A lot of Americans think Islam is an evil religion. That's a good start; now if we can just get them to see that Christianity and Judaism are evil too, we'd really be making progress. "Allahu akbar!" is what Major Nidal Malik Hasan may have shouted as he killed thirteen people at Ft. Hood, but it doesn't translate to "Allah is great," as many American media reports had it. That's only a half translation. What Major Hasan declared was, "God is great!" -- something most Americans enthusiastically agree with. Hasan committed an atrocity because he believed that an imaginary character was compelling him to do so.
Major Hasan, like many dogmatic religious people, saw a world of absolutes: God is great, you will be rewarded or punished after you die, etc. He didn't want to be deployed to the Middle East, because he didn't want to fight against fellow-Muslims. Presumably, he would have been willing to fight people of another religious denomination. He was willing to kill thirteen of his fellow soldiers in Texas. It's a typical religious attitude: Us versus them, the chosen people versus the infidels; some lives are more valuable than others; nothing is more important than God. The problem with this, of course, is that as far as anyone can tell, there is no God -- and that leaves it up to people to make up their own crazy ideas about what God wants.
As with the 9/11 attacks, the media has failed to properly identify the Ft. Hood rampage as a religious assault upon a secular institution. But that's by no means the only missed angle in the coverage. We're so fixated on the fact that Hasan is a Muslim that we've nearly overlooked something more important: Hasan is an American military officer. So in addition to Christian jihadists (skinheads and neo-Nazis), our armed forces include Muslim jihadists. If Major Hasan was capable of this act, then a great deal of what we are told about our military and the men and women who serve is very, very wrong. Anyone who believes there's not much of a difference between "our" killers and "their" killers can regard the Ft. Hood massacre as evidence that soldiers, regardless of the side they seem to be on or the cause they seem to fight for, are all the same. People plus guns equals death. If Hasan had been deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq, he could have committed the exact same massacre, against different victims, and been hailed as a great American hero.
Our military, at least in part, consists of scared, emotionally ravaged, physically brutalized young people, many of whom enlisted out of a sense of hopelessness (easy to come by in this economy). They are asked not only to endure horrifying physical risk ("in harm's way" is the standard line), but to grapple with sociological and geopolitical realities almost nobody understands. Americans are quick to declare their alleged "support" for "our troops," and politicians love to describe the military as the finest people in the world. But behind all that patronizing talk is obvious disregard, and even contempt. A new study indicates that more than 2,200 American veterans died last year -- not because of IEDs, but because they don't have health insurance. Imagine surviving an unspeakable nightmare in a foreign land, getting home, and dying because of our insurance system. Imagine preparing for an unspeakable nightmare, and then being gunned down in Texas by one of your compatriots. Yes, something is very wrong with Major Nidal Hasan, but we shouldn't let that obscure the larger truth: Something is very wrong with our military, and its prolonged engagement in unnecessary and unwinnable conflicts.
But wait -- there's guns. Since we're obviously missing the religious and military implications of Ft. Hood, I'm sure we're going to miss the gun implications. Hasan did not use a military-issued weapon to kill thirteen and wound thirty-eight. Hasan used an FN-5.7, sometimes known as the "cop killer" gun, which he purchased legally and easily at a store in Killeen, Texas called Guns Galore. So now that Islamic jihadists (who are also American soldiers) are using America's insanely permissive gun laws to purchase weapons to murder American soldiers, all the demented NRA people will just be quiet from now on, right?
Yesterday, at the Ft. Hood memorial service, President Obama disappointingly flavored his speech with religious dogma right out of the Koran or the Bible: "For what he has done," the President said, "we know that the killer will be met with justice, in this world, and the next." Whoa, there, sir. As far as anyone can tell, there is no next world, and for an American President to perpetuate religious mythology is a major misstep. (We expected it from the last guy, because he was, you know, an idiot. Obama lacks this convenient excuse.) As for this world, whether or not Hasan is punished for his crime, it won't be undone -- nor will the crime of "D.C. sniper" John Muhammed, who was executed last night; his victims remain dead. But until our culture sheds its tragic obsessions with God and guns, these atrocities will continue to accumulate. At the memorial service, how were the fallen represented? Like this:
Where once there were human beings, now there are only guns.
Well, history was made, but it's hard to know how to feel about a triumph that's just barely acceptable, and still has to get through the Senate. It's hard to know how to feel about health care reform that comes bundled with the most severe setback in abortion rights since the Hyde Amendment.
Assuming the bill emerges from the Senate severely diluted, and is then partially restored in conference, and is signed into law soon by President Obama, there should be noticeable improvements in our tragic health care system (which currently offers the finest care in the world to a select group of the healthy wealthy). About 36 million of the 47 million Americans currently uninsured will get coverage. Young people will be able to stay on their parents' plan through age 27. Insurers won't be able to deny coverage, and a public option may well exist in some form. (It is in the bill that passed last night.)
I guess that's positive change, worth getting excited about. But along with health care reform, will the further erosion of abortion rights be a major part of the Obama/Pelosi/Reid legacy? Because something tells me that after health care, we're going to focus on the economy, the environment, Afghanistan, Iraq, and lots of other things before we get around to restoring the rights guaranteed by Roe v. Wade and systematically restricted into near oblivion since then.
This is a divisive issue because religious fanatics dominate one side of it, and liberals dominate the other. Religious fanatics have a good excuse for not being able to distinguish between a fetus and a person; they also can't distinguish between fairy tales and history. And liberals see so much nuance in everything that they've practically given in to the religious fanatics. I want to vomit every time I hear a liberal talk about how much they've "struggled" with the issue of abortion, how it's the one issue where they totally understand and respect the opposing view, because, hey, that's really sensitive.
No it's not. It's an issue just like all the other issues. "Safe, legal, and rare" is a cop-out. It should be safe and legal, and it should happen just as often as pregnant women decide they can't, shouldn't, or would rather not have babies. "Abortion is a tragedy" -- I've heard so many Democrats say this. "Nobody likes abortion, but..." They preface their opinions with disclaimers, to the effect that what they're about to tell you is probably wrong, so don't pay too much attention. Well, I do like abortion, because without it, women would have no choice. I don't think it's a tragedy. I think unwanted children whose parents can't take care of them are a tragedy.
On this and other issues, liberals have to stop apologizing. After we make our points, sure, let's explore the nuances. But up front, in bold letters, we should state without equivocation that abortions should be available and affordable, that the only truly comprehensive health reform would be a single-payer system, that the sale and possession of firearms should be severely restricted, that our public education system deserves as much money and attention as our military, that corporate polluters should be taxed out of their destructive habits, etc.
Otherwise, we wind up compromising right out of the gate. Conservative Democrats start bullying us around before we even get to the Republicans. This is how we get the kind of terrible mixed feelings we had in the pits of our stomachs last night: The House passed historic health care reform legislation! And took away more women's rights!
Republican legislators, lacking any coherent argument against health care reform, usually settle on "cost." We can't fix our health care system, they say, because it would be too expensive. It's bizarre that they expect citizens who are going bankrupt because of health expenses to be sympathetic to this argument. But it's not quite as bizarre as some of the other arguments, advanced by the people who vote Republican legislators into office. At Michelle Bachmann's pathetic protest, "tea party" types held an enormous photograph of naked, emaciated dead bodies piled up at Dachau, captioned "National Socialist Health Care." Compared to that, the cost argument does begin to appear reasonable.
But it isn't. A few hundred people, with a few hundred I.Q. points among them, assembled on the Capitol lawn and pretended to be concerned about "cost" and "spending." These are the code words Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, et al have taught them. It just sounds better to say "I am concerned about cost and spending!" than to tell the truth: "I hate President Obama, because he's black and I'm stupid."
Cost? Are you kidding? First of all, it's preposterous to suggest that all these livid right-wingers are screaming their heads off because of "concern about cost." But more importantly, when have we ever worried about cost when American lives were at stake? Or even when they weren't? Nobody asked whether we could afford George W. Bush's unprovoked war in Iraq (we couldn't), or George W. Bush's tax cuts for multi-millionaires (we couldn't), or George W. Bush's catastrophic deregulation of the financial services industry (we couldn't). These things, we were told, had to be done.
Now, 45,000 Americans die every year because of insufficient health coverage. As we've noted here before, that's equal to fifteen 9/11s per year. It's a real emergency, an immediate threat to American lives and safety. It's everything Saddam Hussein's Iraq was not. The government's first responsibility is to keep the American people safe, to save lives, to end what amounts to a massacre of Americans on American soil by insurance companies.
The economy will improve when insurance companies are forced to behave like responsible citizens instead of bloodthirsty terrorists. Those who oppose health care reform because they're "concerned about cost" might as well advocate the abolition of police, fire, and sanitation departments, which also cost a lot of money. There is no rational economic argument against reform -- and that's why I'm not bothering with the rational economic argument for reform. Would it help the economy? Would it hurt the economy? I couldn't care less. It would be better to completely bankrupt the United States than to let another 45,000 people die in 2010 because they don't have enough money to get well.
So shut up about money. It doesn't matter. Figure it out later. Stop the killing now.
Watching the Republican Party these days is like watching a bug struggle not to drown in a toilet. The humane thing would be to flush, but we can't, because we're so fascinated by the struggle. Unsurprisingly, Republicans are publicly expressing glee over the results of Election Day 2009 -- they did unseat a Democratic governor in New Jersey, and reclaim the governorship of Virginia. But seen in context, those victories were hollow anomalies.
In New Jersey, Democratic incumbent Jon Corzine has been in freefall for months, ran a lousy campaign, and is tarnished by associations with Goldman Sachs and Wall Street. The winner, Republican Chris Christie, is a big-city prosecutor, fiscally conservative, basically a schmuck -- but nothing like the far-right culture warriors who are the national face of the Republican Party. In Virginia, Republican victor Robert McDonnell is a moderate who ran a solid campaign against Democrat Creigh Deeds, universally regarded as much too weak a candidate to counteract Virginia's long history of electing governors who don't belong to the President's party. Here in New York City, everyone knew Bloomberg would win another mayoral term; the surprise was that he barely squeaked through. (One analysis concludes that Bloomberg's mayoral career has cost him more than $77 per vote.) For liberals, the only really bad news last night was Maine's passage of a ballot initiative similar to California's Proposition 8, overturning the state's legalization of same-sex marriage benefits.
The real story of Election Day 2009 was the story of the New York 23rd congressional district. The Republican candidate, Dede Scozzafava, was an arch conservative in all but a few areas -- abortion rights, gay rights, and the stimulus. In these exceptions, she was perfectly in line with her district (which has always been represented by Republicans, and which will be redistricted out of existence by next year's census). But several nationally conspicuous conservatives (Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Tim Pawlenty, Dick Armey, Rick Santorum) inserted themselves into the campaign, declaring Scozzafava an imposter, and throwing their support behind third-party Conservative candidate Doug Hoffman -- a confused twerp who doesn't live in the district, and considers Glenn Beck his "mentor." After meeting with Hoffman (and his babysitter Dick Armey), the editorial board of the Watertown Daily Times concluded that the candidate was "flustered and ill-at-ease" and "unable to articulate clear positions." So you can see why Sarah Palin was drawn to him.
Hoffman was a nothing candidate. But with all of this national conservative firepower behind him, he created untenably uphill conditions for Scozzafava, who dropped out of the race a few days ago and endorsed Bill Owens, her former Democratic opponent. The Republican leadership in Washington, which had endorsed Scozzafava, had to do an awkward about-face and throw its weight behind Hoffman. Last night, Owens defeated Hoffman by three percent.
Owens' victory is more significant for what it says about the current state of politics than for anything he might accomplish in the House; Owens is no liberal's dream candidate. But that's appropriate, because he'll be representing a very conservative district. The titanic miscalculation of Palin, Pawlenty, Beck, et al was that they purged a moderate who was slightly out of step with the national party, but perfectly in step with her district. Scozzafava, they reckoned, wasn't quite conservative enough. So the Democrats get the seat. The more this happens, the better. There is obviously no room in the Republican Party for anyone who supports women's reproductive freedom, civil rights for same sex couples, or economic and health care plans based in reality. That's why they're down to about 20% of the country.
The political waters seem increasingly muddy these days, but one thing that's never been clearer is our dire need to get the money out of politics. The public health care option -- which we thought was the compromise -- is in serious jeopardy, largely because one conservative Democratic Senator from Montana has received a lot of campaign money from insurance companies. Between the health care "debate" and the Supreme Court's impending ruling on Hillary: The Movie (a political attack ad disguised as a documentary), the subject of corporate personhood has been in the news a lot lately, and it is with this in mind that we present our new music video.
A new Bloomberg poll suggests that public perception of the health care "debate" may be tilting toward reason. Majorities of those surveyed feel that right-wing claims about "death panels," socialism, abortion, and immigration are "scare tactics." In another possible indicator of thawing ice, none other than Bill O'Reilly has spoken in support of a public option -- perhaps because Glenn Beck has cornered the Fox News market on reactionary hysteria, and O'Reilly is staking out a claim to the slightly deeper end of the pool.
Even when O'Reilly says something I agree with, I applaud with great caution. But it would be a great thing if portions of his audience come around to the understanding that the public option in no way represents a radical "takeover" of health care. It would be a great thing if it became more difficult for conservatives to deny that the health care crisis is a greater threat to American lives and safety than any foreign-policy crisis in recent memory. A Harvard Medical School report has found that 45,000 people die in the U.S. every year due to lack of health insurance. That's fifteen 9/11s a year. Thirty-second spots produced by insurance companies should be received in the same vein as al Qaeda's crude video and audio dispatches.
Oklahoma Not Okay
Conservatives continue to scale new heights of absurdity with their ridiculous outrage over czars. One hundred House Republicans are actually co-sponsoring legislation intended to stop the Obama Administration from appointing advisors. Their message is that Obama is turning us into Russia, with all these czars! Never mind the facts: White House point-people with long titles have been informally referred to as czars since the practice began under Nixon; George W. Bush had more "czars" than either Clinton or Obama. These conservatives are plainly saying that the facts don't matter, because their constituents are ignorant. Of course those one hundred House Republicans know full well that there is nothing unique, let alone Communistic, about the Obama White House and its "czars." But they also know that their base doesn't know much, and can be easily whipped up into a frenzy over a foreign-sounding word. This is a useful message to the left: We don't have to call Republicans stupid. Republicans are already doing it.
Ignorance, as always, is a big advantage for Republicans and a big disadvantage for Democrats. Unfortunately, it's an epidemic, and it's getting worse. A recent survey commissioned by the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs finds that only 23% of Oklahoma high school students can identify the first President of the United States. Only 14% know who wrote the Declaration of Independence; 27% can name the two houses of Congress; 26% know that the first ten amendments to the Constitution comprise the Bill of Rights. Six in ten cannot name the two major political parties in the United States, and four in ten are unsure which ocean is on the east coast.
The greatest irony of all is that the questions used in this survey are from the exam immigrants must take in order to become U.S. citizens. Immigrants have to answer six questions correctly. So the majority of Oklahoma high school students, if they were not born in the States, could not pass the test to become citizens. But we know that a good number of them will grow up to be adults who despise immigrants, equate liberalism with Hitler, and claim to defend the Bill of Rights they've apparently never heard of.
Santorum for President?
Former Pennsylvania Senator and renowned fetus-cuddler Rick Santorum says he may run for president in 2012. This would be a hilarious spectacle for all to enjoy, and I, for one, really hope he does it. We haven't had the pleasure of watching "Man-on-Dog" Santorum lose an election in three years, and it would be great to see it again. "The dynamic has changed," Santorum explained in an RNC conference call, adding that the Obama presidency is "injurious to America" and that health care reform is "an abomination." Santorum then returned to his office to cuddle a few fetuses before lunch.
There's a special place in my heart for Rick Santorum, partly because he's such a perfect example of right-wing religious lunacy, and partly because I played Santorum in the Nero Fiddled production Moral Value Meal. For notes on the acting challenge of a lifetime, and a picture of me in the role, see "Becoming Santorum," 4/17/06.
Yes, it's Racism
"I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man," said President Jimmy Carter this week. His timing could have been better. President Obama is about to appear on five Sunday talk shows plus Letterman to push health care reform, and the Carter remarks guarantee that each of those appearances will be devoted, at least partially, to the question of how racist the anti-Obama crowd is. If this sounds familiar, it's because back in July, when Obama held an important press conference on health care, he upstaged his own message by commenting, at the very end, on the perhaps racially-motivated arrest of Professor Henry Louis Gates. The President was correct when he said the Cambridge police "acted stupidly," just as President Carter is correct when he says that a lot of the Obama-haters are racists. The question is how much it helps to say so.
Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post writes that Carter was "right in essence, but wrong in degree," that "some -- but not 'an overwhelming portion,' as Carter claimed -- of the 'intensely demonstrated animosity' toward Obama is indeed 'based on the fact that he is a black man." Okay, I get it. We have to be careful not to appear to suggest that everyone who disagrees with Obama must be a racist. Obviously that would be going too far. But between the birthers and the deathers and the disturbing signage and the Joe Wilson outburst and the guns, the racist element of the opposition does strike me as, well, overwhelming.
And when Jim Sleeper, also in the Post, insists that "it's not about race," he comes off as disingenuous at best. He reminds us of "the swift-boating of Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) during the 2004 campaign and the unending conservative rage against former president Bill Clinton," by way of saying that the rage of the right is not new or specific to Obama. But by raising those examples, Sleeper is disproving his own point. As ugly and as ignorant as the attacks on Kerry and Clinton were, it must be acknowledged that the animosity directed toward Obama is worse -- more ugly, more ignorant, and, incidentally, filled with obvious racism. It's sheer foolishness to suggest that these livid, gun-toting "tea party" people are actually bursting with visceral anger over the deficit.
And frankly, when your arguments are completely incoherent and have no basis in fact, people are going to wonder what's really going on. If you're filled with primal hatred of Obama, and you're carrying a gun and a sign that says "The American Taxpayers are the Jews for Obama's Ovens," and you're utterly incapable of coming up with a single rational argument, anyone with half a brain is going to dismiss your stated concerns and assume that there's another explanation for your hatred.
Did you hear about the country so addled by ancient dogma that its film distributors wouldn't release a movie about Charles Darwin? You may ask: Where is this backwards, unenlightened place? Iran? North Korea? Turkey? Saudi Arabia? It would be nice to know, so we can remember not to expect too much from whatever country it is. All I can say is I'm glad I live here in the United States of America, where...oh.
Creation, a British historical drama directed by Jon Amiel, stars Paul Bettany as Darwin and Jennifer Connelly as his wife, Emma. It's based on the book Annie's Box, written by Darwin's great-great-grandson Randal Keynes, and deals chiefly with Darwin's grief at the death of his daughter. The film opened the Toronto Film Festival last Thursday, and had its British premiere yesterday. According to The Telegraph, it "has been sold in almost every territory around the world, from Australia to Scandinavia." But no American distributor will touch Creation, because it might upset people who think the world was created in six days by a big man in the sky.
The film was produced by Jeremy Thomas, the Academy Award-winning producer of Bertolucci's The Last Emperor, and other morsels of tempting Oscar bait such as David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch and Crash. Thomas told the Telegraph's Anita Singh:
"That's what we're up against. In 2009. It's amazing. The film has no distributor in America. It has got a deal everywhere else in the world but in the U.S., and it's because of what the film is about. People have been saying this is the best film they've seen all year, yet nobody in the U.S. has picked it up. It is unbelievable to us that this is still a really hot potato in America. There's still a great belief that He made the world in six days. It's quite difficult for we in the U.K. to imagine religion in America. We live in a country which is no longer so religious. But in the U.S., outside of New York and L.A., religion rules. Charles Darwin is, I suppose, the hero of the film. But we tried to make the film in a very even-handed way. Darwin wasn't saying 'kill all religion,' he never said such a thing, but he is a totem for people."
He certainly is. The unintentionally hilarious movieguide.org ("a ministry of The Christian Film and Television Commission, founded by Dr. Ted Baehr, to redeem the media [by] providing reviews from a biblical perspective") blames Darwin for "atrocities, crimes against humanity, cloning and genetic engineering" and calls the theory of evolution "half-baked." (As opposed to their careful scientific conclusion that God made Adam and then made Eve from Adam's rib and then a talking snake persuaded Eve to eat a magic apple. That's convincing.)
Oh well. Movieguide.org vows to "bring God's light to an industry with much darkness," but apparently it's not helping them see very clearly. The site's news headlines are enough to tell you what kind of relationship these people have with reality: "Obama Appoints Radical Sodomite Activist to Major School Post." "Obama Officially Endorses Homofascist Indoctrination and Oppression." "A Godless Marriage Is Worse Than a Loveless One." And that's the news!
As usual, the outrage of the religious right is uninformed. It turns out Creation is not a rebuke to religion; it focuses mainly on Darwin's family tragedy. Evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson, blogging for the New York Times, writes that Creation "is not a didactic film: its main aim is not the public understanding of Darwin’s ideas, but a portrait of a bereaved man and his family." Ray Bennett, in his Hollywood Reporter review, writes, "It would be a great shame if those with religious convictions spurned the film out of hand as they will find it even-handed and wise." Variety: "This handsome historical piece...isn't about science vs. faith so much as that well-worn dramatic hook, the loss of a child." Screen Daily's review even suggests that the film avoids controversy to its detriment: "In asserting the domestic over all else, Creation may have backed the wrong horse."
But don't expect any of this to matter to the same people who decried The Last Temptation of Christ, Jesus Christ Superstar, Dogma, The Da Vinci Code, and Religulous. They didn't see any of those films either. (But they flocked to The Passion of the Christ -- not only one of the worst films in recent memory, but ironically, the bloodiest, goriest, sickest thing I've ever seen in the mainstream cinema.) The Hollywood Reporter's Ray Bennett writes that Creation "will do well with grown-up audiences across the board." Maybe so. But in marketing entertainment to much of America, Hollywood is not dealing with grown-ups. It's dealing with people who literally believe in fairy tales.
It's dealing with people like Elizabeth Prata, who writes a blog "chronicling the End of Days," and recently sounded off on the Creation controversy. At least Prata has good design sense: She's chosen black text on a dark gray background. The problem is, if you really squint, you can still read what she's saying:
"Darwin said: 'I had gradually come...to see that the Old Testament was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos or the beliefs of any barbarian.' How did it happen that a man who was raised Christian and attended seminary, lost his faith so completely that he ended up proposing a theory that would do more to encourage apostasy and faithlessness than any other concept in the history of the world?"
Well, he realized that he was an intelligent human being who had been behaving irresponsibly. And so, as all responsible people must, he chose reason and reality over the willful ignorance of religious dogma. But it will not surprise you to hear that Prata has her own answer, and that it's pants-wettingly silly:
"Like the strangler fig, satan takes a tentative hold and then if not immediately swept away, he moves his tentacles in and winds slowly around."
Ready to continue? Elizabeth Prata is. Responding to Creation producer Jeremy Thomas's comments to the Telegraph, she writes:
"It is the time of apostasy in a world that embraces a 'theory' instead of the facts of God; that America is 'too religious' (as if there is any such thing); the notion that the world has outgrown God and we must become modern. That, after all, it IS 2009."
Unfortunately, not all the world has outgrown God. Humanity's great progress remains hampered by benighted pockets of primitive thought. That's why Prata can use a phrase like "the facts of God" without blinking. She can even deny that it's possible to be "too religious," in an age when people of faith crash airplanes into skyscrapers to appease their gods. Every now and then, she almost makes a point:
"Apostasy is a falling away from the truth. Here is some truth: Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species. There was a reason Darwin did not title it On the Origin of Life. Science can't explain how life began on this earth."
Right! In other words, people can't explain how life began on this earth! We just don't know! What a wonderful thing that she has accepted this! Now, having finally shed the yoke of religious certitude, I guess she...oh.
"But bible believers know: God created the world and everything in it in 6 days. An even better truth are the words: 'Hebrews 12:2 - Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.'
"The second you take your eyes off Him, a clarion bell goes off in hell, and satan sends his demons to swoop at you with the strangler fig seed to plant in your mind. Beware, it comes slowly and stealthily, until pretty soon you are so choked with lies you decide that we are descended from monkeys instead of Children of God."
Who, exactly, is "choked with lies?" The person who finds certainty in what has been proven through scientific and historical inquiry, or the person who finds certainty in a compendium of ancient myths? The person who perceives existential threats in climate change, nuclear proliferation, and the health care crisis, or the person who thinks Satan is trying to plant figs in his mind? Who is so opposed to thought, so closed to ideas, as to believe that all is lost "the second you take your eyes off Him?"
This would all be a lot funnier if the problem were not so widespread in the United States. A Gallup poll in February found that only 39% of Americans "believe in" the theory of evolution. (Twenty-five percent do not, and 36% have no opinion either way.) Unsurprisingly, attachment to religious mythology is far less epidemic among the educated; 21% of Americans with a high school diploma "or less" believe in evolution, compared with 53% of college graduates and 74% of postgraduates. Ignorance of Darwin's theory is more common in young people and churchgoers than in adults.
Whether Creation finds a U.S. distributor is ultimately a very small matter. But attached to this story is an issue of unequalled importance. America is being strangled, not by the Satanic fig Elizabeth Prata fears, but by the refusal of too many Americans to think critically, to distinguish between fantasy and reality. If you honestly believe that a man went up a mountain and came back with stone tablets from God, or saved the world by putting two of each animal on a boat, or died "for your sins" and is on his way back, then it must be very easy to believe that Iraq was in on 9/11, that President Obama is a Muslim born in Kenya, and that health care reform is a socialist takeover.
[F. idiot, L. idiota,an uneducated, ignorant, ill-informed person]. 1. An unlearned, ignorant, or simple person; an ignoramus. 2. A human being destitute of ordinary intellectual powers. 3. A fool; a simpleton. -- Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary
On this day, eight years ago, a truly illegitimate President of the United States -- who was not elected by the American people but seized the White House by judicial fiat -- sat in an classroom at Booker Elementary School in Florida, reading The Pet Goat with a group of second graders. (Incidentally, he was not accused by liberals of trying to indoctrinate students.)
I do not believe that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were responsible for the planning or execution of the 9/11 attacks. But there remain many disturbing, unanswered questions about why the Bush Administration failed to protect America. Whether that failure was willful, or simply due to ignorance and incompetence, is a question not sufficiently answered by the known evidence. Undeniably, the attacks were among the worst things that have ever happened to America, and among the best things that ever happened to Bush and Cheney (not to mention Giuliani and a large cast of other supporting players). The Bush Administration failed to keep us safe, to its own advantage. Which is why Dick Cheney is so quick to appear on television these days and say that the Bush Administration did keep us safe. The implicit appositive is, except for that one time. Except for the only time.
Americans have been reflecting on 9/11 for eight years now, and ironically, almost all of us have missed the most salient lessons of the attacks. Popular opinion still says that a Christian nation was attacked by Muslims. In reality, a secular nation was attacked by religious people. Those attacks were a triumph of religion over peace, faith over reason, holy book over newspaper. Granted, not all religious people are as religious as al Qaeda. If al Qaeda is 100% religious, let's say, then someone like Rick Warren is maybe 65%. Of course Rick Warren would never crash an airplane into a skyscraper; he's only 65% religious. Not all religious people are murderers. But they are all guilty of the crime of faith, the willful rejection of critical thinking. In its milder forms, this only leads to church socials and virginity pledges.Turned up several notches, it leads to horrific mass murder -- like the Crusades, the 9/11 attacks, and the bloody apocalypse all dogmatic Christians eagerly anticipate.
Before 9/11 was an act of mass murder, it was a hijacking -- and since that day, the attacks themselves have been hijacked. Just yesterday, Sarah Palin used the attacks to attack President Obama, in a typically incoherent statement posted on Facebook, now her main forum. This weekend, the so-called "9/12 Project" commences -- an alleged grassroots uprising, actually orchestrated by Glenn Beck and Dick Armey's FreedomWorks. This series of events, centered around a protest in Washington tomorrow, claims to seek a return to "the way we all felt on September 12, 2001" -- and is obviously organized by people who felt nothing at all. Nobody who was really paying attention -- and certainly nobody who was here in New York -- felt very good at all that day. On 9/12/01, we were terrified, horrified; many of us had lost loved ones; many others were still desperately awaiting news.
Ironically, the actual goals of these right-wing extremists are the exact opposite of the "9/12" ideals they claim to represent. Glenn Beck says that on 9/12, we didn't care about politics; we just cared about what was best for our country. And this is the crowd that persists in spreading blatant lies about the Obama Administration, idiotically blubbering about a socialist takeover, free health care for undocumented immigrants, and all that birth certificate nonsense. On 9/12/01, they should be reminded, Americans were in absolute lockstep behind their President -- despite the fact that they had not elected him, and he had just failed, like nobody has ever failed before, in the President's primary responsibility. Even I was in no mood to criticize George W. Bush that day. America was in a crisis. Kind of like the crisis it's in right now, over health care, except that the health care crisis has claimed, is claiming, and will claim a far greater number of innocent lives.
Just as the Bush regime failed to protect America, Americans now fail to learn from what happened. 9/11 should have led to a national referendum on the perils of neoconservative foreign policy, administrative incompetence, and religious faith. It has not. It has led to a national atmosphere so consumed by fear -- instilled by Muslim extremists and perpetuated by Christian extremists -- that the chairman of the RNC is still calling Obama's health care plan a "socialist power grab," Republican legislators are still coming out of the woodwork to question the President's citizenship, and the Archdiocese of Chicago is apologizing for honoring Ted Kennedy, on the ludicrous grounds that his devotion to women's rights makes him a killer of babies.
Terrorism is only a symptom, one of many. The real problem, facing not only America but the entire world, is religious fundamentalism. The problem has grown worse, not better, since the awful day eight years ago when people of faith came to New York and Washington and Pennsylvania to spread the Word.
There's a predictable amount of continued fallout from last night's landmark Obama address on health care. Most of it involves the Joe Wilson outburst (which we shall deal with in a moment), but among the important stuff:
The speech has had some immediate impact on public opinion. A CNN / Opinion Research poll indicates that 67% of those who watched the speech agreed with Obama's proposals (up from 53% before the speech). However, CNN reminds us that more Democrats than Republicans watched the speech (the polling sample being 8-10 points more Democratic than the general population), and that similar numbers followed President Clinton's health care address in 1993.
MSNBC is reporting that House Democrats are now a) unwilling to support any bill which does not include a "robust" public option, and b) newly willing to consider reform which does not include a public option at all (except possibly on a "trigger," which would be legislation designed to shoot itself in the foot).
House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, a man cursed with a quality best described as "tone-deafness," is now accusing President Obama of "tone-deafness." Forgive Cantor for not knowing much about last night's speech; he wasn't listening.
And then there's the Joe Wilson thing -- which I hesitate to even discuss, lest it upstage matters of actual importance. But it does have some minor significance, partly as an indicator of how far beneath civility the Republican Party has sunk. The truth is, Wilson's clever "You lie!" was not the only Republican outburst during the speech. Someone shouted "Read the bill!" during Obama's neat debunking of the "death panel" lie. Another witty conservative came up with "Ha!" after Obama said, "I have no interest in putting insurance companies out of business." Cutaway shots during the speech showed many Republican legislators holding up pieces of paper, allegedly representing alternative legislation. There were hoots and catcalls and guffaws and other displays of adolescent boorishness which only increased my admiration for the Democrats who made it through all those Bush speeches without actually vomiting in the aisles.
Major General Paul D. Eaton says that Rep. Wilson's outburst against the Commander-in-Chief was a "breach of military protocol."
Politicians on both sides of the aisle have condemned Wilson, and the White House has graciously accepted his apology. Wilson says "we need to discuss the issues and I'm happy to do that," but he's still wrong about the Obama plan and undocumented immigrants, and his continued pursuit of that fallacy means he's either stupid or a liar. Or even both.
Needless to say, there are plenty of deranged right-wing bloggers leaping to Wilson's defense. Meredith Jessup at Town Hall was "disappointed" to hear that Wilson had apologized. Jessup, who worked for war criminal Dick Cheney in 2005, suggests that Democrats were equally disrespectful during Bush speeches. (Obviously she's wrong, as she is about almost everything; last week she wrote that for a President to address schoolchildren was "unprecedented." I thought I was reading The Onion.)
Erick Erickson at Red State calls Wilson a "Great American Hero" because he "stood up to Barack Obama," and invites his readers to donate to Wilson's reelection campaign. Good luck with that. In fact, Wilson's Democratic opponent, Rob Miller, has received nearly $130,000 in individual donations since last night. (Donate to his campaign here.) It would be nice if "You lie!" became Joe Wilson's political epitaph.
