An American Fairy Tale....

'Brainwash' by Joseph Art

(This is a piece by Katy; a good friend of mine.  She writes over on this site, but I've long wanted her to guest-write on this modest side of the fence.  This is far from her first effort - but it's her first post here.)

Once upon a time, there was a place called America.

Now, America was a pretty great place, as far as places go. There was lots of empty land there. There was no official religion there, so you could practice almost any religion you wanted, even something weird like Anabaptism or Quakerism. Plus, in America, you could say almost anything you wanted to say without ending up roasting on a stake.

Still, America had a lot of problems and there was one that was worse than all the others. You see, the people in America were unable to distinguish between something that was another person and something that was not. So they might look at a comb or at wagon or even at an artificial legal construct created for the accumulation of capital and not be able to tell you if what they were looking at was a human being or something else entirely.

Let me give you a strange but true example of how this worked. You’re probably not going to believe me, but take my word for it for now. When Americans looked at a human-shaped with a lot of melanin in his skin and were then asked “Is this is a person?” they did not know!

Really!

They might say, “No, it’s not a person,” or maybe “Well, that looks like three-fifths of a person to me!”

A doctor might be able to tell you what this psychological disorder is called. I can’t tell you, but whatever it is, it caused all sorts of problems for the Americans. It took hundreds of years and a war before they really decided on an answer.

For the record, they decided that the dark, human-shaped things were in fact people.

They made up some new rules to remind themselves of what they had decided. These rules were called the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. The dark, human-shaped things were supposed to be able to take these rules into court, and if anyone asked, they could wave the rules around and say, “Yes, I am a person. See?”

But here is the thing. The dark, human-shaped things almost never got to use those rules, or at least not until a lot more time had passed.

Instead, some other things that were roaming around America got to use them. For a long time, Americans with money had been spending time building things called “corporations.” Corporations were these contraptions that rich folks stuffed their money into. If I was rich and you were rich, then the two of us might stuff our money into a corporation together, sort of like how people stuff straw into a scarecrow.

This was great for two reasons: First, the rich folks could gather a whole lot of money in this way and do all sorts of things with it. Second (and this was very important), if something bad happened and somebody wanted to sue the rich folks in a court, they could just point at the scarecrow. The scarecrow would pay for the lawsuit out of the money stuffed inside, and the rich folks kept doing whatever they’d been doing before. .

After America made the new rules – the ones I called the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments – the corporate scarecrows started using the new rules a LOT. They ran into America’s courts and they said, “Look at us! We are people!”

And because Americans suffered from this weird ailment where they couldn’t tell if that was true or not, everybody sort of stood around. They shrugged their shoulders, and they assumed that the scarecrows were telling them the truth.

The dark, human-shaped things could not find jobs, and they were getting hanged from trees, and they were going to jail and dying of heart disease in disproportionate numbers.

But the corporate scarecrows? They couldn’t catch heart disease. The scarecrows couldn’t be sent to prison and they could live forever if the rich people kept stuffing them full of money.

Let me tell you: Once America decided that corporate scarecrows were people, that’s when all hell started to break loose!  Those corporations started going on a rampage, not just in America but all over the world. They messed up the rivers and the land and they kept stuffing more and more money into themselves, until finally some of them got so big you could not even see their heads anymore.

The corporations made decisions that mostly only helped other corporations.

Ordinary folks like you and like me, we couldn’t out-talk them. We couldn’t out-spend them. And we sure couldn’t outlive them. Things got worse and worse and worse for the rest of us, and we started fighting amongst ourselves a lot. Nobody seemed to know what was going wrong.

But then, just before everything went dark, a couple of the exceptionally good people had an idea. “Maybe we’re looking at this whole thing wrong!” they said.

They said, “Maybe the problem is that we’re not classifying everybody as people the right way.”

The rest of us sort of stood there, stumped, scratching our chins. (Behind us, while we were scratching our chins, the corporate scarecrows were ripping the tops off of mountains and stomping down whole forests of trees!)

We finally said to the exceptionally good people, “Well, okay. That could be right. What did you have in mind?”

And do you know what those good people did? They took a medical contraption out of a bag and they held it right up to this fat lady’s stomach. They pointed at her stomach and then something from inside showed up on a little screen. It looked sort of like one of those gummy bears that the children always love to eat.

“We know why things have gone wrong!” they said. “Do you see that thing in this lady’s stomach?”

Then the good people paused for dramatic effect.

We said yes. Yes, we saw it.

“That…” the good people said, “is a person!”

And the corporate scarecrows lived happily ever after.

Fundies In The Voting Booth...

...or, "Don't Whack Off in Wilmington", and Other Tales....

"Who are these people?"

I asked this question the other day of a friend of mine, after discussing the outlandish bullshit coming from the ultra Religious Right.  We were sitting in this place, one of my favorite breakfast-places in my hometown of Portland, Oregon.  Sitting there among the aging hippie boomers and the pierced/tattooed 'Portlandia' crowd who were busy getting their grub-on via French omelettes and organic side-salads with plenty of Stumptown Coffee's finest, it was a little hard to view the world as spinning off its sociopolitical axis.

"I don't know, Will.  I honestly don't know."  

She was telling the truth - neither she (or most others here in the People's Republic of Oregon) have any idea what these people are about.  The Religious Right has a guilty-pleasure allure to those of us who are fascinated with their efforts to destroy what's left of American culture, though - it's akin to watching a train-wreck, or seeing someone blow their lunch after riding the Tilt-A-Whirl at the county fair - we're horrified; yet compelled to watch.  

"Well, 1/3 of America - if the figures I've read are right, and I believe they are - are ultraRight Evangelicals.  Another 1/3 tend to vote that way.  Put 'em together, and it's a miracle Obama's in office.  The country's been making an inexorable move to the Right ever since 9/11."

She nodded, then sipped more coffee.  The look on her face told the story - like so many, she felt helpless to really do anything about the onslaught of Fundies like Rick Santorum, the homophobic rantings of people like David Fischer and Rick Barber, plus the full on race-to-the-bottom in American education, courtesy of the early efforts of R.J. Rushdoony and carried on by legions of homeschoolers as evidenced by the Creation Museum of Ken Ham and the wholesale rewrite of textbooks by the state of Texas.

"I read the other day that the city of Wilmington, Delaware passed a resolution calling on Congress to declare sperm the same as eggs, and give them 'personhood' rights.  I'm hoping it's a joke.  Otherwise, anyone who whacks-off in Wilmington could go to prison for murder."

Understand something.  My friend is an educator.  We went to college together.   She teaches English composition at one of the local high-schools, and is underpaid by any standard, especially considering that she completed her master's at Reed College, one of America's best private schools. 

Reed is an accredited college.  If Rick Santorum, the Fundies' darling in the Presidential race has his way, that won't be the case much longer -  he's in favor of pulling accreditation from any college or university which doesn't have an equal number of  'conservative professors' to counter the 'liberal influence' of America's higher-educational institutions (now, just how he'd do that is beyond any thinking person - the notions of 'liberal' vs. 'conservative' have nothing to do with teaching a set of facts - but that's rather Santorum's point, after all.  He's not interested in facts - he's interested in seeing that his brand of religion gains primacy in America).  This, of course, does not sit well with my friend.

"They've rewritten history," she said.  "They've rewritten science.  And, they have people who believe them."  Her voice had a resignation; it was like hearing, "Everyone now believes the earth is flat." 

It's not just outfits like the Creation Museum and Liberty University which is in the vanguard of rewriting history and science.  For every Fundie 'college' spouting a young-earth paleontology or a 'Christian nation' history of America, there are several like the benignly-named Discovery Institute, which publishes books like "The Devil's Delusion - Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions" (authored by a self styled 'thinker and raconteur' without a smidge of credentials).  

This sort of thing goes a long way toward legitimizing the Right's otherwise-indefensible positions on science and history - they can say "See!  We have think-tanks, just like you do!  Thing is, they support our position!"

(I've written several times about the long history of the far Right and the Christian Fundamentalist movement in America, and their anti-intellectual stance; it dates back to before the Revolution, and traces its origins to the border-ridings between Scotland and England, where mistrust of an educated populace is endemic.)

America's first colleges were religious.  These gave rise to a tradition of accrediting schools of pure religion right alongside real educational institutions.  As a consequence, arguments which should have been put to bed over a century ago are still alive and well; Fundies now look through a warped lens at the past - a past they do not understand - where life was simpler because 'God's laws' ruled the nation.

"They also vote", my friend continued.  "They vote."  

And why not?  They believe, like some isolated cargo-cult which believed that if they just made the right marks on paper that aircraft would appear by magic and drop parachutes full of Spam, condoms and bubblegum on their island.  If we only 'turn back to God', then crime will stop; the economy will correct itself by magic and there will be perfect harmony.  The best way to 'take America back', they believe, is to elect someone like Santorum, who believes the same thing.

Yes; they vote.  

And, they vote not just for people like Santorum.  By default, they vote against knowledge - and that's why Fundamentalism in America is not a harmless practice.  

When one asks, "What harm does it do, that these people believe the earth is 6,000 years old; that the Founders intended America to be a 'Christian nation' with other religions suppressed, and that homosexuality is a 'treatable disease'?   What harm does it do that they have their own museums; their own schools; their own culture?  Does it really hurt me that there's a dinosaur model wearing a saddle in Ken Ham's Creation Museum?  Does it hurt me that David Barton wants a theocracy in America?"

Yes, it does.  

"Do you think Santorum really has a chance?"  My friend had finished her coffee.   The bill was paid.  We were walking toward our respective vehicles in a light rain.

"Yeah, he does.  If he can force a floor-fight at the convention, he can wind up with the nomination.  If he can put the fear of 'God' - and Obama - in enough marginally-literate people in America, yes - he can get elected."

"I'm sorry to hear that," she said.

_________________________________

The odds don't look good.  For every theologian like Francis Collins, there are dozens of Fundies and powerful 'think tanks' like the aforementioned Discovery Institute, and the momentum appears to be against the enlightened and genuinely educated.

Meantime, people who are influenced by these people and who view voting for Fundie candidates as somehow returning America to a 'better time' are clueless enablers, engaging in the cognitive dissonance of belief.   

Ad interim, Santorum's star is on the rise.  It remains to be seen, as they say, whether he's got the staying-power to win a nomination and get himself elected - but from here, the view is depressing.

Don't whack off in Wilmington.