Tales From George Bush’s America…Special Katrina Remembrance Edition
One year ago today the United States lost a city. And if you’re still wondering why reconstruction has been taking so long to even get really started, then you’ve been missing the point of the past five years. Digby has a post up, linking to a Frank Rich column that pretty much nails it, but I wouldn’t go reading it if you’re still not ready to see that open sewer that is the republican party today for what it is…
Douglas Brinkley, the Tulane University historian who wrote the best-selling account of Katrina, “The Great Deluge,” is worried that even now the White House is escaping questioning about what it is up to (and not) in the Gulf. “I don’t think anybody’s getting the Bush strategy,” he said when we talked last week. “The crucial point is that the inaction is deliberate — the inaction is the action.” As he sees it, the administration, tacitly abetted by New Orleans’s opportunistic mayor, Ray Nagin, is encouraging selective inertia, whether in the rebuilding of the levees (“Only Band-Aids have been put on them”), the rebuilding of the Lower Ninth Ward or the restoration of the wetlands. The destination: a smaller city, with a large portion of its former black population permanently dispersed. “Out of the Katrina debacle, Bush is making political gains,” Mr. Brinkley says incredulously. “The last blue state in the Old South is turning into a red state.”
The inaction is the action… People who are thinking that the devistation of New Orleans, and the Bush gang’s shockingly callow response to it are going to hurt the republicans politically still aren’t getting it. New Orleans is dead, but Louisiana is red. The GOP is counting it as a plus, never doubt it.
I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: "C-Students frm Yale."
George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences.
To say somebody is a PP is to make perfectly respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete’s foot. The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr. Hervey Cleckley, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Medical College of Georgia, published in 1941. Read it!
Some people are born deaf, some are born blind or whatever, and this book is about congenitally defective human beings of a sort that is making this whole country and many other parts of the planet go completely haywire nowadays. These were people born without consciences, and suddenly they are taking charge of everything.
PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!
And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And they are waging a war that is making billionaires out of millionaires, and trillionaires out of billionaires, and they own television, and they bankroll George Bush, and not because he’s against gay marriage.
So many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick. They have taken charge. They have taken charge of communications and the schools, so we might as well be Poland under occupation.
They might have felt that taking our country into an endless war was simply something decisive to do. What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is they are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin’ day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with any doubts, for the simple reason that they don’t give a fuck what happens next. Simply can’t. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In these Times, and kiss my ass!
This is why George Bush could strum a guitar while New Orleans died. Last year, as the appalling scope of the disaster just kept getting more and more worse, and Brad DeLong was saying, astonished, "I really am naive. I did not expect this degree of unpreparedness and incompetence. I did not expect this even though I knew that the Bush administration is worse than you can imagine, even after having taken account of the fact that it is worse than you can imagine"…I wrote this:
For generations the Republicans have played Americans against one another. As government in the late 20th century began to acknowledge and protect the rights of minorities and women, the republicans began a concerted effort to deliberately weaken government, so it could no longer do that. An America that extends the promise of liberty and justice to all is anathema to them. For decades they poured billions of right wing dollars into a relentless campaign to convince Americans that greed is good, and that their worst prejudices were righteous. American self reliance became self interest. American independence became insularity. In pulpits all across America, the Jesus who taught us to love our neighbor was crucified as a communist and a pervert, and a new one who taught that might makes right was put in his place. The payoff came with the election of George Bush. The punch line came this week in New Orleans.
It isn’t that America can’t respond to the need of New Orleans as well as it can the need of those places destroyed by the Indian Ocean Tsunami…it’s that it isn’t supposed to. That’s what all the vitriolic rhetoric about "nanny government" means. A government that can wage a successful fight against civil chaos after a devastating natural disaster, can also prevent lynchings, wife beatings, and gay bashings. Government isn’t supposed to take care of the powerless, whether they’ve been rendered helpless by a hurricane, or by a lynch mob. Rights are for the powerful. To be able to just get on with your life is a privilege, not a right. That is George Bush’s America.
Somewhere in a corner of the putrid stench the Superdome has become, are the rotting corpses of two elderly New Orleans women, laying where their bodies were dragged to get them out of the way of the still living. Take your mental camera into the Superdome. Pan it across the trash littered bleachers, move down the aisles, through the suffocating stench of hundreds of backed up toilets and cardboard boxes full of human excrement. There…there they are…in that dark corner over there. Two pitiful little bodies you could almost mistake for just another random pile of trash. But they were people once. Your fellow Americans. Slowly zoom your mental camera in on that image. There is the America the republicans have been doggedly leading us to for decades now. There is what is inside the shining city on the hill.
NEW ORLEANS – Buses taking Hurricane Katrina victims far frm the squalor of the Superdome stopped rolling early Saturday. As many as 5,000 people remained in the stadium and could be there until Sunday, according to the Texas Air National Guard.
Officials had hoped to evacuate the last of the crowd before dawn Saturday. Guard members said they were told only that the buses had stopped coming and to shut down the area where the vehicles were being loaded.
"We were rolling," Capt. Jean Clark said. "If the buses had kept coming, we would have this whole place cleaned out already or pretty close to it."
…
Capt. John Pollard of the Texas Air Force National Guard said 20,000 people were in the dome when evacuation efforts began. That number swelled as people poured into the Superdome because they believed it was the best place to get a ride out of town.
He estimated Saturday morning that between 2,000 and 5,000 people were left at the Superdome. But it remained a mystery why the buses stopped coming to pick up refugees and shuttle them away.
Tina Miller, 47, had no shoes and cried with relief and exhaustion as she left the Superdome and walked toward a bus. "I never thought I’d make it. Oh, God, I thought I’d die in there. I’ve never been through anything this awful."
The arena’s second-story concourse looked like a dump, with more than a foot of trash except in the occasional area where people were working to keep things as tidy as possible.
Bathrooms had no lights, making people afraid to enter, and the stench frm backed-up toilets inside killed any inclination toward bravery.
"When we have to go to the bathroom we just get a box. That’s all you can do now," said Sandra Jones of eastern New Orleans.
Her newborn baby was running a fever, and all the small children in her area had rashes, she said.
…
At one point Friday, the evacuation was interrupted briefly when school buses pulled up so some 700 guests and employees frm the Hyatt Hotel could move to the head of the evacuation line – much to the amazement of those who had been crammed in the Superdome since last Sunday.
"How does this work? They (are) clean, they are dry, they get out ahead of us?" exclaimed Howard Blue, 22, who tried to get in their line. The National Guard blocked him as other guardsmen helped the well-dressed guests with their luggage.
The 700 had been trapped in the hotel, near the Superdome, but conditions were considerably cleaner, even without running water, than the unsanitary crush inside the dome…
One military official said that as of Friday morning, 4,200 people had been evacuated, including 1,000 frm the convention center, where many times that number spent days without any aid and where several corpses lay on the street Thursday. Another military official said that commanders had not been aware of the large and desperate concentration of people at the convention center until Wednesday, that the focus had been on evacuating the Superdome and conducting other emergency operations in the city.
"It had not perhaps been raised to our consciousness by the reports we had received," Maj. Gen. Richard Rowe, the chief operations officer of the U.S. Northern Command, said in a phone interview.
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By Friday night, the number of National Guard troops was expected to reach 11,700 in Louisiana and 8,000 in Mississippi, with more than 5,000 troops still to come over the weekend. Add to that more than 2,500 Coast Guard personnel on the scene with more than 50 aircraft. Four Coast Guard cutters are stationed in the Mississippi River to offer communications and logistics support, said U.S. Coast Guard spokeswoman Sharon Richey. Even so, one frustrated state senator announced that he has lined up barges to float aid down the Mississippi River to stranded individuals…
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As reports continued of famished and dehydrated people isolated across the Gulf Coast, angry questions were pressed about why the military has not been dropping food packets for them — as was done in Afghanistan, Bosnia and in the aftermath of the Asian tsunami.
Bill Wattenburg, a consultant for the University of California Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and one of the designers of the earlier food drop programs, said that he has lobbied the administration and the military to immediately begin something similar. He said he was told that the military was prepared to begin, but that it was awaiting a request frm FEMA.
"We know very well how to do this, and it’s just incomprehensible that we’re not," Wattenburg said.
…
Canaan Spriggs, 31, and his extended family, including three infants, again prepared to sleep on the floor of a nearby parking garage. He said he was pleased by the sight of the military convoys but that the city was far frm tame.
"It’s quiet now, but the night-time is wild," he said. "They’re sugarcoating it on the news. Come out here at night, but only if you have the National Guard with you. There are gunshots, and you hear people screaming for help.
WASHINGTON – Several states ready and willing to send National Guard troops to the rescue in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans didn’t get the go-ahead until days after the storm struck — a delay nearly certain to be investigated by Congress.
New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson offered Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco help frm his state’s National Guard on Sunday, the day before Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana. Blanco accepted, but paperwork needed to get the troops en route didn’t come frm Washington until late Thursday.
The official version; then there’s the in-the-trenches version
NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) — Diverging views of a crumbling New Orleans emerged Thursday, with statements by some federal officials in contradiction with grittier, more desperate views frm the streets. By late Friday response to those stranded in the city was more visible.
But the conflicting views on Thursday came within hours, sometimes minutes of each of each other, as reflected in CNN’s transcripts. The speakers include Michael Brown, chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, evacuee Raymond Cooper, CNN correspondents and others. Here’s what they had to say:
Conditions in the Convention Center
# FEMA chief Brown: We learned about that (Thursday), so I have directed that we have all available resources to get that convention center to make sure that they have the food and water and medical care that they need. (See video of Brown explaining how news reports alerted FEMA to convention center chaos. — 2:11)
# Mayor Nagin: The convention center is unsanitary and unsafe, and we are running out of supplies for the 15,000 to 20,000 people. (Hear Nagin’s angry demand for soldiers. 1:04)
# CNN Producer Kim Segal: It was chaos. There was nobody there, nobody in charge. And there was nobody giving even water. The children, you should see them, they’re all just in tears. There are sick people. We saw… people who are dying in front of you.
# Evacuee Raymond Cooper: Sir, you’ve got about 3,000 people here in this — in the Convention Center right now. They’re hungry. Don’t have any food. We were told two-and-a-half days ago to make our way to the Superdome or the Convention Center by our mayor. And which when we got here, was no one to tell us what to do, no one to direct us, no authority figure.
Uncollected corpses
# Brown: That’s not been reported to me, so I’m not going to comment. Until I actually get a report frm my teams that say, "We have bodies located here or there," I’m just not going to speculate.
# Segal: We saw one body. A person is in a wheelchair and someone had pushed (her) off to the side and draped just like a blanket over this person in the wheelchair. And then there is another body next to that. There were others they were willing to show us. ( See CNN report, ‘People are dying in front of us’ — 4:36 )
# Evacuee Cooper: They had a couple of policemen out here, sir, about six or seven policemen told me directly, when I went to tell them, hey, man, you got bodies in there. You got two old ladies that just passed, just had died, people dragging the bodies into little corners. One guy — that’s how I found out. The guy had actually, hey, man, anybody sleeping over here? I’m like, no. He dragged two bodies in there. Now you just — I just found out there was a lady and an old man, the lady went to nudge him. He’s dead.
Hospital evacuations
# Brown: I’ve just learned today that we … are in the process of completing the evacuations of the hospitals, that those are going very well.
# CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta: It’s gruesome. I guess that is the best word for it. If you think about a hospital, for example, the morgue is in the basement, and the basement is completely flooded. So you can just imagine the scene down there. But when patients die in the hospital, there is no place to put them, so they’re in the stairwells. It is one of the most unbelievable situations I’ve seen as a doctor, certainly as a journalist as well. There is no electricity. There is no water. There’s over 200 patients still here remaining. …We found our way in through a chopper and had to land at a landing strip and then take a boat. And it is exactly … where the boat was traveling where the snipers opened fire yesterday, halting all the evacuations. ( Watch the video report of corpses stacked in stairwells — 4:45 )
# Dr. Matthew Bellew, Charity Hospital: We still have 200 patients in this hospital, many of them needing care that they just can’t get. The conditions are such that it’s very dangerous for the patients. Just about all the patients in our services had fevers. Our toilets are overflowing. They are filled with stool and urine. And the smell, if you can imagine, is so bad, you know, many of us had gagging and some people even threw up. It’s pretty rough.(Mayor’s video: Armed addicts fighting for a fix — 1:03)
Violence and civil unrest
# Brown: I’ve had no reports of unrest, if the connotation of the word unrest means that people are beginning to riot, or you know, they’re banging on walls and screaming and hollering or burning tires or whatever. I’ve had no reports of that.
# CNN’s Chris Lawrence: Frm here and frm talking to the police officers, they’re losing control of the city. We’re now standing on the roof of one of the police stations. The police officers came by and told us in very, very strong terms it wasn’t safe to be out on the street. (Watch the video report on explosions and gunfire — 2:12)
The federal response:
# Brown: Considering the dire circumstances that we have in New Orleans, virtually a city that has been destroyed, things are going relatively well.
# Homeland Security Director Chertoff: Now, of course, a critical element of what we’re doing is the process of evacuation and securing New Orleans and other areas that are afflicted. And here the Department of Defense has performed magnificently, as has the National Guard, in bringing enormous resources and capabilities to bear in the areas that are suffering.
# Crowd chanting outside the Convention Center: We want help.
# Nagin: They don’t have a clue what’s going on down there.
# Phyllis Petrich, a tourist stranded at the Ritz-Carlton: They are invisible. We have no idea where they are. We hear bits and pieces that the National Guard is around, but where? We have not seen them. We have not seen FEMA officials. We have seen no one.
Security
# Brown: I actually think the security is pretty darn good. There’s some really bad people out there that are causing some problems, and it seems to me that every time a bad person wants to scream of cause a problem, there’s somebody there with a camera to stick it in their face. ( See Jack Cafferty’s rant on the government’s ‘bungled’ response — 0:57)
# Chertoff: In addition to local law enforcement, we have 2,800 National Guard in New Orleans as we speak today. One thousand four hundred additional National Guard military police trained soldiers will be arriving every day: 1,400 today, 1,400 tomorrow and 1,400 the next day.
# Nagin: I continue to hear that troops are on the way, but we are still protecting the city with only 1,500 New Orleans police officers, an additional 300 law enforcement personnel, 250 National Guard troops, and other military personnel who are primarily focused on evacuation.
# Lawrence: The police are very, very tense right now. They’re literally riding around, full assault weapons, full tactical gear, in pickup trucks. Five, six, seven, eight officers. It is a very tense situation here.
Shirt-sleeves rolled up, W. finally landed in Hell yesterday and chuckled about his wild boozing days in "the great city" of N’Awlins. He was clearly moved. "You know, I’m going to fly out of here in a minute," he said on the runway at the New Orleans International Airport, "but I want you to know that I’m not going to forget what I’ve seen." Out of the cameras’ range, and avoided by W., was a convoy of thousands of sick and dying people, some sprawled on the floor or dumped on baggage carousels at a makeshift M*A*S*H unit inside the terminal.
…
Michael Brown, the blithering idiot in charge of FEMA – a job he trained for by running something called the International Arabian Horse Association – admitted he didn’t know until Thursday that there were 15,000 desperate, dehydrated, hungry, angry, dying victims of Katrina in the New Orleans Convention Center.
Was he sacked instantly? No, our tone-deaf president hailed him in Mobile, Ala., yesterday: "Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job."
It would be one thing if President Bush and his inner circle – Dick Cheney was vacationing in Wyoming; Condi Rice was shoe shopping at Ferragamo’s on Fifth Avenue and attended "Spamalot" before bloggers chased her back to Washington; and Andy Card was off in Maine – lacked empathy but could get the job done. But it is a chilling lack of empathy combined with a stunning lack of efficiency that could make this administration implode.
No matter how nervously Kanye West said what he did, it wasn’t some revealed truth, but a long assumed feeling. Bush doesn’t care about black people. No fucking kidding.
The problem is that he doesn’t care about anybody.
The fact that the citizens of New Orleans are now Aligator MRE’s is of concern to Bush, because it may make him look bad. But the world of George Bush is a narrow one, not much beyond his nose. Everything is about him.
Which is why he can praise Brown. Even the French fired Nivelle once he failed and replaced him with Petain. Bush only sees what affects him.
President Bush often complains about lack of transparency in places like North Korea or, more recently, Cuba — and contrasts that with the United States.
Here he is in Vienna in June: "We’re a transparent democracy. People know exactly what’s on our mind. We debate things in the open. We’ve got a legislative process that’s active."
But the reality is that, particularly when it comes to Bush’s foreign policy, the minimal press access to the intensely secret inner workings of the White House and the almost complete lack of effective Congressional oversight have left Bush’s decision-making process largely a mystery.
Case in point: What is really motivating our policy in the Middle East? And who’s really making the decisions? We don’t know.
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Today, Ron Hutcheson of McClatchy Newspapers writes: "If there’s a starting point for George W. Bush’s attachment to Israel, it’s the day in late 1998 when he stood on the hilltop where Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount, and, eyes brimming with tears, read aloud from his favorite hymn, ‘Amazing Grace.’
" ‘He was very emotional. It was a tear-filled experience,’ said Matthew Brooks, a prominent Jewish Republican who escorted Bush, then governor of Texas, and three other GOP governors on the Middle East visit. ‘He brought Israel back home with him in his heart. I think he came away profoundly moved.’
"Eight years later, Bush is living up to his reputation as the most pro-Israel president ever. As Israel’s military action in Lebanon heads into its fourth week, the president is standing firm against growing international pressure for an immediate cease-fire."
Yesterday, I noted former Newsday and Knight Ridder White House correspondent Saul Friedman ‘s essay on NiemanWatchdog.org: "I believe this to be the first time in modern American history that a president’s religion, in this case his Christian fundamentalism, has become a decisive factor in his foreign and domestic policies. It’s a factor that has been under-reported, to say the least, and that begs for press attention."
Former Clinton official Sidney Blumenthal sees another, related form of evangelism at work: The neoconservative variety. He writes in Salon: "By secretly providing NSA intelligence to Israel and undermining the hapless Condi Rice, hardliners in the Bush administration are trying to widen the Middle East conflict to Iran and Syria, not stop it. . . .
"The neoconservatives are described as enthusiastic about the possibility of using NSA intelligence as a lever to widen the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah and Israel and Hamas into a four-front war."
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And here’s another data point: Joel C. Rosenberg, who writes Christian apocalyptic fiction, told me in an interview this week that he was invited to a White House Bible study group last year to talk about current events and biblical prophecy.
Rosenberg said that on February 10, 2005, he came to speak to a "couple dozen" White House aides in the Old Executive Office Building — and has stayed in touch with several of them since.
Rosenberg wouldn’t say exactly what was discussed. "The meeting itself was off the record, as you could imagine," he said. He declined to name the staffer he said invited him or describe the attendees in any way other than to say that the president was not among them. "I can’t imagine they’d want to talk about it," he said.
"I can’t tell you that the people that I spoke with agree with me, or believe that prophecy can really help you understand what will happen next in the Middle East, but I’m not surprised that they’re intrigued."
The White House press office wasn’t able to confirm the visit for me, but there have been previous reports about White House Bible study groups inviting Christian authors to come speak.
Rosenberg — like Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, the authors of the phenomenally popular "Left Behind" series — writes fiction inspired by biblical prophecy about the apocalypse. The consistent theme is that certain current events presage the end times, the Rapture, and the return of Jesus Christ. Rosenberg’s particular pitch to journalists is that his books come true.
Here he is in a recent interview with Christian talk-show host Pat Robertson , talking about what he thinks is going to happen next: "Now I have to say, Pat, I believe that Ezekiel 38 and 39 — the prophecies that we’re talking about — I think this is about the end of radical Islam as we know it. God says He’s going to supernaturally judge Iran, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, these other countries. We’re talking about fire from heaven, a massive earthquake. It’s going to be devastating and tragic. But I believe that afterwards there’s going to be a great spiritual awakening. We’re seeing more Muslims coming to Christ right now than at any other time in history. But I think that’s just the beginning. We’ve got dark days ahead of us. But I believe there’s a light at the end of that tunnel."
Rosenberg says he got a call last year from a White House staffer. "He said ‘A lot of people over here are reading your novels, and they’re intrigued that these things keep on happening. . . . Your novels keep foreshadowing actual coming events. . . . And so we’re curious, how are you doing it? What’s the secret? Why don’t you come over and walk us through the story behind these novels?’ So I did."
Judy Keen first wrote back in October 2002, in USA Today, that "some White House staffers have been meeting weekly at hour-long prayer and Bible study sessions."
Elisabeth Bumiller wrote in the New York Times last year that "intelligent design was the subject of a weekly Bible study class several years ago when Charles W. Colson, the founder and chairman of Prison Fellowship Ministries, spoke to the group."
All this talk about family values, and preserving the institution of marriage as the best way to raise children, and nurture the next generation, and underneath it all the fervent hope that the end of the world will happen in their lifetimes.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has outlined proposals that are expected to lead to the exclusion of The Episcopal Church of the United States from the Anglican Church as a consequence of consecrating a gay bishop.
The US branch of Anglicanism faces losing its status of full membership of the Anglican Church in the wake of its consecration of the openly gay Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire, an act which has propelled the worldwide church to the brink of schism.
The final straw came when The Episcopal Church failed to "repent" of its action at its General Convention in Columbus, Ohio earlier this month, and failed to vote through a moratorium on any more gay consecrations.
Dr Williams is proposing a two-track Anglican Communion, with orthodox churches being accorded full, "constituent" membership and the rebel, pro-gay liberals being consigned to "associate" membership.
All provinces will be offered the chance to sign up to a "covenant" which will set out the traditional, biblical standards on which all full members of the Anglican church can agree.
But it is highly unlikely that churches such as The Episcopal Church in the US, the Anglican churches in Canada and New Zealand and even the Scottish Episcopal Church would be able to commit themselves fully to such a document.
These churches and any others that refused to sign up could opt to cut ties to Canterbury altogether, or could choose to remain in associate status.
This is not simply a victory for bigotry…it’s a milepost along a highway of blood. Homosexuals will die, never doubt this, as a result of the religious passions Williams is now pouring gasoline on. After the holocaust you’d think they’d know better, but it seems that lesson was only Lets lay off the Jews for a while and bash the homosexuals instead. Once upon a time the Catholic church, and then the Protestants, insisted that Jews were Christ killers who deserved what they got. You can argue that lead directly to the Ovens, but in fact the killing had been going on for centuries. By the reckoning of normal population growth statistics, and starting from the count of the number of Jews in the holy lands at the time of Jesus (the Roman occupiers kept meticulous records in the manner of all totalitarian states…), I’m told there should be about 240 million Jews walking this earth, right now, right this moment. In fact there are about 18 million. Hitler didn’t do all that…
We shall see how defenders of the Church take pains to distinguish between "anti-Judaism" and "antisemitism"; between Christian Jew-hatred as a "necessary but insufficient" cause of the Holocaust; between the "sins of the children" and the sinlessness of the Church as such. These distinctions become meaningless before the core truth of this history: Because the hatred of Jews had been made holy, it became lethal. -James Carroll, "Constantine’s Sword"
The holocaust made antisemitism something you’re not supposed to preach from the pulpit…at least not while outsiders are looking. But on the other hand Leviticus gives a free pass to people who kill homosexuals in the name of God, and judging from the reaction in some quarters already to Williams’ decision to expel everyone who doesn’t think homosexuals are unclean, the mob is ready for a little Leviticus action…
And get it they will. I strongly doubt it is any coincidence, that the rise in gay bashings and killings worldwide has come at a time when Catholic and Protestant church leaders, in America and in the third world, are busy calling homosexuals a threat to everything from children and marriage and family to the existence of civilization itself. Rowan Williams has not only signed onto this pogrom, whatever his future protestations that he means gay people no harm, by throwing his church into schism because some churches weren’t treating gays as the unclean god condemned sinners they are, he’s now poured gasoline onto it. The Gays Split The Church, isn’t quite as good as The Jews Killed Christ, but it will do nicely.
No Dr. Williams…our blood is not upon us. It is upon you.
Just So You Know…You Need To Be Aware Of Your Surroundings In Parking Lots
It’s a subject I’m reluctant to talk about, for fear of being labeled a paranoid, but there are places where I’m always watchful, and none more so then parking lots. I’ve heard way too many stories of random violence happening to people in parking lots. Stories like this…
Video shows man’s abduction by Aryan Brotherhood
A Baytown Wal-Mart security camera caught the kidnapping of a Baytown man who was later found murdered. According to police, in the low-resolution video Robert McCartney, 49, pulls into a parking spot in his white pick-up. It is highlighted in red on the left. A dark colored pick-up pulls in behind McCartney. Its highlighted in red on the right. Before McCartney can exit his truck, a man can be seen exiting the passenger side of the dark truck and walking to the drivers-side door of McCartney’s truck where he appears to get behind the wheel and then follows the darker truck out of the frame.
A surveillance camera video taken in the Wal-Mart parking lot and obtained on Thursday by the Enterprise shows what police say is Robert McCartney’s abduction by members of the Aryan Brotherhood.
McCartney is seen pulling into the parking lot in a 1988 white Chevy pickup truck, parking and quickly being approached by a man who just got out of another vehicle. The man gets into McCartney’s truck and drives away as the other vehicle follows them.
Three members of the Aryan Brotherhood are facing capital murder charges in the brutal stabbing death of the 49-year-old Baytown man.
McCartney’s body was found near County Road 611 in Eastgate on Friday morning, according to Capt. Philip Fairchild of the Liberty County Sheriff’s Department.
Police said the killing was not a sex crime and that the men targeted McCartney’s because they wanted his truck. One of the men arrested had fallen into disfavor with an Aryan Brotherhood leader and apparently thought the truck parts could restore his good standing, said Capt. Roger Clifford of the Baytown Police Department.
Both the killers and the victim were white, in case you were thinking that white supremacists are only dangerous to people of color.
I’m certainly not going to say here that Mr. McCartney wasn’t being watchful enough. He could easily have been just as perpetually wary as I am, and for just that one moment got caught off guard. It could happen to any of us. The random, out of the blue nature of the crime is what is so frightening. A couple gutter crawling thugs decide they want parts for a certain kind of car and just kidnap and murder someone they happen across with that kind of car. Last year a man was shot to death in a local shopping mall parking garage during an armed robbery, after the robber decided he wasn’t getting enough respect from his victim. Just a few months ago a group of thugs tried to kill a man in a shopping center parking lot just down the street from me. Remarkably (because getting a carry permit out of the state of Maryland is like squeezing water from a rock) the victim was armed and able to fight off his attackers. Probably the most heartbreaking story of this kind I ever heard concerns Robert Alton Harris and his brother Daniel Marcus Harris who kidnapped 16 year olds John Mayeski and Michael Baker from a fast food restaurant as they were eating, forced them to drive to an isolated area and then killed them. Then he finished eating their burgers. Then he and his brother drove off. Harris merely wanted a getaway car for a bank robbery he’d planned. For that he killed two 16 year old boys as if murdering kids was just part of his day, nothing to get all excited about.
I think criminals like parking lots because most of the time people in them have their minds elsewhere. And the patterns of car and foot traffic in them are chaotic. It’s hard to pay attention to everything going on around you. Alas, you need to.
A couple weeks ago in Memphis, me and a couple friends were standing by my car in the parking lot of the motel I was staying at. It was just nightfall and my room was in a section of the motel just a bit away from the main building. A couple guys pull up in an old beat up car, see us, the driver checks out my license plate (out of state), stops, backs in to a parking space just across from mine, and his passenger gets out…and between their backing in (for a quick getaway maybe), and the looks of this guy walking toward us I just started getting all kinds of bad vibes. What I did may have freaked my companions a tad, but the two guys in the beat up car left the scene pretty quickly. My thinking is that if someone tries to take me in a parking lot, I am not going to go quietly. So the best thing is to be aware of my surroundings, and avoid becoming prey in the first place. Whether you are armed, or skilled enough or strong enough to fight back, or prefer more peaceable means of confronting violence, that is the best thing anyway. They say a good landing is one you can walk away from, but a good fight for your life is one that never even happens.
The Shadow War, In a Surprising New Light: By Barton Gellman: THE ONE PERCENT DOCTRINE: Deep Inside America’s Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11 By Ron Suskind: This is an important book, filled with the surest sign of great reporting: the unexpected. It enriches our understanding of even familiar episodes from the Bush administration’s war on terror and tells some jaw-dropping stories we haven’t heard before.
One example out of many comes in Ron Suskind’s gripping narrative of what the White House has celebrated as one of the war’s major victories: the capture of Abu Zubaydah…. Described as al-Qaeda’s chief of operations… shipped to a secret prison abroad. Suskind shatters the official story line here. Abu Zubaydah, his captors discovered, turned out to be mentally ill… nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be… appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations; rather, he was al-Qaeda’s go-to guy for minor logistics — travel for wives and children and the like.
That judgment was "echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President," Suskind writes. And yet somehow, in a speech delivered two weeks later, President Bush portrayed Abu Zubaydah as "one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States." And over the months to come, under White House and Justice Department direction, the CIA would make him its first test subject for harsh interrogation techniques.
How could this have happened? Why are we learning about it only now? Those questions form the spine of Suskind’s impressively reported book….
[T]he intelligence and counterterrorism professionals whose point of view dominates this book… came to believe, Suskind reports, that "their jobs were not to help shape policy, but to affirm it." (Some of them nicknamed Cheney "Edgar," as in Edgar Bergen — casting the president as the ventriloquist’s dummy.)…
Tenet and his loyalists also settle a few scores with the White House here. The book’s opening anecdote tells of an unnamed CIA briefer who flew to Bush’s Texas ranch during the scary summer of 2001, amid a flurry of reports of a pending al-Qaeda attack, to call the president’s attention personally to the now-famous Aug. 6, 2001, memo titled "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US." Bush reportedly heard the briefer out and replied: "All right. You’ve covered your ass, now."…
Tora Bora… Henry A. Crumpton… was blunt: The surrogate forces were "definitely not" up to the job, and "we’re going to lose our prey if we’re not careful."…
Which brings us back to the unbalanced Abu Zubaydah. "I said he was important," Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. "You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" "No sir, Mr. President," Tenet replied. Bush "was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth," Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, "Do some of these harsh methods really work?" Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports. They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep. Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety — against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each… target." And so, Suskind writes, "the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered."
So…to recap… We tortured a man we knew to be mentally ill and of low importance, and then sent our police forces scrambling to quell every delusional plot this mentally ill man raved under torture about to his captors…so that President smirking richboy jackass wouldn’t loose face. Or as Matthew Yglesias bullets it over at TPM Cafe…
Al-Qaedist Abu Zubaydah was captured in March 2002.
Zubaydah’s captors discovered he was mentally ill and charged with minor logistical matters, such as arranging travel for wives and children.
The President was informed of that judgment by the CIA.
Two weeks later, the President described Zubaydah as "one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States."
Later, Bush told George Tenet, "I said he was important. You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you?" and asked Tenet if "some of these harsh methods really work?"
The methods — torture — were applied.
Then, according to Gellman, "Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety — against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty."
At which point, according to Suskind, "thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each . . . target."
Fred Clark tells us that years ago, back in the stone age gamer days of Pong and Space Invaders, there was a text only version of the Left Behind game you could play on your Commodore 128. Kinda like Zork…but with more sacred violence.
(I think Fred’s being a bit sarcastic and maybe even a tad bitter here…)
You are in Manhattan. There is an infidel here.
>Convert infidel.
The infidel does not want to be converted.
>Convert infidel.
The infidel does not want to be converted.
>Convert infidel.
The infidel does not want to be converted.
>Witness to infidel.
The infidel does not want to be converted.
>tell infidel about Hell
Such language!
You are in Manhattan. There is an infidel here.
>tell infidel about eternal suffering and gnashing of teeth in the lake of fire
The infidel does not want to be converted.
>shoot infidel
You raise the BFG-9000 and fire, raining divine judgment on the infidel in a righteous hail of molten lead. The infidel falls over, dead.
Score: 105 out of 500.
You are in Manhattan. There is a dead infidel here.
>examine dead infidel.
On the body of the dead infidel you find more change for the pay phone.
>get change.
You are in Manhattan. There is a dead infidel here.
>make phone call
You have to find a phone first!
You are in Manhattan. There is a dead infidel here.
>n
Well that beats Zork any day. On a more serious note, one of Fred’s commenters urges us to check out the Left Behind Games FAQ. You should, but only if you can handle the occasional peek down into the Pit…
Does anyone get killed in the game?
People do perish in our game just like some do in the book series. This is a real strategy game, so the gamer controls his forces just like you do in chess game.
Why does this game have to contain violence at all? Why is it necessary for a fun and successful game?
Violence is not required to make a fun game. However, it is required to make a game about the end of the world in the Left Behind book series. We have taken great care to make certain that there are real consequences for poor gamer behavior, unlike most games in the market. For instance, unnecessary killing will result in lower Spirit points which are essential to winning.
I especially liked this one:
What distinctive features differentiate LEFT BEHIND: Eternal Forces from other RTS games on the market?
Parents need a substitute for the degrading moral values of games like ’Grand Theft Auto.’ We’re giving the industry an RTS game that is fun to play as well incorporating inspirational content.
And let’s face it, there’s very little in this life more inspirational and conducive to a wholesome moral childhood then making the streets run red with the blood of the infidel for spirit points. I hear promotional copies have been handed out in a few megachurches. You can imagine parents tucking them alongside their bibles in their laps, reading the cover blubs on the ride home and after playing a few rounds with the kids, perhaps, walking calmly to the bathroom, standing in front of the bathroom mirror, peering in, and asking the face on the other side what the hell they’ve let themselves become.
Exgays huddled in the massive ghettos of Anytown, USA had better beware. The trains are rolling in. The furnaces have been tested and the ex-ex-gay, –XXtroopers– have their marching orders via the supreme commander of anti-exgay forces in America, Herr Wayne Besen.
…and so on and so forth. D.L.’s a tad pissed that Wayne has stepped up to the plate and created Truth Wins Out, to counter Love Won Out’s lies with some hard facts about the damage conversion therapy causes, and the political motivations of the leaders of the ex-gay movement. With Truth Wins Out we’ll finally have an organization dedicated 100 percent to confronting ex-gay groups and their between the lines political message, that gay people don’t need rights, because gay people either don’t, or should not exist in the first place. This is a good thing, and something the religious right cannot be happy about. They’ve had a virtual free pass to lie through their teeth in the debate about conversion therapy in the popular media for decades now. It seems now that those days are over, and if painting little Hitler mustaches on pictures of Wayne Besen, who is Jewish, is the best that louts like D.L. can do, then they have to know at some level that they’ve lost the fight.
The problem I’ve always had with Goodwin’s Law is that it stifles discussion about fascism in an age when fascism is on the rise. But D.L. makes a good case for it all the same, and you almost feel sorry for him. Reading his post was like watching a raving street lunatic walking around buck naked and babbling to everyone about the aliens in his microwave oven. You just want to scream for someone, anyone, to please give the goddamned nutcase a bathrobe and a ride to his shrink. Seriously. Just because everyone can expose themselves to the whole goddamned world in their blogs, that doesn’t mean everyone should.
This is good:
Wayne Besen’s Final solution (WBFS) Truth Wins Out (TWO) is for all accounts exgaywatch with shark teeth. Along with a 10 point plan to expose, root out and if possible imprison former homosexuals and supporters, Besen seems to have finally found the trigger to his uncontrollable desire to rid the world of exgays.
…root out and if possible imprison former homosexuals and supporters… That’s really rich, coming from someone allied with a political movement whose leadership has repeatedly called for the reestablishment of sodomy laws. But what really makes D.L.’s histrionics about trains and furnaces and prisons so pathetic, is that the bedrock theory of the ex-gay movement is that homosexuals should not exist. The very fact of our existence is proof that there is something wrong within us, and something wrong with the society we live in. If there’s any eliminationist thinking going on around here, it’s being preached from the pulpits of the religious right. And as for final solutions, the religious right already has theirs. They call it the Second Coming:
Addressing the group from the very spot where the conflict is to take place, Frazier turns to Revelation 19, which describes Christ going into battle. "It thrills my heart every time that I read these words," he says, then begins to read: "’And I saw heaven standing open.… And there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and makes war. His eyes are like blazing fire.’"
Frazier pauses to explain the text. "This doesn’t sound like compassionate Jesus," he says. "This doesn’t sound like the suffering servant of Isaiah 53. This is the Warrior King. He judges and makes war."
Frazier returns to the Scripture: "He has a name written on him that no one but he himself knows. He is dressed in a robe that is dipped in blood and his name is the word of God."
This is the moment the Rapturists eagerly await. The magnitude of death and destruction will make the Holocaust seem trivial. The battle finally begins.
Those who remain on earth are the unsaved, the left behind—many of them dissolute followers of the Antichrist, who is massing his army against Christ. Accompanying Christ into battle are the armies of heaven, riding white horses and dressed in fine linen.
"This is all of us," Frazier says.
Frazier points out that Christ does not need high-tech weaponry for this conflict. "’Out of his mouth comes a sharp sword,’ not a bunch of missiles and rockets," he says.
Once Christ joins the battle, both the Antichrist and the False Prophet are quickly captured and cast alive into a lake of fire burning with brimstone. Huge numbers of the Antichrist’s supporters are slain.
Meanwhile, an angel exhorts Christ, "Thrust in thy sickle, and reap." And so, Christ, sickle in hand, gathers "the vine of the earth."
Then, according to Revelation, "the earth was reaped." These four simple words signify the end of the world as we know it.
Grapes that are "fully ripe"—billions of people who have reached maturity but still reject the grace of God—are now cast "into the great winepress of the wrath of God." Here we have the origin of the phrase "the grapes of wrath." In an extraordinarily merciless and brutal act of justice, Christ crushes the so-called grapes of wrath, killing them. Then, Revelation says, blood flows out "of the winepress, even unto the horse bridles, by the space of a thousand and six hundred furlongs."
With its highly figurative language, Revelation is subject to profoundly differing interpretations. Nevertheless, LaHaye’s followers insist on its literal truth and accuracy, and they have gone to great lengths to calculate exactly what this passage of Revelation means.
As we walk down from the top of the hill of Megiddo, one of them looks out over the Jezreel Valley. "Can you imagine this entire valley filled with blood?" he asks. "That would be a 200-mile-long river of blood, four and a half feet deep. We’ve done the math. That’s the blood of as many as two and a half billion people."
We’ve done the math… How much raw, bleeding seething hatred do you have to have in your heart for your neighbors, when you can raptly, joyfully, eagerly imagine literally billions of them being crushed to death by Jesus Christ in a massive wine press, and calculate exactly how many of them have to go through it in order for their blood to fill the Jezreel valley to a depth of four and a half feet, the height of a horse’s bridle?
Imagine: you are a foot soldier in a paramilitary group whose purpose is to remake America as a Christian theocracy, and establish its worldly vision of the dominion of Christ over all aspects of life. You are issued high-tech military weaponry, and instructed to engage the infidel on the streets of New York City. You are on a mission – both a religious mission and a military mission — to convert or kill Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, gays, and anyone who advocates the separation of church and state – especially moderate, mainstream Christians. Your mission is "to conduct physical and spiritual warfare"; all who resist must be taken out with extreme prejudice. You have never felt so powerful, so driven by a purpose: you are 13 years old. You are playing a real-time strategy video game whose creators are linked to the empire of mega-church pastor Rick Warren, best selling author of The Purpose Driven Life.
Left Behind Games" has stated, on its website its hopes of getting a "suitable for ages 13 and up" or "suitable for ages 6 and up" rating for "Left Behind: Eternal Forces". Here’s a screen capture:
This game immerses children in present-day New York City — 500 square blocks, stretching from Wall Street to Chinatown, Greenwich Village, the United Nations headquarters, and Harlem. The game rewards children for how effectively they role play the killing of those who resist becoming a born again Christian.
Let it be said the game makers also give you the option of fighting on the side of the Antichrist, when you’ve had your fill of slaying heathens. By that time you could forgive a kid if they’re wondering if there’s any goddamned difference between being on the side of Christ the Savior, verses Satan the Despiser. Well…there is the fine linen.
Love God with all your heart, and love thy neighbor as thyself…and pass the ammunition! It’s not Wayne Besen who D.L. Foster and his kind have put the Hitler mustache on. It’s Jesus Christ.
Christian Identity is a religion based on race. It believes that the historical Jews of the bible, the Israelites of the old testament, God’s Chosen People, were the white Aryan race. According to Christian Identity, it is the white race that God created in [his] own image. It holds that other races are so-called "mud people" – descended from a race God created before Adam and Eve…I suppose as a test. The mud people are the ancestors of all the people of color of the earth. The people we now call Jews are another story however. Christian Identity holds that the Jews are an entirely separate race, created when Eve had sex with the devil in the Garden of Eden.
In short, Christian Identity holds that Jews are, literally, the spawn of Satan.
This came to mind last night, as I read (via Andrew Sullivan) the following Wikipedia entry on Nicolae Carpathia, the Antichrist in Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins Left Behind stories…
Born in the county of Cluj in Romania, Carpathia’s birth is the product of genetic engineering. His mother Marilena Carpathia, is convinced by parties who are followers of Satan, although she is kept unaware of this, to become the mother of a child who they assure her would change the face of the world. Marilena’s husband, Sorin, and his gay lover, Baduna Marius, provide genetic material to facilitate Nicolae’s conception.
Dig it. LaHaye and Jenkins are telling their readers that the Antichrist is, literally, the spawn of a gay male couple.
And some days I sit here at my computer and wonder if this is what it was like to be a Jew in 1920s Germany, watching the horror coming on the horizon. This is the kind of stuff that gets people killed. Someday, it might well get me killed. Someone with a baseball bat or a gun comes along and takes my head off, because he thinks that gay people are going to deliver the world to the Antichrist.
And LaHaye and Jenkins are hardly alone in this. Variations on this theme are popping up all across the kook pews. The Gays are in league with Satan… Just last week James Dobson was telling his listeners on the Focus on the Family radio broadcast, that same sex marriage was an attack on the family by the very forces of hell itself (via Ex-Gay Watch):
…as you all very well know marriage is under vicious attack, now I think from the forces of hell itself. Now it’s either going to continue to decline, and as I told you in my office a few minutes ago, I believe with that destruction of marriage will come the decline of western civilization itself.
What was soft peddled before the re-election of George Bush is coming out of the closet, free, free at last to dispense with the loathsome hypocrisies of Love The Sinner, Hate The Sin. Now the message is clearly and unambiguously that homosexuals are in league with Satan. Not mere sinners, we are destroyers of the world. We will give birth to the Antichrist. Next thing you know, we will be all four horsemen of the Apocalypse too. Whatever it takes, to make everyone hate us, as much as they hate us.
And then watch them wash, wash their hands of our blood…
Imagine you’re a gay teenager, and you’ve either just come out to your parents, or been outed to them. Imagine they react with anger and shame and contempt. You’re a kid, going through adolescence, struggling with your emerging sexuality. It’s a confusing, embarrassing time when you begin to feel things, things about the attractive sex, that you’d never felt before. Thrilling, confusing, embarrassing things. You are a pervert, your parents tell you. You’re going to catch AIDS and die before you’re 40 they tell you. You’re a shame on your family name, and on them. You’re going to hell.
Imagine your parents force you into Love In Action to be cured. Imagine you find yourself one day, inside the Love In Action program. You are a young teenager, and you are in one of the group sessions, surrounded by older adults who have in their past engaged in sexual perversions and addictions the likes of which your teenage mind could never have conceived. Imagine being force into exposing yourself, your deepest sexual thoughts and feelings, to these men, and being forced to listen as they expose themselves to you. They are sexually broken, say the staff at Love In Action. You are sexually broken, they tell you. You, and the man next to you telling you how it is to fuck animals, are both sexually broken. You are the same as they. The sessions last for weeks. There is no place inside of yourself that is safe from the staff at Love In Action, and you must expose it all to the men who fuck animals, rape children, and have never known what it is to have a healthy adult sex life. You’re a young teenager. Throughout it all you are told in word and in deed that you are no different from them.
Eventually, you begin to believe it. You are finally dismissed from the Program, and perhaps you decide you are still gay and there is nothing wrong with that. Or perhaps you try, as so many do, to stop being gay, only to discover you can no more choose your sexual orientation then you can choose whether to be right or left handed. Perhaps some logical, rational part of your mind rejects what you were told about your sexuality at Love In Action. But deep down inside, the seed is planted. I’m a freak…There’s something wrong with me…with my sex…I’m a freak…I’m a freak… You try to go on with your life, find yourself failing utterly to find love, emotional intimacy, peace…
Surely, nobody would do this to a child, even if they think that homosexuality is sinful and wrong. Right? You don’t understand. Faith excuses everything. Faith, and hate. Peterson Toscano has an expanded post up now that you should read.
Back in January 2005, I met with the BBC crew that had just finished filming LIA/R. The presenter and the crew expressed shock at the treatment of the youth in the facility. They told me that adults and minors gathered together and talked about serious issues including prostitution, sexual abuse, and beastiality. They told me of a 16 year old lesbian placed in the program against her will. And the message that she received by being there is that her same-sex attractions are on the same level as a man having sex with animals.
I couldn’t believe it, so on June 1, 2005, when I bumped into John Smid at the Atlantia airport, I questioned him about this. (I had not yet heard of Zach’s story as it was just unfolding). He assured me that although the youth and the adults attended the some of the same sessions, they did not talk about their particular "issues", just their feelings.
Even if that were true, any 16 year old I know is smart enough to figure out within a half a day why everyone is in the program.
This fall, I spoke at length with a young man who was in the adult program this summer when Zach was also in attendance in Refuge, the youth program. I asked him to describe the sessions and he confirmed that adults and youth met together. When I asked, "But of course they don’t talk about issues, just emotions, right?" He replied that they talked about the issues often, in fact, each participant had to give an introduction which outlined the exact nature of their issues.
[Emphasis mine] Notice how John Smid was able to look Peterson right in the eye and tell him it wasn’t happening. And it was.
Today, pumped up on the war rhetoric of saving youth from a culture set out to destroy them, potentially thoughtful and kind human beings who run LIA/R end up employing harmful strategies designed to scare these kids straight by any means necessary. Even if it means exposing them to pedophiles and people with extreme sexual fetishes. (The language reminds me of the fear-fueled war talk of the US Christian fascist group BattleCry)
I know folks from my time at LIA who before they entered the program never had sex with another person and were quite naive sexually. By the time they left, often with the shame of failure, armed with loads of details about what we thought of as "the gay lifestyle", they ended up living self-destructive lives filled with anonymous sexual encounters and worse addictions than they ever experienced before.
Go read the whole thing. This is why I’m going to be in Memphis on June 5th. If doing this to kids in the name of love appalls you, and you can make it to Memphis, then be there too.
Via a friend on MySpace, comes this appeal for letters. First, from the Wikipedia, a little background…
The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), formed in 1987, is a rebel paramilitary group operating mainly in northern Uganda. The group is engaged in an armed rebellion against the Ugandan government in what is now one of Africa’s longest-running conflicts. It is led by Joseph Kony, who proclaims himself a spirit medium, and apparently wishes to establish a state based on his unique interpretation of Biblicalmillenarianism. The LRA have been accused of widespread human rights violations, including the abduction of civilians, the use of child soldiers and a number of massacres.
It is estimated that around 20,000 children have been kidnapped by the group since 1987 for use as soldiers and sex slaves. The group performs abductions primarily from the Acholi people, who have borne the brunt of the 18 year LRA campaign. The insurgency has been mainly contained to the region known as Acholiland, consisting of the districts of Kitgum, Gulu, and Pader, though since 2002 violence has overflowed into other districts. The LRA has also operated across the porous border region with Southern Sudan, subjecting Sudanese civilians to its horrific tactics.
God save this poor world from your prophets… My friend passes along this request that you send a letter to the U.S. State department, urging them to keep this horrific conflict high on the agenda. In includes the story of one boy who was kidnapped and forced into The Lord’s Resistance Army…
Ms. Condoleezza Rice
Secretary of State
U.S. State Department
Washington DC 20520
Dear Secretary Rice,
I am deeply concerned about the conflict in northern Uganda, and particularly its devastating impact on children. I am writing to urge you to place this forgotten crisis higher on the United States’ agenda, and to use the U. S. influence to end the human rights abuses by both sides that lie at the heart of the conflict.
Since the war began in 1986, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has abducted more than 30,000 children to serve as soldiers, laborers and sex slaves. These boys and girls are forced to fight against the government Uganda People’s Defense Force (UPDF), carry out raids, beat and kill civilians, and abduct other children. Girls are additionally forced into sexual slavery as "wives" of LRA commanders. Children who refuse to follow orders or try to run away are often captured and killed.
I want to tell you about a boy who I will call Peter. Peter lives in Gulu, Uganda, on of the most targeted areas in the country. One horrific day, while attending his primary school in Gulu, Peter was abducted by the LRA along with 6 other schoolboys. The same day the LRA went to Peter’s house and murdered his two uncles and his father, and later took Peter home to see their dead bodies, and watch his mother get beaten unconscious. Additional members of his family were also tortured and murdered before his eyes.
Peter was dragged into the bush where he endured severe unspeakable brainwashing meant to turn the abducted children into brutal soldiers. If the children dropped their guns they were beaten, if they tried to escape they were tortured in front of the other children as an example of what would happen in the case of disobedience. Peter lived among this nightmare for 10 long years, quickly rising to the rank of Joseph Kony’s (the leader of the LRA) personal bodyguard. Peter managed to escape the LRA when he was 19 years old and has now lived the last 5 years of his life doing everything he can to spread awareness and end this treacherous war.
Peter is only one story out of the approximate 30,000 children that have been abducted into the LRA.
The threat of LRA abduction is so great that every night as many as 40,000 children leave their homes in the countryside to sleep in the relative safety of towns. They seek refuge overnight at churches, hospitals, bus stations and temporary shelters before returning home again each morning. These children are known as "night commuters" because of the long distances they travel nightly on foot.
Top UN officials have called the war in northern Uganda the world’s biggest forgotten crisis. Child abductions and other human rights have now continued for nearly twenty years,
I urge the United States government to take stronger action to address this crisis. The United States should use its leverage with the government of Uganda to push for increased protection for children and other civilians in the north of Uganda. It should press the new government of Sudan (the government of National Unity, formed with the former rebel forces in 2005) o cut off all support, formal or informal, for the Lord’s Resistance Army which operated in southern Sudan. The U.S. should also support efforts through the United Nations to strengthen human rights and child protection operations in the North.
Under President Bush, the United States played a significant role in achieving peace between long-warring parties in Sudan, Uganda’s northern neighbor. I urge our government to place a similar priority on addressing the crisis in northern Uganda.
Respectfully,
In addition, the request is that you also send a copy to John Bolton. Now…I strongly doubt that Rice or Bolton give a good goddamn about the fate of impoverished children anywhere, let alone in Africa. But it can’t hurt to try and prick somebody’s conscience in the State Department. And while you’re at it, send a copy to your congress critters too. War is hell enough on children but this is beyond evil. It might not seem like much, but sometimes just knowing that people are aware of and watching what’s going on is the difference, that makes a difference.
Via Peterson Toscano, a powerful reminder that James Dobson’s greatest crimes against humanity aren’t the ones he’s committed against gay and lesbian people, but his methodical and systematic breaking of the bond of love between parent and child. Ex-ex-gay blogger Christine writes about what it was like growing up in a fundamentalist household, where Dobson’s pathological hatred of children had found its soil, and taken root…
I was disciplined and guilted and shamed into submission for many years. It somehow seems appropriate to me that Focus on the Family is such a partner with Exodus. My parent’s treatment of me as a child (using Dobson as their guide) no doubt made me all the more vulnerable to the ex-gay message. I was ready and willing to believe myself a damaged and broken person that needed to be fixed, with my sin nature needing to be beaten down and submerged, subdued, and dominated. I was willing to believe that my homosexuality was a part of my own strong-willed defiance gone horribly wrong and satanically out of control.
I can’t even look at Dr. Dobson’s book Dare to Discipline without wanting to weep…
Well somebody needs to look at it. Because this man has single handedly shattered the lives of countless thousands of helpless children. And he did it by manipulating their parent’s fundamentalist religiosity, their fear of Satan, and that secret empty place inside of them, where other people have a conscience and a capacity for basic human sympathy…
For parents like mine, who got almost all of their parenting advice from Dr. Dobson, is it any wonder that everything turned into a battle of wills and they saw their child as a "strong-willed tyrant" that needed to be battled into submission? Dr. Dobson is a man who says that "If discipline begins on the second day of life, you’re one day too late." What kind of discipline could a one-day old infant possibly need?!?
I have heard of Dobson-style parents commenting on how "manipulative" a four-month old baby is, because the baby will smile when an adult is playing with them, but cry when it is left alone.
This is sickening. Of course an infant will cry when its left alone. Look at that, because the temptation is to think that Dobson desensitizes parents and he doesn’t. Infants are helpless and vulnerable and need to be cared for. For Christ sake they’ll cry when they’re hungry too, when they’re sick, when they’re in some kind of pain. The first reaction of any normal human being to the sound of an infant crying is that anxious sensation that something’s wrong. But the problem Dobson’s parents face isn’t that they don’t know what to do with a crying infant, it’s that they don’t know what they’re supposed to feel.
And Dobson supplies them with an explanation of child parent interaction that fits their sensibilities perfectly: there are no genuine human emotions…everything is manipulation. Love… affection… tenderness… anxiety… grief… sorrow… Dobson tells them that all of that is really just different ways humans manipulate one another. Ask yourself what kind of person this makes sense to, and the horrors inflicted on so many children in this world by their own parents stop being so surprising.
There’s also the story of how Dobson treated his own dog, Siggie (yes, after Freud) in a battle of wills between man and beast. Dobson relates this story in The Strong-Willed Child:
"I had seen this defiant mood before [defiant mood being indicated by Siggie not wanting to leave a warm spot in the house and go to his kennel, and subsequently growling at Daddy Dobson], and knew there was only one way to deal with it. The ONLY way to make Siggie obey is to threaten him with destruction. Nothing else works. I turned and went to my closet and got a small belt to help me ‘reason’ with Mr. Freud."
If you decide to click on that link, brace yourself. They say that the abuse of animals is a prime indicator of deeper sociopathologies. Its something they watch for in young children as a warning sign of potential for serious pathological violence later in life. Dobson however, is in the enviable position of being able to exercise his pathologies by proxy. Why abuse children yourself, and risk a very long prison term, when you can get their parents to do it for you? But not just any parents mind you. You need the ones who are missing that extra something most humans have…a capacity to feel sympathy. A heart, capable of whole hearted love for another. You find yourself enough of these, and then the rest is just a matter of invoking the name of Jesus, and telling those parents that their children are Satan incarnate.
No…I’m not exaggerating…
This brings me to another thing I’ve wondered of late. In talking with other ex-ex-gays or those who have survived fundamentalist upbringings, many of us have in common parents who are absolutely unable to love unconditionally. These parents do things and say things that most parents would not utter to their children no matter how upset they were with them. Is it the idea of sin or satan somehow controlling our lives that gives them license to think of us this way, or talk to us this way? Is it a lifetime of thinking of us as "defiant tyrants" that gives parents the idea that their child is in league with the devil himself?
My own mother once looked at a 5-year old boy and said out-loud to him "get thee behind me, Satan!" because she was convinced that he’d looked at her in a defiant manner that gave her chills and that she could only attribute to Satan. She told our family about this later, with an air of pride that she’d had the guts to speak out against Satan in this manner (nevermind the poor child who probably still remembers that church lady calling him "satan"). For those of us whose parents see us in this light…could this be an explanation for why they are so willing to throw us away, to denounce us and reject us? Do they truly still see brazen and defiant tyrants controlled by satan when they look at us?
(emphasis mine) I’ve seen that with my own two eyes. Guy I dated once had a father like that. Couldn’t love unconditionally if Jesus Christ gave him his heart to do it with. And there’s the problem, in all its horrible stomach churning glory. There’s the Pit you don’t want to stare into for too long, because it also stares back into you. The fundamentalist demands structure, tight all controlling structure to their world, because the world of intimate human interaction is utterly incomprehensible to them. If they have to manage their way in the human community the way the rest of us do, by building bonds of trust and Empathy and love, they’re completely lost at sea and cannot cope. Without that all controlling structure to tell them how to conduct their lives at the interpersonal level, they simply can not fathom right from wrong. They just can’t figure it out. Telling a five year old boy that he’s the devil no more disturbs their conscience then telling him the time of day would. The boy does not exist in their conscience as a boy, but as an incomprehensible…thing. It might be human…it might be a child…on the other hand it might be the devil himself. They’ve just no way of knowing, apart from some structure, some tradition, some religious dogma, telling them what the boy is.
And into this soil fertile for every human horror you can imagine, because none of them have any brakes beyond the traditions and social structures they live inside of, comes Dobson – telling these parents that their children are, in fact, the very images of satan himself. The growing child who expresses the slightest shred of their own human individuality is, in fact, channeling the serpent in the Garden of Eden…
Perhaps this tendency toward self-will is the essence of ‘original sin’ which has infiltrated the human family. It certainly explains why I place such stress on the proper response to willful defiance during childhood, for that rebellion can plant the seeds of personal disaster.
To suck the human identity out of a child, leaving their soul an empty blackboard that any authority figure can scribble their will upon, is Exactly Dobson’s purpose here. But I don’t think Dobson means to be that authority. I think he just takes pleasure in the emptying of a human soul, and leaving it with nothing left to Be. A vampire gains some nourishment from the people whose blood they take. Dobson is one of those toxic human voids that just suck the life out of everything they touch, for the pleasure of watching something they could never themselves become die. Oscar Wilde once said that we’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. Dobson is the man handing out hot pokers to parents, determined that every child will grow up blind, so they will never know that the stars above his gutter and beyond his reach, even exist.
…many of us have in common parents who are absolutely unable to love unconditionally… My own mother once looked at a 5-year old boy and said out-loud to him "get thee behind me, Satan!"… Never mind the stacking of the Federal Courts…here’s the legacy of the ascendancy of the religious right that America will be suffering under for generations to come. Tens of thousands of soul wounded children, walking into adulthood with their only understanding of what it is to trust and love coming from parents who were taught to regard them as satanic beings.
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