Wake Me Now

I’ve been working in a better direction, dammit, and the recent trivialities aren’t going to derail my ambitions.  Some men are jerks, and I’m not sure that can be changed.  Certainly can’t be changed by me as I have little desire to continue socializing with those types of folks, least of all in a “hobbying” arrangement where my own ability to get paid is determined by what I’m willing to tolerate and accept.  Sounds like any other job, sure, but it’s not — one’s body and mind can’t be bought and sold, nor should money be used to suppress one’s spirit so that another may feel comparatively more potent and powerful.  It’s a dumb arrangement that only has gotten dumber in today’s high-speed, competitive, instant gratification-seeking, “me me me” culture.

So, to get our mind off of such bullshit, let’s turn to the writings of Chris Hedges in his book American Fascists: The Christian Rught and the War on America, which I recently completed reading.

Beginning on page 90 (my own notes in purple):

The use of control and force is also designed to raise obedient, unquestioning and fearful children, children who as adults will not be tempted to challenge powerful male figures.  These children are conditioned to rely on external authority for moral choice [which ties in with the exo-skeleton claims of another article posted on the blog].  They obey out of fear and often repeat this pattern of fearful obedience as adults.  Refusal to submit to authority is heresy.  Raised in a home and a school where he or she is taught to see the world as one where the possibility of attack and danger lurks behind every crevice, the child learns to distrust outsiders.  The benign and trivial take on satanic proportions.  There is no safety.  Satan is always present.  The pathology of fear, ingrained in the child, plays itself out in the constant search for phantom enemies who seek the destruction of the adult believer.  These elusive and protean enemies, always there to lure the believer toward self-destruction, must be defeated to establish a world, ushered in by Christ’s return, where no one will be able to do them harm, where the irrational is abolished and the binary lines of right and wrong are enforced by a Christian government.  Only then will the believers be safe.

One of the tools used to keep believers obedient is the “prophecy” of the Rapture.  One day, without warning, the saved will be lifted into heaven and the unsaved left behind to suffer a sever-year period of torment and chaos known as the Tribulation.  This event will, believers are told, suddenly and unexpectedly tear apart families.  Those who are not good Christians will lose their mothers and fathers or their children.  The big-budget films Apocalypse, Revelation, Tribulation, and Left Behind, based on the Left Behind series by LaHaye and Jenkins, have popularized these fears, the fims employing Hollywood stars such as Gary Busey, Margot Kidder and Corbin Bernsen.  The films show parents left behind as their infants have been raptured into heaven, screaming “My babies, my babies!”  Abandoned teddy bears and diapers litter empty airplane seats.  Children come home to find their parents gone.  The world descends into anarchy, with trains, planes and cars, now without engineers, pilots or drivers, crashing in deadly fireballs.  In an instant, the United States, with as much as half of its population lifted into heaven, is reduced to the status of a developing country, dominated now by an ascendant Europe that carries out the will of Satan through the Antichrist.

This conditioning of children to fear nonconformity and blindly obey ensures continued obedience as adults.  The difficult task of learning how to make moral choices, how to accept personal responsibility, how to deal with the chaos of human life is handed over to God-like authority figures.  The process makes possible a perpetuation of childhood.  It allows the adult to bask in the warm glow and magic of divine protection.  It masks from men and from others the array of human weaknesses, including our deepest dreads, our fear of irrelevance and death, our vulnerability and uncertainty.  It also makes it difficult, if not impossible, to build mature, loving relationships, for the believer is told it is all about them, about their needs, their desires, and above all, their protection and advancement.  Relationships, even with families, splinter and fracture.  Those who adopt the belief system, who find in the dictates of the church and its male leaders a binary world of right and wrong, build an exclusive and intolerant comradeship that subtly or overtly shuns and condemns the “unsaved.”  People are no longer judged by their intrinsic qualities, by their actions or capacity for self-sacrifice and compassion, but by the rigidity of their obedience.  This defines the good and bad, the Christian and the infidel.  Ad this obedience is a blunt and effective weapon against the possibility of a love that could overpower the dictates of the hierarchy.  In many ways it is love the leaders fear most, for it is love that unleashes passions and bonds that defy the carefully constructed edifices that keep followers trapped and enclosed.  And while they speak often about love, as they do about family, it is the cohesive bonds created by family and love they war against.

Continuing on page 92:

Joost A. M. Meerloo, the author of The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing, wrote:

“Living requires mutuality of giving and taking.  Above all, to live is to love.  And many people are afraid to take the responsibility of loving; of having an emotional investment in their fellow beings.  They want only to be loved and to be protected; they are afraid of being hurt and rejected.

“It is important for us to realize that emphasis on conformity and the fear of spontaneous living can have an effect almost as devastating as the totalitarian’s deliberate assault on the mind…  Trained into conformity the child may well grow up into an adult who welcomes with relief the authoritarian demands of a totalitarian leader.  It is the welcome repetition of an old pattern that can be followed without investment of a new emotional energy.”

All those who do not subscribe to this male fantasy, or who were born female or gay, must be pressured to conform.  By disempowering women, by returning them to their “proper” place as a subservient partner in the male-dominated home, the movement creates the larger paradigm of the Christian state.  The men’s movement Promise Keepers [what a coincidence, one of my escort clients was a self-proclaimed proud Promise Keeper---what bitter irony there...his arrogant ass is now divorced after an ugly, 2-year court battle], which at its height a decade ago drew tens of thousands of men into football stadiums, called on men to “take back” their role as the head of the household. The movement used the verse from Ephesians that calls on wives to “be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord” (Ephesians 5:22) to give the stance biblical authority.  Women were not allowed to attend the events, although some could volunteer at concession stands outside.  The founder of the group, former Colorado football coach Bill McCartney, called the movement’s battle against abortion the “Second Civil War” and lambasted gays and lesbians as “stark raving mad.”  He dismissed gays and lesbians as “a group of people who don’t reproduce, yet want to be compared to people who do reproduce, and that lifestyle doesn’t entitle anyone to special rights.”  The organization mounted campaigns such as “Real Men Matter,” in which men were instructed to recover their maleness in a “morally bankrupt, godless society.”  The goal of the movement, strongly supported by Dobson, was designed to help men regain their place in society.  And while Promise Keepers as an organization is on the wane, the agenda it promoted is firmly embedded in the masculinity cult of the Christian Right.

In the megachurches, the pastor, nearly always male, is obeyed by the congregation.  It is the pastor who interprets the word of God.  This pattern is established on a smaller scale in the home.  The make leader governs through a divine mandate, a mandate that cannot be challenged since it comes from God.  And these leaders speak often about taking their cues directly from God.  These concentric male fiefdoms, radiating out from the home, do not permit revolt, discussion or dissent.  And once women buy into this message, one that supposedly protects their families, makes their boys into men, their husbands into protectors and themselves into godly Christian women, they cede personal, political and economic power.  Those who are weak or different, those who do not conform to the rigid stereotype, those who have other ways of being, must be forced by the stern father to conform and obey.  If they do not bend, they will be destroyed by God.

Turning to page 197:

Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor nat Harvard Divinity School, told us that when we were his age—he was then close to 80—we would all be fighting the “Christian fascists.”

The warning, given to me nearly 25 years ago, came at the time Pat Robertson and other radio and televangelists began squeaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts at taking control of all institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government.  Its stated goal was to use the United States to create a global Christian empire.  It was hard, at the time, to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of leaders in the Christian Right who expounded it.  But Adams warned us against the blindness caused by intellectual snobbery.  The Nazis, he said, were not going to return with swastikas and brown shirts.  Their ideological inheritors in America had found a mask for fascism in patriotism and the pages of the Bible.

Adams was not a man to use the “fascist” lightly.  He was in Germany in 1935 and 1936 and worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as the Confessing Church, with dissidents such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  Adams was eventually detained and interrogated by the Gestapo, who suggested he might want to reconsider returning to the United States.  It was a suggestion he followed.  He left on a night train with framed portraits of Adolf Hitler placed over the contents inside his suitcase to hide the rolls of home movie film he took of the so-called German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi, and the few individuals who defied them, including the theologians Karl Barth and Albert Schweitzer.  [...]

He saw in the Christian Right, long before we did, disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church and the Nazi Party, similarities, he said that would, in the event of prolonged social instability, catastrophe or national crisis, see American fascists, under the guise of Christianity, rise to dismantle the open society.  He despaired of liberals, who he said, as in Nazi Germany, mouthed empty platitudes about dialogue and inclusiveness that made them ineffectual and impotent.  Liberals, he said, did not understand the power and allure of evil or the cold reality of how the world worked.  His long discussions with church leaders and theologians in Nazi Germany—some of whom collaborated with the regime, some of whom resisted and most of whom remained silent—were the defining experiences of his life.  He was preoccupied with how liberal democracies, which could never hope to compete with the fantastic, utopian promises of personal and collective salvation offered by totalitarian movements, could resist.  Adams was a close friend of the theologian Paul Tillich, a vocal opponent of the Nazis who in 1933 became the first non-Jewish professor barred from German universities and soon went into exile.  Tillich, he reminded us, taught that the role of the church was in society, that the depth of its commitment and faith were measured by its engagement with politics and culture.  It was this engagement that alone gave faith its vibrancy and worth.  Tillich did not retreat from the looming crisis around him.  He spoke out against the intolerance and hatred preached by the Nazis before they came to power.  And Tillich angrily chastised those in the church who, preoccupied with narrow Christian piety, were passive.  He thundered against this complacency and begged Christians to begin to “take time seriously.”

Adams had seen how the mask of religion hides irreligion.  He reminded us that “our world is full to bursting with faiths, each contending for allegiance.”  He told us that Hitler claimed to teach the meaning of faith.  Mussolini used to shout, “Believe, follow, and act,” and told his followers that fascism, before being a party, had been a religion.  Human history is not the struggle between religion and irreligion, Adams said.  “It is veritably a battle of faiths, a battle of the gods who claim human allegiance.”

Continuing on page 199:

Democracy is not, as these Christo-fascists claim, the enemy of faith.  Democracy keeps religious faith in the private sphere, ensuring that all believers have an equal measure of protection and practice mutual tolerance.  Democracy sets no religious ideal.  It simply ensures coexistence.  It permits the individual to avoid being subsumed by the crowd—the chief goal of totalitarianism, which seeks to tell all citizens what to believe, how to behave and how to speak.  The call to obliterate the public and private wall that keeps faith the prerogative of the individual means the obliteration of democracy.  Once this wall between church and state, or party and state, is torn down, there is an open and subtle warfare against love, which in an open society is another exclusive prerogative of the individual.  In the totalitarian world, there are those worthy of love and those unworthy of it.  In the totalitarian world, the private sphere becomes the concern of the state.  This final restriction of the freedom to love—the freedom of a Christian to love a Muslim or the freedom to love those branded by the state as the enemy—heralds the death of the open society.  The promises of Christian harmony, unity, happiness—in short a utopia—held forth by the dominionists have a seductive quality that will never be countered by the tepid offerings of democrats, who at best can offer citizens the opportunity to seek their own happiness and construct their own meaning.

We must, Adams told us, watch closely what these new fascists accused their opponents of planning.  For radical movements expose their own intentions and goals by tarring their enemies with their own nefarious motives.  These movements assume that those they attack are, like themselves, also hiding their true agenda, also plotting to silence and eradicate opponents.  This common form of “projection”was, on a smaller scale, on display during the Florida recount in 2000.  The Republicans accused Al Gore of attempting to steal the election through court fiat, the very theft being secretly orchestrated by the Republicans.  Richard Hofstadter was one of the first to grasp the role of projection in “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”:

“It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him.  The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry.  Secret organizations set up to combat secret organizations give the same flattery.  The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy.  The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through “front” groups and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy.  Spokesmen of the various fundamentalist anti-Communist “crusades” openly express their admiration for the dedication and discipline the Communist causes calls forth.”

Adams, like Bonhoeffer, did not believe that those who would fight effectly in coming time of turmoil, a fight that for him was an integral part of the biblical message, would arise from the institutional church or the liberal, secular elite.  His critique of the prominent research universities, along with the media, was withering.  These institutions—self-asborbed, compromised by their close relationship with government and corporations, given enough of the pie to be complacent—were unwilling to deal with the fundamental moral questions and inequities of the age.  They had no stomach for a battle that might cost them their prestige and comfort.  He saw how easily the German universities had been Nazified.  He told me, I suspect only half in jest, that if the Nazis took over America, “60 percent of the Harvard faculty would begin their lectures with the Nazi salute.”  He had seen academics at the University of Heidelberg, including the philosopher Martin Heidegger, raise their arms stiffly to students before class.  Adams also reminded us that American intellectuals and industrialists openly flirted with fascism in the 1930s.  Mussolini’s “corporatism,” which created an unchecked industrial and business aristocracy, appealed to many American industrialists at the time, who saw it as an effective counterweight to Roosevelt’s New Deal.  In July 1934, Fortune magazine lavished praise on the Italian dictator for his defanging of labor unions and his empowerment of industrialists at the expense of the workers.  And Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here told the story of a conservative politician, “Buzz” Windrip, backed by a nationally syndicated radio host, Bishop Peter Paul Prang, who is elected president and becomes a dictator to save the nation from welfare cheats, sex, crime and a liberal press.

The New York Times in 1944 asked Vice President Henry Wallace to answer the questions: What is a fascist?  How many fascists have we?  How dangerous are they?  The Vice President’s answers were published on April 9, 1944, as the war against the Axis powers and Japan was drawing to a close.  He wrote:

“The really dangerous American fascist…is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way.  The American fascist would prefer not to use violence.  His method is to poison the channels of public information.  With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.

“They claim to be superpatriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution.  They demand free enterprise but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest.  Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjugation.”

Adams knew that resentments and bigotry lurk below the surface of all democratic societies and can be roused, under the right conditions, to promote a creed that calls for the destruction of democracy.  What is evil about these systems of intolerance and persecution is not the foot soldiers who carry out the crimes, but the organization that mobilizes and unleashes these dark passions.  He worried that such a movement was, late in his life, again on the march.  It was more sophisticated than in  the past, more cleverly packaged, and this time without serious opposition.  The hatreds were again being stoked.  The labor unions and progressives who had been able to battle back in the 1930s were spent forces.  The despair of tens of millions of Americans, unable to find manufacturing jobs or work that offered fair wages and benefits, would lead them, he knew, into the arms of these fanatical preachers.  The rage of those abandoned by the economy, the fears and concerns of a beleaguered and insecure middle class, and the numbing isolation that comes with the loss of community, would be the kindling for a dangerous mass movement.  If these dispossessed were not reincorporated into mainstream society, if they eventually lost all hope of finding good, stable jobs and opportunities for themselves and their children—in short, the promise of a brighter future—the specter of American fascism would beset the nation.  This despair, this loss of hope, this denial of a future, led the desperate into the arms of those who promised miracles and dreams of apocalyptic glory.  Adams had seen it once.  He knew what it looked like.  He feared it was coming again.