The Invisible Library

Ever wonder what drives otherwise decent folk into the arms of religion? Sure you do! Chris Hedges, author of American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America did too and went looking to see what he could find out. Turns out, it’s the same thing that drives a lot of dirt poor people all over the world into all manner of fanaticism– despair:

The engine that drives the radical Christian Right in the United States, the most dangerous mass movement in American history, is not religiosity, but despair. It is a movement built on the growing personal and economic despair of tens of millions of Americans, who watched helplessly as their communities were plunged into poverty by the flight of manufacturing jobs, their families and neighborhoods torn apart by neglect and indifference, and who eventually lost hope that America was a place where they had a future.

This despair crosses economic boundaries, of course, enveloping many in the middle class who live trapped in huge, soulless exurbs where, lacking any form of community rituals or centers, they also feel deeply isolated, vulnerable and lonely. Those in despair are the most easily manipulated by demagogues, who promise a fantastic utopia, whether it is a worker’s paradise, fraternite-egalite-liberte, or the second coming of Jesus Christ. Those in despair search desperately for a solution, the warm embrace of a community to replace the one they lost, a sense of purpose and meaning in life, the assurance they are protected, loved and worthwhile.

During the past two years of work on the book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, I kept encountering this deadly despair. Driving down a highway lined with gas stations, fast food restaurants and dollar stores I often got vertigo, forgetting for a moment if I was in Detroit or Kansas City or Cleveland. There are parts of the United States, including whole sections of former manufacturing centers such as Ohio, that resemble the developing world, with boarded up storefronts, dilapidated houses, pot-hole streets and crumbling schools. The end of the world is no longer an abstraction to many Americans.

[…] There has been, along with the creation of an American oligarchy, a steady Weimarization of the American working class. The top one percent of American households have more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined. This figure alone should terrify all who care about our democracy. As Plutarch reminded us “an imbalance between the rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.”

The stories believers such as Learned told me of their lives before they found Christ were heart breaking. These chronicles were about terrible pain, severe financial difficulties, struggles with addictions or childhood sexual or physical abuse, profound alienation and often thoughts about suicide. They were chronicles without hope. The real world, the world of facts and dispassionate intellectual inquiry, the world where all events, news and information were not filtered through this comforting ideological prism, the world where they were left out to dry, abandoned by a government hostage to corporations and willing to tolerate obscene corporate profits, betrayed them.

They hated this world. And they willingly walked out on this world for the mythical world offered by these radical preachers, a world of magic, a world where God had a divine plan for them and intervened on a daily basis to protect them and perform miracles in their lives. The rage many expressed to me towards those who challenge this belief system, to those of us who do not accept that everything in the world came into being during a single week 6,000 years ago because it says so in the Bible, was a rage born of fear, the fear of being plunged back into a reality-based world where these magical props would no longer exist, where they would once again be adrift, abandoned and alone.

The danger of this theology of despair is that it says that nothing in the world is worth saving. It rejoices in cataclysmic destruction. It welcomes the frightening advance of global warming, the spiraling wars and violence in the Middle East and the poverty and neglect that have blighted American urban and rural landscapes as encouraging signs that the end of the world is close at hand.

Believers, of course, clinging to this magical belief, which is a bizarre form of spiritual Darwinism, will be raptured upwards while the rest of us will be tormented with horrors by a warrior Christ and finally extinguished. This obsession with apocalyptic violence is an obsession with revenge. It is what the world, and we who still believe it is worth saving, deserve.

Those who lead the movement give their followers a moral license to direct this rage and yearning for violence against all those who refuse to submit to the movement, from liberals, to “secular humanists,” to “nominal Christians,” to intellectuals, to gays and lesbians, to Muslims. These radicals, from James Dobson to Pat Robertson, call for a theocratic state that will, if it comes to pass, bear within it many of the traits of classical fascism.

The Fear gets you ever time. The moment you fear something, it has control over you. And God fearing Christians (or Muslims or Hindus, etc.) are the most easily controlled, as with a silent God who makes no demands but through those who claim to work in his name (for a price and a pat and sometimes always an awful lot more) there is no way to protest or offer a counter argument. It’s do as your told by whatever authority figure promises the best fairy tales and uses (or abuses) you the least, or else suffer the consequences (enumerated in gory detail all throughout the Holy scripture). That is how republics fall, not through outside corruption but because their citizens were too timid, afraid or cowed by superstition to demand dignity. Once you believe in a supreme Caesar who controls everything, you’ll believe anything else that reinforces that, especially if it’s sold to you at the local Wal Mart or wrapped in the noble crusade of saving unborn babies. That it keeps you tired, poor and hungry for something else is not a side effect of sin, it is the result of salvation.

Link via Bookslut.

If it’s Christmas, it’s time for the usual blather about the supposed Secular War on Christmas. Which, historically, is a neat little reversal that Bill O’Reilly and his ilk have stumbled upon. If you’re over the age of 20, you may remember that up until the early nineties, there really was a cultural war against Christmas, only it was being perpetrated by religious fundamentalists, not against them. Every year, Christian groups, some of them at least wearing a mask of civility and mainstream belief, conducted a campaign to remind people of the “Reason for the Season,” to try and retake the holy day from the evil secularists who had commercialized the true spirit out of Christmas. They wanted all the Christmas trees taken out of the malls, no carols on the radio and all references to Santa and his reindeer excised form the season entirely. Christmas was a solemn religious occasion, they intoned, not a festival of gift giving and materialism.

At some point that got reversed, into the now familiar claim that we secularists are somehow trying to suck all the meaning out of Christmas by trying to have all the Christmas trees taken out of the malls, no carols on the radio and all references to Santa and his reindeer excised form the season entirely. Celebrating Christmas openly is a flagrant disregard to the varied and multicultural celebrations of indigenous people all over the world, we secularists supposedly shriek, and we shouldn’t be forcing any one belief on everyone.

The whole business about the true Christmas spirit being religious rather than secular is ironic, seeing as how it was Christians who stole the holiday from pagans to begin with. It’s also bullshit.

Up until the seventeenth century, Europeans celebrated Christmas the same way we Americans now celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day, or Cinco de Mayo or Thursday: by getting drunk and breaking shit. Christmas revelry was so bad that when the founding fathers settled down to the day to day governing of the new country, they outlawed Christmas. And it was by unanimous assent. No one wanted anything to do with that noisy, brawling European jackassery. It wasn’t until the mid nineteenth century that the tree and wreath and quiet celebration with family became popular and it was a British import, from Queen Victoria who had grown fond of how her German husband celebrated the day.

So which religious impulse do we follow? The ancient Winter feast in honor of the returning Sun? Or the mythical mass and two week-long exercise in self flagellation that was the traditional Christian way to honor the birth of the returning Son? Truth be told, it’s neither.

If the modern meaning of Christmas has its source in any one thing, it is a work of fiction. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol has become the basic template for the Modern view of the holiday. It’s basic moral, that in this coldest month of the year (at least in the Northern hemisphere) we should take a moment to be thankful for what we have, especially each other, remember the past, ponder the future and try and be a little more just and kind to those around us, resonates with everyone. There’s no need to drag in a magical carpenter and three itinerant astrologers, but neither do we need to overdo the gift giving. Keep it simple, personal and heartfelt. That is the secular spirit of Christmas, the one everyone really celebrates, today. Weather or not it was always so is not the point. Traditions change. And in the waning days of religiosity, change is usually accompanied by wailing and drama from the religious dinosaurs who wish the secular comet weren’t plunging into the atmosphere. But it is and you can’t stop it. That’s life.

That we still do celebrate Christmas, even we secular atheists, should surprise no one. It just isn’t the Christmas your grand pappy remembers or that your ancestors tried to forget.

Yesterday, I received this frankly baffling email:

Hi. My name is Eugene Gershin. Perhaps we have met online, but more probably you don’t know me from Adam. I monitor blogs for SamsonBlinded, and came across your post.

I’d like to welcome you to look at Obadiah Shoher’s blog. Obadiah - an anonymous Israeli politician - writes extremely controversial articles about Israel, the Middle East politics, and terrorism.

Shoher is equally critical of Jewish and Muslim myths, and advocates political rationalism instead of moralizing.

Google banned our site from the AdWords, Yahoo blocked most pages, and Amazon deleted all reviews of Obadiah’s book, Samson Blinded: A Machiavellian Perspective on the Middle East Conflict.

Nevertheless, 170,000 people from 78 countries read the book.

Various Internet providers ban us periodically, but you can look up the site on search engines. The mirror www.terrorism-in-israel.com/blog currently works.

Please help us spread Obadiah’s message, and mention the blog in one of your posts, or link to us from invisiblelibrary.blogspot.com. I would greatly appreciate your comments.

Best wishes,
Eugene Gershin

First off, Eugene is right, I don’t know him from Adam. I don’t recognize him form the comment threads on any of my regular reads and he’s never commented on this blog. And seeing as he wants a link form the old blogger version that I shut down over a year ago, I’m guessing he hasn’t read anything I’ve written here lately.

But more to the point: Who is Obadiah Shoher, and how exactly does one become an anonymous Israeli politician? Israel hasn’t been around that long and it’s not that big so as to have politicians that could be anonymous, if we can even grant that there ever could be such a beast as an anonymous politician to begin with. I suspect they sit at the same lunch table with tiny giants and compassionate conservatives.

Googling his name doesn’t really answer the question, as it’s apparently a pen name for someone who describes himself as having a Machiavellian perspective, which is refreshing in it’s honesty, if still a bit scary.

Shoher’s “political rationalism” advocates an Imperialist Israel that controls the entire Middle East. He also applauded the war between Israel and Hezbullah over the summer, and seems to advocate war (nuclear or just good old killing) with well, everyone within reach of Israel’s missiles. It’s a little hard to make out just what policies he’s advocating from his site’s entries as they ramble all over the map of Cloud Kuckooland without ever making a real point. But the general impression one gets is that he’s awfully fond of the idea of starting wars he’ll never have to personally fight. Which makes me wonder how he managed to avoid getting appointed to some high ranking post in the Bush Administration. I guess that’s one of the downsides to being an anonymous politician.

I don’t know what to make of Amazon deleting reviews of his silly book, unless they were simply so racist and militant that they constituted hate speech. Which is not out of the question. Right wingers like Shoher tend to bring out the worst in those with poor impulse control and childish world views.

Why they would think I might be interested in promoting such bloody and fantastical nonsense escapes me. I doubt that Eugene is really singling me out here. This is very likely just a rare bit of kook spam but I clearly got on someone’s list because if something I wrote here or on my old blog.

So, let me make something clear: I never have and never will espouse an ideology like Shoher’s. I’m morally opposed to Imperialism and war, no matter what the excuse. If my anti-religious stance has given someone the impression that I’m just another antimuslim or antisemite ranter, let me clear that up as well: I’m opposed to religious indoctrination, not religious people. You have every right to believe any damn fool thing you like. But I am neither obligated to play make believe with you or to suffer your ignorant jibber jabber, especially when that barely coherent rambling involves celebrating murder and advocating killing as if it were just part of the daily routine of politics.

I’m not in the habit of discouraging people from reading this site but Mr. Shoher and Eugene, you are not welcome here. Tolerance only goes so far but it does not mean that I will suffer idiots and fools.

Mary Cheney’s baby finds a strange defender in the form of Dan Savage:

it feels strange to rush to the defense of Mary Cheney, the useless dyke daughter of our malevolent vice president. But I knew I had to speak up after Janice Crouse of Concerned Women For America called Cheney’s pregnancy “unconscionable.” A few thoughts for you, Janice:

First, because Christianists like you can’t come out and say they oppose Cheney’s pregnancy because it says right there in Leviticus that Mary Cheney should be put to death (along with all adulterers, rebellious slaves, and lobstermen), they’re condemning Cheney for creating a “fatherless” child, a child that will have no masculine role models. Have you gotten a good look at Heather Poe, Mary Cheney’s partner of 15 years? My son has two fathers, but Heather Poe’s left labial lip is butcher than both of us put together. Even if Mary and Heather planned on raising their child on a deserted island somewhere, their kid wouldn’t want for masculine role models. And if things get too girly at Mary and Heather’s place, Grandpa Dick can always take the kid hunting.

Second, fathers are great—my son couldn’t agree more, Janice. And guess what? A lesbian couple can’t have a child without one. For all we know, Mary and Heather, like so many other lesbian couples, used a known gay male sperm donor—Ken Mehlman? Mark Foley? Ted Haggard?—and this kid is going to have a father in his life.

Third, Concerned Women For America doesn’t think Mary Cheney should have a baby. Great, fine, whatever. But Mary Cheney’s uterus belongs to Mary Cheney, Janice, and she can do whatever the fuck she likes with it. She can have babies with it or keep her car keys in it or fill it up with potting soil and plant tulips in it. It’s her fucking uterus, Janice, not yours. And if you keep inserting yourself into it, people are gonna think you’re a dyke too, or Heather Poe is going to show up on your doorstep and beat the holy living hell out of you.

Fourth, Concerned Women For America and the Christian Coalition and Mitt Romney and Pat Robertson have all made it clear that they think it’s wrong for lesbians to have children. Would someone in the media please ask them the obvious follow-up question: How the fuck do they propose to stop lesbians from having children? Post two members of the National Guard at the entrance to every lesbian vagina in the country? Forced sterilizations at women’s music festivals? Mandatory abortions for every lesbian who does manage to get herself pregnant?

Fifth, up in Canada—sane, sane Canada—a bill to reopen, and possibly reverse, the decision to legalize gay marriage failed by a wide margin in Parliament Thursday, December 7.

BBC:

Iran’s foreign minister has rejected criticism of a two-day conference being held in Iran to examine whether the Holocaust actually happened.
Manouchehr Mottaki told participants the event did not seek to confirm or deny the Holocaust, but rather to allow people to “express their views freely”.
Israel’s prime minister has condemned the gathering as “a sick phenomenon”.
[…]Participants include a number of well-known “revisionist” Western academics. American David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, is to present a paper.

This is a mockery of the entire concept of the Open Society. This is a bunch of conservatives and theocrats putting on a pantomime to show the world that fostering an air of open inquiery leads to nothing but a kook convention. This way they can say, “Well we tried your Multiculturalism and look what it did! Oh well, back to the Bhurkas and female circumcision.”

Christian Conservatives have been trying this nonsense for a few years, here in the US. It’s gotten so bad that we don’t even recognize it anymore as a mockery and think now that events like Justice Sunday, which are meetings held by Evangelical Megachurches to discuss legal issues, is just another feature of the fair and balanced media landscape.

Theocrats and Dominionists, here and in other parts of the world, have twisted language to suit their own vile needs. They’ve decided that the simplest way to get what they want is to call whatever their agenda is another name, something innocuous, that has the ring of something benign and maybe even liberal. If the opposite is actually the case, so much the better. Everyone gets duped, no one knows what the fuck is goig on and in the middle of this confusion, while we’re all parsing their mush mouth language, they slip the constitution out from under us and in the name of the Glorious and Holy Revolution, we slide into Fascism and religious dictatorship. Yipee!

Guradian:

Dozens of literary masterpieces and international bestsellers have been banned in Iran in a dramatic rise in censorship that has plunged the country’s publishing industry into crisis.

Companies that once specialised in popular fiction and other money-spinners are being restricted to academic texts under a cultural freeze instigated by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Several thousand new and previously published works have been blacklisted by Iran’s culture and Islamic guidance ministry, which vets all books.

The ban includes current and recent American best sellers, as well as classics, plus current international novels by Iranian expats and pre-revolutionary authors.

However, publishers say many books are being banned arbitrarily. “We had adapted to the previous policy but now that is annulled and they are imposing their own personal taste,” said Mohammed Ali Jafarieh, head of the Sales publishing house. “Publishers are being hurt. We rely on multiple print runs to make a profit but if these are being denied we cannot make any money.”

The rise in book censorship mirrors repression in other spheres. In September the reformist newspaper Shargh was closed after publishing a cartoon depicting President George Bush, disguised as a horse, debating with a donkey under a halo, widely seen as representing Mr Ahmadinejad. The publishers launched a replacement newspaper, Rouzegar, but it was ordered to close after five days.

This isn’t just a case of a hardline fundamentalist aligned government cracking down on some literature that isn’t sufficiently deferential to it’s particular brand of fairy tale. It’s a political statement. This is the Iranian government saying a big fat fuck you to the West, which of course is only going to bulster the case for the Right in claiming this as a Monumental Clash of Cultures. Or it would, if the idiots on the right promoting this Culture War (or a War on Culture) weren’t trying to ban some of the same books. But I’m sure that continuing to refer to them as the Axis of Evil doesn’t help matters any.

I would think that by the 21st century, we wouldn’t have to keep arguing for  the bennifts of an open society versus a closed one but sometimes, the same old song still has a beat you can dance to.

Pam over at Pandagon beat me to the story about the Gerogia Mom who wants to ban Harry Potter books in school here because they indoctinate kids into Wicca, cause school shottings, and acne:

A woman who maintains that the Harry Potter books are an attempt to teach children witchcraft is pushing for the second time to have them banned from school libraries.

Laura Mallory, a mother of four from the Atlanta suburb of Loganville, told a Georgia Board of Education officer that the books by British author J.K. Rowling, sought to indoctrinate children as Wiccans, or practitioners of religious witchcraft.

Referring to the recent rash of deadly assaults at schools, Mallory said books that promote evil - as she claims the Potter ones do - help foster the kind of culture where school shootings happen.

That would not happen if students instead read the Bible, Mallory said.

OK, I made up the bit about the books causing acne, but its just as plausible. This woman wouldn’t know a Wiccan if one walked up to her and said “Merry meet”. She probably head the word somewhere and learned that it was the modern religion of “witchcraft” and flipped out like all these ditzy Georgia soccer moms do. A couple years back the local paper advertised a Harry Potter book burning just across the border at a church in South Carolina. That’s the mentality we’re talking about here. Wicca, Satanism, school shootings, they’re all related in her twitterpated little mind. Harry Potter is just the most recent and convenient icon for religious nuts to attach their ire to. Before Harry Potter it was Marylyn Manson, and before that it was Ozzy, and Kiss and Led Zeppelin, preceded by Elvis Presley, then Swing Music, then Ice cream parlors and the evils of the zipper. And flappers. let’s not forget how flappers (and bobbed haircuts for girls) were supposed to drive us all to Hell in a merry little handbasket.

None of this nonsense addresses the real reason school shootings happen, though. Most of the kids who have gone into their schools and shot people did so because of the stringent enforcement of cultural and social conformity. These kids were outcasts, bullied and made fun of for years until they couldn’t take it anymore.

As for the guy who shot up the school last month and the one who shot up the Amish school last week, they were severely disturbed men with violence issues and a pedophilia streek a mile wide. if they hadn’t have shot up schools after raping girls, they would be running for Rep. Foley’s seat in Congress.

So yeah, there are weirdoes and disturbed individuals with easy access to guns and internet porn out there. They are a real problem. But so far, none of them have had dogeared copies of The Prisoner of Azkaban in their pockets. And they didn’t listen to Kiss records either.

The revised Player’s Guide to the Catholic Church is about to be released and there are a few changes to the Doctrine of the Faith that old Pope Rat has seen fit to make. Most noteworthy is the abolition of Limbo, which has many die hard players up in arms.

“I have sent countless souls to limbo!” exclaimed one adamant young player named Adolf, “Now where are they going to go?”

“what’s next?” asked a skeptical Bishop, “Reduce Vampire hitpoints from holy water?”

While the Pope acknowledged that some of the revised rules are controversial, he has stated publicly that it is all simply to make game play more streamlined and easier for new players to pick up the rules quicker, “It’s hard to attract new players to a system that is so outdated. All the other religions have already switched over to the 20d system, for Christ’s sake! All I’, doing is modernizing the Church’s rules a bit while keeping the same flavor of play that our fans have come to expect.”

No news yet on whether or not the rules restricting use of altar boys to seventh level clerics and above will stay the same.

seriously though, if the Pope can just change the rules of theology, just because they are unpopular and no one believes them anymore, than maybe we can really streamline this whole religion thing down to just the bare bones, maybe a few deacons in casual wear offering pamphlets with a few words of generic advice and a stern foot rub.

Why stop with Limbo? After all, most Catholics hardly take the Pope seriously anymore and it’s been decades since anyone has mentioned the whole Infallibility thing, so maybe it’s time to retire the funny hat as well.

Here’s a list from the ALA of the most challenged and banned books in the country. Bet you can’t guess what the most banned book is. Hint: it’s about a boy with glasses who goes to a special school.

What’s your favorite banned book? Let me know in comments.

This week is Banned Books Week and of course, some people don’t like the word “banned”:

Judy Platt with the Association of American Publishers is a proponent of Banned Books Week. But not even she could come up with a book that has been banned.

“I can’t think of any book that has been banned across the country.”

Phil Burress with Citizens for Community Values says the event is a fraud put on by the American Library Association.

“What people need to understand is that this is the American Library Association’s way of trying to censor those who exercise their free speech rights and say that there are books in the library that should not be available to children.”

These are the same people who often don’t like the word “book” either unless it is preceded by the words “The Good” (a euphemism I’ve never really cared for, as it carries with it the implicite assumption that if this is The One and Only Good Book than whatever subject covered in all those other Books is by definition Bad).

But they’re missing the point. The ALA wouldn’t have to sponsor a Banned Book Week if idiots didn’t keep trying to ban books. That’s the operative word, trying. Because while we no longer ban books on a national level, it wasn’t that long ago that we did. Not that illiterate jackasses would know that, since they weren’t the ones trying find a copy of Ulysses or Lolita back in the sixties when those books were still being seized by customs officials.

Hat tip to Bookslut for reminding me it was one of my favorite weeks of the year.