I hope you’ll bear with the rambling nature of this week’s piece. Since the horrors of 4/19, I’ve been thinking about a lot of things. The following is among them.
The militia and posse cults, such as those being blamed for the Oklahoma City bombing, are the carriers/victims of a classic American ideology, ultimate individualilsm. Individualism is why “socialism” never got far in this country. It’s the root of much of what’s wrong with this country, and also of much of what other countries admire about us. But the flavor of extreme individualism expressed by the militia cults is something different. It’s a case of people foolishly really believing an ideology meant to be taken cynically.
The government-bashing associated with the militias and their less extreme counterparts in religious right is a tool used by the political sleazemeisters to buy votes and to promote a culture of fear and greed. But it may be a tool of something else as well.
The way I read my Bible prophecy, the “Antichrist” isn’t one individual corporeal being. It’s a spirit, a compulsion for doing the devil’s work in the lord’s name. It’s a spirit that’s been around throughout the history of Christendom. The religious right, which for at least three decades has been out looking for 666 under every governmental rock, is now among this spirit’s victims. It bought into conspiracy theories that a single Antichrist dictator would emerge to form something called One-World-Government. The real “world government” in the post-USSR era is global business, the very people who are the real patrons of the politicians vying for Fundamentalist votes. The Trilateral Commission? That wasn’t a secret cabal working to create One-World-Government. That was an above-ground club of think-tankers who wanted to make individual governments more responsive to big business (just like that Global Business Network that those Whole Earth Catalog and Wired magazine people belong to). Conservatives used to claim that Communists promised freedom but delivered tyranny; modern conservatives promise individualism but deliver globalism.
And the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse? They could easily be seen as representing the kind of environmental destruction now advocated by “pro growth” politicians and “property rights” lobbyists.
Similarly, many commentators have contrasted Jesus’s disses against rich people to the right’s demonization of the poor and deification of money and property. This contradictory appeal of anything-goes for polluters and developers with fiscal S&M for the rest of us not only contradicts the Big Book, it harkens back to the days of decadent Madness of King George-era England, the England our forefathers had good reasons to secede from. The people most loudly invoking the imagery of the American Revolution are being increasingly corrupted by some of the values this country was founded against.
I’m not saying evangelicals or business executives (or even Republicans) are soldiers of a personalized devil. I’m saying they’re components in a self-perpetuating system that’s accelerating the rich/poor gap, the depletion of the earth’s resources, and other trends that contradict any reasonable definition of “personal liberty,” “Christian stewardship,” or “family values.”
What we’re seeing is a cultural feedback loop. The “programmers” of this loop are the folks who built an economic system that generates byproducts of alienation, greed and fear, but have cleverly found a way to channel that greed and fear back into the system; helping perpetuate the conditions of downward mobility, decreased quality of life, and frayed social relations.
Yet where else is there for the disempowered to go? Release the clutch of corporate interests from the right and you end up with the world of the militia cults. If there are Republicans who haven’t succumbed to the sleaze, they’re keeping low these days. The middle-of-the-road Democrats have been trying to sell the idea of a soft-edged Right Lite for over a decade now, and may now have lost that crusade for good. The American Left was never much able to sell the value of socialism in a nation of individualists; in most of my lifetime, it hasn’t even bothered to offer a coherent vision of an idealized society, let alone try to sell that vision to people who don’t live in college towns. But that’s a topic for another week.
