9/11: THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL

John Chuckman

I wanted to avoid this topic. Just as I want to avoid everything concerned with what has become known as “9/11,” America’s penchant for nick-names and short-forms holding even in its nightmares. But we do not always get to do the things we want, and ignoring this is something like ignoring a monstrous iceberg that’s drifted into the harbor.

On that date this year, a dense, almost impenetrable fog will descend over the entire United States. All thinking will stop. Television networks will proudly sport logos designed just for the day, and they will broadcast spots from advertisers pretending not to be selling anything. Hours of toe-crinkling, stomach-churning sentiment will be broadcast from politicians with the morals of gangsters.

There will be a moment of silence in the casino lounges of Los Vegas and Atlantic City. Thousands, with casual-wear pant-suits bulging over the tops of barstools, will pause to reflect on the meaning of 9/11 between frenzied rounds of feeding slot machines. Elvis impersonators and chorus girls will bow their heads. The $8-an-hour student in the big fuzzy mouse-suit at Disney World will stop a minute from shilling for expensive rides and eats.

Fundamentalist television-preachers will pause from the work of building media empires to pose in leather arm chairs and shake blubbery jowls, squeezing out a few more stage-tears for dear old America, confident that the moment’s diversion won’t hurt the flow of money from lonely, loopy folks living through television sets.

Footage of smoking, crumbling towers will be replayed a thousand times on television stations with nothing else to attract advertisers. And it will be watched, especially where the option on the dial is one of those politicians reciting his pathetic lines for the twentieth time in a day. The replay button on a million video machines will be hit with trembling anticipation like that felt replaying a favorite horror flick. A billion terrible drug-store photos, snapped on trips to New York, will be taken down from closet shelves to be thumbed and smudged over once again by friends and family.

Recently a Canadian friend I had not seen for a while recounted her experience of flying into New York right at the time of the attack. I tell part of her story because it offers perspective on that day’s events and what has been learned from them.

Through the back window of her cab, she actually saw the second plane strike the World Trade Center. In the logjam of traffic in which she was trapped, crowds of people got out of their cars to gawk, large numbers of them furiously snapping pictures.

Of course, such behavior, had there been a more far-reaching crisis, would have been exactly the opposite of what was called for. People were holding up the flow of traffic away from the city to catch photo-album memories.

A second riveting scene was her going to a bar in the evening for a drink in the airport-area hotel where she would be trapped, surrounded by soldiers, for days (this only after her cab returned to the airport following hours of effort at getting into Manhattan). The television broadcast pictures of American warships off the coast with commentary about how they were equipped with cruise missiles. The men in the bar cheered loudly, just as they would at a football game, fists and forearms pumping like the response to a touchdown. My friend could only put her head down and despair over the notion that she was caught in the middle of a war.

The scene is interesting for several reasons. The football-game reaction to the warships was a replay of the mindless, gut reaction to the military witnessed so many times in my lifetime. It is precisely the reaction that permits a government, often serving special interests and questionable ideology, to become mired in the affairs of others, often to an extent at odds with the interests of most individual Americans.

It was obvious that the attack was the work of people who destroyed themselves as well as their victims. The applicability of warships, with cruise missiles no less, missiles whose only purpose is to destroy targets on the ground or sea hundreds of miles away, to this situation could not have meaning beyond a reassuring show of strength. And yet people cheered. At the time, there was no certainty about what group might be responsible for the destruction.

Many of them still cheer over what has been accomplished in Afghanistan, that is, the killing of thousands of innocent people, the scattering of the genuine terrorists to the four winds, the toppling of a stable but unpleasant government, and putting in its place an unstable but equally unpleasant government.

The displaced government blew up ancient statues and abused women. Members of the new government murder prisoners, suffocating them by the hundreds and dumping their bodies into mass graves on the desert. They also devote time to shooting and blowing up one another. They still abuse women. In the last year, despite the photo-op casting off of the burka, nine women have immolated themselves in protest over ghastly arranged marriages – a far greater number than occurred under the Taliban.

I was reminded of audience reaction to the Sylvester Stallone-Vietnam movie, First Blood. This was a fantasy that re-assured American mass audiences they might have avoided the despair, frustration, and disgrace of Vietnam had there only been people like the star making decisions. This star, a kind of living, plastic action-hero figure, possessed the cunning to defeat every trap and the vision to avoid all confusing complexities – every trap and complexity, that is, except those of going into Vietnam in the first place.

American foreign policy, and particularly the quixotic interventions it has entailed, over the last sixty years has been based on wishes and fantasy rather than facts, on how Americans – at least the financially and politically influential portion of them – would like to see the world rather than how the world is.

To an extent that would surprise many people who regard America as advanced and pragmatic, this is, in fact, a society where fantasy plays a huge role. There are the fantasies of adults who behave like children. There are the paranoid fantasies of Christian fundamentalists who speak in tongues, heal cancer with a thump on the forehead, and find signs of devil worship in corporate symbols or children’s books. There are many strange cults like those of Jim Jones, the Branch Davidians, the Aryan churches, or the recent oddity of sanctifying gibberish from a second-rate science-fiction writer. Always there is the escapism of Los Vegas, Disney World, and Hollywood, and the powerful fantasies of advertising that keep the economic engine at full throttle.

In many ways, this attachment to fantasy plays a role in foreign affairs, in the way America sees the world and how she understands her place.

In the Middle East, a place under great stresses including rapid modernization contemporary with the continued existence of ancient tribal cultures, something has been occurring much like the gradual build-up of pressure from the slow, almost imperceptible movement of tectonic plates. Under these stressful conditions, America’s myopic views and careless policies themselves provide additional sources of stress. The accurate, dreadful message delivered on September 11 is that this way of treating events has become dangerous to Americans whereas before it was dangerous only to those who were the victims of American policy.

And it is that message that America has ignored for the last year. All American efforts and tens of billions of dollars have been directed at two main objects. One is the distortion of traditional arrangements and freedoms at home plus many relationships abroad to help shape a Fortress America. The other is to intensify the very same policies, attempting to destroy people and places abroad viewed as especially unfriendly to the effort.

I don’t believe that any number of attacks and invasions can alter such a fundamental and growing problem. There are simply too many people adversely affected by American policy. You cannot use force to make vast numbers of people submit, unless you are prepared to impose indefinitely the kind of terror Stalin or Hitler imposed on society. And you cannot maintain a fortress society in a globalized world.

ASHCROFT, AMERICAN HISTORY, AND SPEAKING IN TONGUES

John Chuckman

John Ashcroft, Attorney General of the United States, recently repeated an old chestnut about America being a Christian nation whose Founders were Christian gentlemen.

The claim is common among the country’s fundamentalist Christians, but it is so ignorant of actual history one wonders whether it should not be taken as another serious indictment of American public education. Some readers may not be aware that Mr. Ashcroft’s background includes familiarity with such arcane subjects as speaking in tongues. As for Mr Bush, who touched the same theme in China, perhaps no comment on his grasp of history is required.

The late eighteenth century, following on the Enlightenment and waves of reaction to the violent excesses of the Reformation and Counter-reformation over the previous two centuries, was perhaps the lowest point for Christian influence ever. Virtually all educated people in Europe were deists and many were open skeptics.

America was not free of this influence despite its many Puritan immigrants. Indeed, many of the best educated citizens at this time were educated in Europe. And the small number of good libraries owned by educated people often contained the works of Enlightenment authors. Virtually all the ideas in the Declaration of Independence and even some of the words of the Constitution derive from these European sources. It is due precisely to the unique qualities of the period that we owe America’s early
embrace of religious tolerance. The immigrant Puritans had displayed no religious tolerance , and in fact were some of the worst fanatics from Europe.

Washington was a deist. He was a member of the Masons, a then
comparatively-new, secretive fraternal organization widely regarded as unfriendly to traditional Christianity and reflecting European secular attitudes. He did attend church regularly, but this was done with the aristocratic notion that it set an example for the lower classes, Washington being very much a planter-aristocrat (he used to refer to the independent-minded Yankee recruits in the Revolution, who had had the practice of electing their officers before he was appointed as commander, as “a dirty
and nasty people.”). This was a time when there was an established church in
Virginia, and it functioned as an important quasi-political organization.

Washington always used deistic terms like Great Providence. His writings, other than one brief note as a very young man, do not speak of Jesus, and he died, knowing he was dying, without ever calling for prayer, Bible, or minister. There is a story given by some of his best biographers shedding light on his church-going. He apparently never kneeled for prayer nor would he take communion. When one parson brought this to his attention after the service, Washington gave him the icy stare for which this aloof, emotionally-cold man was famous and never returned to that church.

Thomas Jefferson was accused publicly of being an atheist. More than any other Founder, Jefferson was under the spell of European (and particularly, French) thought. His writings, and references to him by friends, certainly make him sound like a private skeptic. He belonged to no church. He explicitly denied the divinity of Jesus, viewing him as a great teacher of human values. At best he was a deist referring in his private writings to God as “our god.”

Jefferson who, despite high-sounding words, was something of a hypocrite on many aspects of civil liberties, and particularly on slavery, was at his best on the need for religious liberty. Despite his free-thinking reputation, he formed alliances with groups like the Baptists, who deeply resented paying taxes to the established church in Virginia, and won a long battle for a statute of religious liberty.

Thomas Paine, whose stirring words in Common Sense contributed greatly to the Revolution, was often accused of atheism because of his religious writing, but deism is closer to the truth. His later writing done in Europe, The Age of Reason, was regarded as scandalous by establishment-types. France, during the Terror under Ropespierre, turned to a new kind of state religion. This, the very brave Paine, living in Paris, also rejected, writing,

“I do not believe in the creed professed… by the Roman church,
by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the protestant
church, nor any church that I know of. My own mind is my own
church.”

The great Dr. Franklin, who incidentally lived about a quarter of his life on diplomatic missions in Europe and who as a very young man had run away from a home where rigid religious principles were imposed, was a typical deist of the period. He was an active member of the first Masonic temple in America. His attitudes were so amicable to French intellectuals and society, he was embraced, as no other American has ever been, as a national figure in that country.

Alexander Hamilton, undoubtedly the most intellectually gifted of the Founders other than Franklin, paid lip service to religion, but he was known during the Revolution as a rake. Later, his distinguished career in Washington’s cabinet was marred by a great sexual scandal. Generally, Hamilton used religion to promote his political aims, ignoring it whenever it was convenient. In this respect, perhaps he qualifies as a thoroughly modern American version of a Christian.

Gouveneur Morris, who wrote the draft of the Constitution we all recognize from the notes of others, was an extremely worldly and aristocratic man. He was also one of Washington’s most trusted confidants. He was perhaps the most rakish, womanizing diplomat America ever sent to Europe, sharing at one point a mistress with Talleyrand, the most amoral ex-cleric who ever practiced statecraft. In general, Europeans were astonished that a man so worldly and so arrogantly patrician in temperament represented the young republic for a period in France.

Abraham Lincoln, while not a Founder, is the most beloved of American presidents. Lincoln’s closest friend and most interesting biographer, Herndon , said flatly that Lincoln was a religious skeptic. This has always so upset America’s establishment historians that Herndon has been accused of writing a distorted book, a rather ridiculous charge in view of a close friendship with his subject and twenty years spent collecting materials.

Lincoln never attended church, and when he refers to God in speeches during the Civil War, it is always with words acceptable to secular, educated people who regarded the King James Bible as an important cultural and literary document apart from any claims for its sacredness. There is reason to believe that as the bloody war continued, Lincoln, who suffered from severe depressions, turned to the Bible for consolation, especially to the story of the struggle of the Hebrews. Lincoln was also an extremely astute politician who used every means at his command in the great battle with secession, and his references to the Almighty may well have been part of
his psychological artillery. He certainly did not invoke the name of Jesus.

Patrick Henry, who incidentally opposed ratification of the Constitution, was a Christian, but he was once described by Jefferson as “an emotional volcano with little guiding intelligence.”

WHY REPUBLICANS HAVE NO SENSE OF HUMOR

John Chuckman

It may have something to do with a life spent scowling, years of squeezing facial muscles and lips so tightly the skin comes to resemble cracked swollen grapes. It may relate to the hemorrhoid-inducing strains of bad potty training, although research is unclear as to whether this is a cause or an effect. “Not sparing the rod” may play a role – you can’t look into the hard-boiled-egg face of Second-Lady, Lynne Cheney, without thinking about Sam Spade slapping around uncooperative witnesses. But I wouldn’t insist on the point. Her face may just reflect explosively-high blood pressure. Or an abnormally large spleen.

There may be a genetic basis for many of the large divisions of human nature – not for all the details and refinements, but for the basic dichotomies, such as optimism and pessimism, open to new ideas or close-minded, generous or greedy, smiling or sour, peaceful or violent. I certainly don’t know this to be the case, but it seems a plausible hypothesis.

So I do think it possible there is a genetic basis for Republicanism. It is difficult otherwise to explain why the same mix of traits turns up over and over – greedy, narrow, sour, and lacking in humor, always excepting for the kind of sophomoric stuff mumbled and stumbled over by a pretzel-challenged President.

Whatever the cause, it is an easily confirmed observation that Republicans have no sense of humor. I’m sure there are readers – especially the ones that send me notes advising that J.K. Rowling is a pseudonym of Beelzebub – now thinking, “Then how do you explain Rush Limbaugh?”

Well, this just proves my point. If that is your idea of a sense of humor, you have none. The words of “Naziism with a Friendly Face,” as Rush is warmly known to closeted Hitler-Jugend and aspiring pimply-faced predator-entrepreneurs across the United States, provide a sure test for lack of humor. If he makes you laugh, you have a problem. Or, rather, the country has a problem if there are enough of you.

If Republicans had a sense of humor, they’d laugh their own leadership off the platform. The party’s Washington mob could be the cast of extras from one of those old Hammer Studio horror films with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. Scary, ugly and dopey – all at the same time.

Strom “The Living Corpse” Thurmond: It is reliably reported that a Senate page is assigned, full time, to yank sash cords from a secret room in the Senate basement that run up Strom’s pants, attach to his jaw, and make his mouth move. Strom is no dummy though, having been granted several honorary degrees from Bob Jones University

Tom “The Roach Exterminator” DeLay: Here is a man who almost certainly ingested too much rat and roach powder while working as a pest exterminator in Texas, the kind of entrepreneurial experience deemed, in that neck of the woods, as fully qualifying you for a career in national politics. Tom fancies himself a Constitutional scholar though, always carrying a folded-up copy of the sacred text in his back pocket and showing some adeptness at its interpretation. The only trouble is it’s the Constitution of the Confederate States of America.

Trent “Prancey Boy” Lott (a.k.a. “Big Hair”): This former star agricultural-college cheerleader still performs at private benefits on behalf of the George Wallace Memorial Chapter for the Preservation of our Glorious Confederate Heritage. If you want to catch him going through his moves, book early – they’re always sell-out crowds.

Dennis “The Crusher” Hastert: Nick-named in recognition of his tireless efforts on behalf of election-finance reform as well as his remarkable resemblance to one of those WWF plastic dolls, a man said by some to suffer from extended exposure to crop dusting in southern Illinois.

And that barely scratches the surface for miserable, threadbare material in the Republican Party.

We have Jesse “Don’t Tread on Me” Helms: He represents the one known species of viper that weird Carolina fundamentalists avoid using in their snake-handling acts.

Newt “Hydrophobia” Gingrich: Almost resembling a very large Kewpie doll in a business suit, Newt seems quite innocuous until he displays his piranha-like smile and suddenly strikes with rows of glittering razor-teeth. The Beanie Baby version of Newt has been declared hazardous for children.

Phil “As my ol’ Mama said, ‘Some gotta clim’ down outta the wagon…’ ” Gramm. This guy’s failure to put together a wad of dough as big as the one that made Bush president, spared generations of school kids from memorizing mind-numbing quotes off the sides of a giant marble wagon in Washington.

Bob “The U.S. government’s running a damned concentration camp down there in Washington, an’ they got Elian locked up in it!” Smith. Smith does have a certain gentility, earning him the epithet, “New England’s Own Big Bubba.” Big Bubba’s career heroic moment was quitting the party, not for anything so unrewarding as principle, but so he could be lured back with a committee position. His feat of crawling back to Washington over the rocky New England landscape is the stuff of Republican legend.

Bob “I want Ron and Nancy stuffed and put in the permanent collection at the Smithsonian!” Barr. The acerbic Barr has a tender side, he has been known to weep openly at the sight of a bowl of jelly beans. Former associates at the CIA still affectionately refer to him as the Agency’s Nincompoop Quota.

Henry “The Two-Ton Hypocrite” Hyde. Well, at least Bush’s “youthful indiscretions” stopped, instead of starting, at forty. Hyde, a consummate ham actor, gave his most memorable performance in the role of noble, white-maned statesman heroically struggling against the forces of reason, good sense, and good taste to cast down an elected President over a dribble on a dress. In his own mind, he was repeating the magic of Charles Laughton in Advise and Consent.

And, we have a new star in the Republican firmament since September 11, John “Speaks in Tongues” Ashcroft. Here is today’s indispensable man. In the course of years rolling around on the dirt floors of revival tents in Missouri, blubbering incomprehensibly, he gained immense insight into fundamentalist financial networks that he now applies to the damned heathen fundamentalists who believe the wrong fundamentals.

Of course, with a party that doesn’t think there should be a government – just a contracted-out private army with an unlimited budget for weapons from Fortune 500 companies plus a secret-police network whose computers hook-up to every home (this last is a self-funded scheme from the sale to corporations of the greatest stash of intimate, personal marketing data ever assembled) – such ballot choices are not terribly surprising. But still, even this partial roll call provides powerful evidence of a complete lack of humor.

Just as I was about to complete this important piece of investigative journalism, the following item came in on the wire from a large Eastern research facility. I believe it requires no additional comment.

IMPORTANT NEW FINDING!

Important new research has made a startling discovery. Autopsies on the brains of hundreds of cadavers have revealed that  the vestigial bit of reptilian brain long known to exist in all humans is three times larger than normal in Republicans.

Preliminary follow-up work with MRIs on living Republicans not only confirms the finding but indicates a dominant role in many of their brain functions.