Kind of a follow-up to this post.
""Our government makes no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith -- and I don't care what it is."-Dwight Eisenhower
There are plenty of interesting and baffling things about Glenn Beck. Here is another. Glenn Beck is a Mormon. (Even stranger, apparently a convert.) You may not consider that unusual until you consider that Mormons used to be considered vile heretics by the same sort of evangelical Christians which Beck spends a great deal of time and effort wooing and hobnobbing.
Beck in this way is in the same boat as soon-to-be perennial presidential candidate Mitt Romney. You may recall that Fellow Mormon Romney gave a much-hyped speech during the 2008 primaries for just this purpose, to reassure other religious conservatives that the contents of any theological debate are moot in comparison to the broader shared experience of being pious about something and conservative (I stole the Eisenhower quote from this slacktivist post on the speech. Fred has a couple others as well.)
It's not just Mormons, however. The general trend among conservative public figures of any sort, and the particular stock in trade of the Beck/Palin populist variety, is to talk vaguely about "values" and "faith" while only very rarely making any specific comment on creeds or doctrines. The enemies are no longer people of the wrong religion (with the exception for the moment of Muslims until the Middle East runs out of natural resources), it's people of no faith, or at least people who don't believe faith should interfere with the political process. It's oddly ecumenical for people who would otherwise regard ecumenism as a dangerously relativistic liberal subversion. These are people (various Protestant sects vs. each other and Catholics, Christians vs. Jews etc.) who have historically been at each others' throats over doctrinal minutiae, who adhere to strict scriptural literalism, and regard the tiniest heresy as tempting damnation. Why are they suddenly able to handwave all of these differences and get together in a friendly drum circle?
It's because they do not believe in any creed so much as the ecumenical creed of conservatism. They have discovered that their shared interests--preservation of sexual/gender hierarchies, etc--and a shared duty to act as a barrier between the elite and the working class trumps any temporary concern they might have about eternity and damnation and all the rest. So shockingly, religious conservatives are not sincere in their beliefs. Hoocoodanode?
27 August 2010
16 August 2010
The dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life
I hate to be all "we've finally succumbed to the vortex of stupid!" on you, but the fact that this "Ground Zero Mosque" non-story still has legs makes me feel we have crossed some final threshold of no return.
Yes, the "controversy" which initially began as a few far-right Islamophobes getting all pouty that the brown heathens were approaching the consecrated crucifixion scene has somehow transformed itself into a legitimate political issue on which our Serious leaders are being asked actual questions and are expected to respond in some way other than "Have you dumbasses ever read the First Amendment?" If there was any doubt about how much the right controls popular discourse, and how desperate the ruling class is to talk about something other than the shape of the economy, this should be proof enough.
How many mental hoops do you have to jump through to manufacture some outrage about this story? Well, there's the fact that the "Ground Zero Mosque" is neither a) a mosque (not that it matters) nor b)at Ground Zero (it's two blocks away, and can't even be seen from there.) Then you have to bypass the dangerous precedent of declaring where and when a minority religion gets to practice, although, given the rise across the country in anti-Muslim fervor I suppose this is past the point now. Why don't we skip right to the yellow crescent stickers? Nevermind that, though, because how could you have missed the outrage of scary Muslims praying in the Pentagon of all places! To steal Elliot's great number, they didn't even have the decency to move two blocks away!
I'm struggling to come up with ways to express how ridiculous and outrageous this story is, and what it says about the complete depravity of our elite opinion-makers and the right-wing knuckle-draggers they are so eager to swoon over. What's somewhat surprising is that the United States has generally been better at integrating its Muslim population, probably moreso than Western Europe, for example. Even George Bush, perhaps unconvincingly, tried to insist he was not at war with the entire religion of Islam. That appears to be very over. Why now? Obviously, there's always the opportunity that economic crisis brings to facilitate the scapegoating of a small, unpopular and powerless minority. The more likely cause, though, is the need of the war party to wave the bloody shirt of 9/11 martyrdom and keep the public's thirst for destruction primed for the liberation of the next enemy.
Yes, the "controversy" which initially began as a few far-right Islamophobes getting all pouty that the brown heathens were approaching the consecrated crucifixion scene has somehow transformed itself into a legitimate political issue on which our Serious leaders are being asked actual questions and are expected to respond in some way other than "Have you dumbasses ever read the First Amendment?" If there was any doubt about how much the right controls popular discourse, and how desperate the ruling class is to talk about something other than the shape of the economy, this should be proof enough.
How many mental hoops do you have to jump through to manufacture some outrage about this story? Well, there's the fact that the "Ground Zero Mosque" is neither a) a mosque (not that it matters) nor b)at Ground Zero (it's two blocks away, and can't even be seen from there.) Then you have to bypass the dangerous precedent of declaring where and when a minority religion gets to practice, although, given the rise across the country in anti-Muslim fervor I suppose this is past the point now. Why don't we skip right to the yellow crescent stickers? Nevermind that, though, because how could you have missed the outrage of scary Muslims praying in the Pentagon of all places! To steal Elliot's great number, they didn't even have the decency to move two blocks away!
I'm struggling to come up with ways to express how ridiculous and outrageous this story is, and what it says about the complete depravity of our elite opinion-makers and the right-wing knuckle-draggers they are so eager to swoon over. What's somewhat surprising is that the United States has generally been better at integrating its Muslim population, probably moreso than Western Europe, for example. Even George Bush, perhaps unconvincingly, tried to insist he was not at war with the entire religion of Islam. That appears to be very over. Why now? Obviously, there's always the opportunity that economic crisis brings to facilitate the scapegoating of a small, unpopular and powerless minority. The more likely cause, though, is the need of the war party to wave the bloody shirt of 9/11 martyrdom and keep the public's thirst for destruction primed for the liberation of the next enemy.
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