on the United States are often the least likely to recognize the
threat.
Whether because of misinformation,
denial, fears of being labeled “politically incorrect” or some
combination of all of the above, we who identify ourselves as
secular-minded or spiritually independent tend to ignore or dismiss
any openly religious assault against our hard-won freedoms of
conscience. Though we instantly mobilize against identical attacks by
seemingly secular politicians and political groups, we are profoundly
reluctant to resist or even acknowledge the equally egregious threats
that emanate directly from – and often in the name of – organized
religions.
The fact so many of these these
assaults happen far away – on the other side of the globe, in the
former Confederacy or in some flyover state – makes it easy for us
to brush them off as isolated events of no personal consequence, the
random deeds of distant extremists. Particularly if we live in a
great city, we can readily convince ourselves such fanatics could
not possibly impinge on the liberties we enjoy in our island of
civilization.
But our indifference is ultimately our
defeat. It measures the success of our enemies' most perfect strategy
– their skill at convincing us they are too intellectually remote
or geographically far away to hurt us. That's how the Christian
theocrats have already managed to deny abortion providers to the
women who live in in 87 percent of the USian counties.
Similarly we pooh-pooh Christianity's
escalating assault on our right to dictate our own end-of-life
circumstances. Yet Christian zealots do not hesitate to defy
assisted-suicide laws or do-not-resuscitate orders and thereby
condemn victims of permanently debilitating accidents or medical
crises to years of “redemptive” suffering
– misery that, not coincidentally, pumps windfall wealth into the
already overflowing coffers of church-owned hospitals.
We tell ourselves how happy we are
to be exempt from such barbarism and dispel all further thoughts of
what it might be like to endure such physical and psychological
abuse. “It will never happen here,” we say.
But
it is already happening. The barbarians are already inside the gates.
Our islands of civilization are already being overrun.
And
we are bringing our downfall on ourselves. It is happening because
our secular-minded smugness has blinded us to the toxic reality of
the theocratic incursion. We have failed to comprehend the awful
strength and implacable dynamics of fanatical religion. We deny the
totality by which it both shapes its adherents and is itself shaped
by their fanaticism, how it shapes or reshapes the societies in
which they live, how it is the ultimate historical proof of the
ancient adage “ideas have consequences.”
Even now we remain blind to the
stranglehold Christianity has on the USian population. Nor do we
comprehend the savagery – real and potential – implicit in a
people 63 percent of whom are fanatics by definition:
that is, they believe the Bible is not only the word of god but is
literally, word-for-word true.
Many who claim to be Christians
vehemently object to characterization of their religion as founded on
the hatred of women, sexuality and Nature. Yet history proves that to
be the quintessential doctrine of all the Abrahamic religions. In the
case of Christianity, it is confirmed by a two-thousand year litany
of victims. The contrary examples of the Christian Bodhisattvas
– St. Francis of Assisi, St. Theresa of Avila, Albert Schweitzer,
Dorothy Day, Fr. William Bischel, others of their kind – are rare
exceptions indeed. Their humanitarianism is like a frail scatter of
bright blossoms on a dark and bloody tide, its tsunami of carnage
ironic fulfillment of the precept given us by St. Matthew, the fruit
by which Christianity makes its true self known. As a dear friend and
leading pagan scholar was wont to say before her untimely death in
1994, “the goodness of the saints is in spite of Christianity, not
because of it.”
Moreover, the failure of the
so-called mainstream churches
to publicly denounce the fanatics who have emerged as the most
powerful, influential and well-funded members of the USian Christian
clergy proves – if only by default – such hatefulness whether
Protestant or Catholic is as much the “true Christianity” today
as it was at the height of the
Burning Times.
The fanaticism-supporting silence of
mainstream Christianity is no doubt among the primary influences that
prompt too many secular-minded or independently spiritual folk to
reject all notions of a theocratic conspiracy to overthrow
constitutional governance in the United States. “Religion is just
not that important anymore,” say the secularists. “Only morons
still believe in that sort of thing.”
Alas,
as documented by Susan Jacoby in The
Age of American Unreason,
it is Moron Nation in which we reside. Read Chris Hedges' American
Fascists: the Christian Right and the War on America;
read Kevin Phillips' American
Theocracy; then pull it
all together by reading Jeff Sharlet's The
Family: the Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power,
which tells how Christians – Catholic and Protestant alike – have
been working at least since the 1930s to subvert the constitution and
replace it with Biblical law, the Christian counterpart of Sharia.
Also there are at least three websites
vital to building an understanding of the magnitude of the theocratic
threat. These are http://www.mergerwatch.org/,
which probes the Catholic war against reproductive freedom and
end-of-life rights as manifest in the church's leveraged purchases of
the nation's secular hospitals; http://www.au.org/,
Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which documents
the inroads Christian theocrats are making on government and USian
society in general; and http://www.theocracywatch.org/,
which exposes the doctrines and doctrinal interpretations upon which
the thrust toward theocracy is based.
My sole criticism of these on-line
resources is that Americans United and Theocracy Watch too often
sidestep the bipartisan nature of the theocratic threat.
TheocracyWatch – otherwise a veritable encyclopaedia on Christian
subversion of constitutional governance – is especially misleading
in this regard. It focuses on “the rise of the Religious Right in
the Republican Party” but steadfastly ignores the identical danger
within the Democratic Party, which keeps its collaboration with the
theocrats carefully hidden beneath a deceptive cover of (apparent)
secularism. As Sharlet reports in The Family, “Hillary
(Clinton) fights side-by-side
with (Sen. Sam) Brownback and others for legislation dedicated less
to overturning the wall between church and state than to tunneling
beneath it” (first edition, Harper, New York: 2008; p. 275).
Note
also President Obama's
dramatic expansion
of the Bush
Administration's Faith-Based
Initiatives,
which facilitate the privatization of social services and give
religious organizations control – often zero-tolerance control –
over who receives aid. It is especially telling how Obama applauds
such (theocratic) programs as “a force for good greater than
government.”
In
terms of actually working to impose theocracy, the only meaningful
difference between the Republicans and the Democrats is the extent to
which the latter have thus far managed to conceal their commitment
to an officially Christian United States – a point frighteningly
demonstrated by Sharlet's research.
***
While
I have long recognized
and many times warned
against
the theocratic threat, I was unaware of how the Catholic Church is
using its near-infinite wealth to buy or affiliate with secular
health care organizations as a means of terminating reproductive
freedom and limiting end-of-life alternatives.
But
then two Seattle news outlets, The
Stranger and the on-line
daily Crosscut,
bravely published stories exposing the alarming local impact of this
(typically devious) theocratic scheme.
One of
these reports, “Faith Healers,” describes in general terms the
attack on all such freedoms.
The other focuses mostly on the
prohibitive threat to end-of-life choices.
Both are well worth reading.
Group
Health Cooperative, the
non-profit, single-payer organization I joined as a political
statement when I was in Washington state during the 1970s and which
now administers my Medicare program, sends its Tacoma patients to a
local Catholic hospital whenever they need such services. The
hospital is St. Joseph, part of the Franciscan Medical Group that
operates in the Puget Sound area. Hence I immediately telephoned GHC's
customer service department and asked whether St. Joseph would honor
documented end-of-life wishes that conflicted with Catholic doctrine.
The response was anything but
reassuring: “Since that is not one of our hospitals, we do not
know what they would honor.”
A Catholic source who has personal
experience coping with end-of-life issues says the situation is not
as bad as the two articles portrayed – that the Franciscan
hospitals will at least honor a do-not-resuscitate order. The
source, a dissident who openly rejects the church's opposition to
contraception, abortion and homosexuality yet regularly attends Mass,
is therefore especially credible.
But the mere fact such questions now
arise demonstrates the extent to which even avowedly secular Group
Health – originally perhaps the most staunchly
patient-rights-oriented medical institution in the Pacific Northwest
and certainly amongst the most outspoken such organizations in the
nation – is being trampled by the stampede toward theocracy.
The Stranger's Cienna Madrid
reports the Catholic Church now owns 12 percent of the hospitals
nationwide and a staggering 44 percent of the hospitals in Washington
state, the latter a rapidly growing monopoly that already includes
all the hospitals in three very large counties. It is an
unprecedented – and unprecedentedly sneaky – assault on
reproductive rights in the state that was first in the nation to vote
for legalized abortion.
Anyone who has read the relevant works
by Hedges, Phillips and Sharlet will recognize immediately how the
dramatic expansion of Catholic hospital ownership is yet another
manifestation of the obscenely well-funded corporate campaign to
impose theocracy, via Christian fanaticism whether Catholic or
Protestant, on the entire United States.
Its long-range objective is to
subjugate us all beneath local variants of the theocratic ethos that
rules the Bible-thumping (and often virulently anti-Catholic) South.
As I know from the school years I (involuntarily) spent there c.
1950-1959, also from the years I worked for daily newspapers there
(1962-1965) and my summer there in the Civil Rights Movement (1963),
the South is a realm of Christian fanatics whether Protestant, as in
Appalachia and the cotton-belt, or Catholic, as in the jungles of the
Louisiana bayou country.
Imagine, if you will, a United
States in which possession of Alan Ginsberg's Howl
is a felony and the teaching of evolution is a gross misdemeanor, a
realm where behavioral codes are enforced by Christian counterparts
of the Islamic morality police. Such was the South – the land to
which I was exiled by familial dysfunction. Yes, the copy of Howl
lent me by a Knoxville woman in 1959 could have subjected either of
us to five-year prison sentences. As for morality police, this
function in Protestant communities was (and likely still is)
fulfilled by the Ku Klux Klan, hence its colloquial name: "the
Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class." Rumor attributed a
similar clandestine purpose to the Knights of Columbus in Louisiana
and in Catholic communities elsewhere in the South.
(Though it begs the question, I should
probably explain why I returned to Tennessee after I completed the
three-year active duty portion of my six-year U.S. Army obligation.
Because I had been a stringer for The Knoxville Journal and
two community weeklies during my last year of high school and the 18
months between graduation and enlistment, Knoxville was the one sure
place I could get work as a journalist – and thus begin building a
viable résumé
to get me back home to New York City as soon as possible. I have
returned to the South only twice since then – in 1967 with Adrienne
just after our marriage and in 1969 on a photo assignment that
coincided with a younger sister's wedding.)
That said, why would morally imbecilic
capitalists – especially given their enthusiastic adoption of Ayn Rand's principle of infinite greed as ultimate
virtue – prefer rule by Biblical law? While the
anti-environmentalist implications of Christian doctrine are obvious
– see again the first item linked in my opening paragraph – the
Southern brand of Christianity-protected capitalism predates the
environmental movement by nearly a century. What did the the Southern
One Percent discover after the Civil War that bound the Bible so inseparably to
capitalism?
In the first place, the core ideologies
of capitalism – the hierarchy of the rich over the poor; the
ruthless exploitation of underlings and Nature; male supremacy and/or
the supremacy of patriarchal values and methods – all originate
from Biblical principles. (Those who doubt this should read not just
Max Weber [The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism]
but the works of Barbara Mor [The Great Cosmic Mother]
and Rianne Eisler [The Chalice and the Blade]).
More to the present-day point,
innumerable studies in what used to be called “industrial
psychology,” all of which seem to have been carefully removed from
public circulation, long ago concluded the combination of
divine-right management, sexual taboos, misogyny and psychological terror
implicit in all Abrahamic religion (Judaism, Christianity, Islam)
makes for the most obedient, most productive, hence most profitable
workforce possible. Abrahamic theocracy thus effectively reduces
“human capital” to its original antebellum meaning, a euphemism
for slaves and enslavement.
Studying the slavishly religious South,
the industrial psychologists realized its practice of elevating the
boss to the equivalent of a divine-right monarch and anointing him
god's representative on earth ensures the unquestioning obedience of
all believers in the workforce. The Christian Prosperity Gospel
reinforces managerial authority by defining poverty as divine
punishment. Collective bargaining is thus implicitly condemned as
wanton defiance of god's will – a deadly or mortal sin.
The counterparts of these Christian
principles in the other Abrahamic religions structure their
respective societies in recognizably
similar ways. The rich
and powerful are portrayed as god's chosen; the poor and/or the
non-believer as his rejects; males as made in the image of god and
therefore superior to females; structures of gender, class and caste
as divinely ordained and therefore inescapable; Nature as god's gift
to man to be exploited however man chooses. Replace “fear of the
Lord” with der führerprinzip
and you have Nazism – particularly its core concept of
übermenschen and
üntermenschen
– hence the intimate connection between Abrahamic religion, fascism
and imperialism.
Borrowing from Freud and again studying
the South, industrial psychologists also discovered the bottomless
frustration resulting from strictly enforced prohibitions of sexual
expression outside heterosexual marriage is typically sublimated
into frantic productivity and endless frenzies of trinket
materialism. Later events – most notably the expansion of the USian
empire – proved the result is the same whether the workers are
Christian, Islamic or Jewish. For the One Percent, theocracy thus
means more profit at less expense.
The notorious oppression of Southern
women – best illustrated by the South's intense opposition to
the Equal Rights Amendment –
reflects another defining characteristic of Abrahamic theocracy. But
denial of female personhood – though obviously prompted by the
Jewish/Christian/Islamic patriarchy's envious fear and hatred of
women's sexuality – also seems to have economic motives. In
today's world it is apparently yet another expression of the One
Percent's infinitely despotic intent, an especially vivid example
of the new paradigm of global governance: absolute power and
unlimited profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for everyone else.
Semiotics
gives us our most important
clue as to why the One Percent so relentlessly supports theocratic male
supremacy. Throughout Occidental history, liberty is invariably
personified as female, no doubt in (mostly unconscious) tribute to
the central but oft ignored role of women in innumerable
revolutions. The history so symbolized begins at least with
Boudicca's rebellion against Imperial Rome c. 60-61 CE; it may have
originated 1500 years earlier in the Minoan resistance to Mycenaean
conquest. The storming of the Bastille in 1789 was triggered by the
women of Paris protesting the price of bread. The Russian Revolution
of 1917 was sparked by the women of the Lesnoy Textile Works, who
boiled into the streets of Petrograd to protest the firing of five
organizers. The fierce activism of women in New York City after the
1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire gave the U.S. labor movement one of its
greatest and most pivotal victories.
These histories and others like them
suggest women may be notably quicker than men both to develop
revolutionary consciousness and to evolve the cooperative solidarity
essential to successful radical action. If true – and you can
assume industrial psychologists and intelligence analysts alike have
had this matter under investigation for years if not decades – it
gives the One Percent an obvious motive for excluding women from the
workforce and methodically reducing them to the abject
powerlessness so horrifically prophesied by Margaret Atwood in The
Handmaid's Tale.
Once again, we witness how the
oppressive functions of Abrahamic theocracy provide capitalism with
profitable mechanisms of oppression: not just opiate, but brain
police as well.
The
imposition of Islamic theocracy on
Iraq and its seemingly permanent disempowerment of women is therefore
probably no accident. Likewise the theocratic takeovers that followed
the so-called Arab Spring in Egypt and Libya. Indeed the USian
military is relentlessly drilled in Christian-crusader ideology. Its ultimate proverb – “kill 'em all; let god sort 'em out”
– is the perfect facilitator of the imperial war machine's true
function as the One Percent's international goon-squad.
Sectarian warfare over which
fundamentalists will control the power structure of a given state –
Protestant versus Catholic, Shiite versus Sunni, one Hasidim versus
another – ensures the disunity that perpetuates the power of the
One Percent even as theocracy subjugates the
workforce. Whomever wins, once the fundamentalists rule, the quest for
progressive change becomes blasphemy if not heresy, just as it was in
the time of the Inquisition, in the time of the Sultanate, in the
times of Franco and Pinochet, just as it is now in Saudi Arabia and
Iran and much of Israel and in the 87 percent of the United States
where women are already denied local access to abortion. God is
watching. The intelligentsia are
silenced; the masses are shackled by cradle-to-grave orthodoxy; in some realms the
disobedient are publicly tortured to death and they are everywhere cursed with
eternal damnation. “God remembers how you vote.”
Can it be coincidence the model societies of
the Bible and the Qur'an so closely approximate the
burgeoning reality of the USian surveillance state?
Verily, we are ever more a conquered
people. When O when will we awaken?
LB/16-25 April 2013
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