Voltaire’s Prayer

"...and it came to pass"

by Bryan Zepp Jamieson

12/11/04

http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/VRWC/voltaire.htm

As the doors rapidly slam shut on freedom in America, one sees remarks and observations that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. For example, CBC, the Canadian Broadcast Corporation, has a four-part series on relations with the US that contains the question, "Will the post-9/11 security state mean detentions, deportations, and ‘secret trials’ for Canadians traveling in the U.S.?" (The title of the documentary series is "Canada and the New American Empire" and shows a flag that consists of the white field with a red field on each side, with a large blue American star where the red maple leaf would go, and in it, a small white maple leaf) Maureen Farrell wrote an essay  where she showed a direct correlation between Putsch’s thoughts on Christianity and the role of religion in state affairs, and how they were nearly identical with those of Adolf Hitler. (The idea isn’t original to Ms. Farrell; it shows up in my signature file that I’ve used for the past month and predates that by several years. But she did a brilliant job of showing just how disturbingly pervasive that correlation is).

On "The Daily Show" Jon Stewart showed Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf stating flatly that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, followed a few minutes later by a rattled-looking Wolf Blitzer coming on to explain to his docile cable audience that he had been told that when Musharraf had called attacking Iraq a "mistake" he hadn’t meant it quite as "unconditionally" as it sounded. Protect that "access," Wolf; it’s your bread and butter, and I don’t guess those red leather pumps and matching red satin hotpants come cheap, do they? Especially with all the wear and tear of being a member of America’s fourth estate.

A few years back, I wrote an essay about how, for the large majority of Germans, life continued on, seemingly normal after Hitler seized power, and all the familiar items about German culture that they loved and depended on seemed to go on pretty much as before.

But of course, change did come, and the German people became curiously inured to those changes. Incrementalism, the art of boiling a frog, made the unthinkable quickly mundane. So what if the government cracked down on liberal judges, enemies foreign and domestic, and liberal and socialist trouble makers? Life went on, the job was still 9 to 5, and if a few undesirables were removed from the neighborhood, why that can only improve property values, right?

It all seems kind of mundane. The CBC series will be seen by less than 1% of Americans, and most will be undisturbed by the fact that America’s closest ally is warning its citizens about travel in the United States in much the same way that people were warned about traveling in the Soviet Union. Be careful not to stray from the tour paths approved, take no unauthorized photographs, and if you end up in a jail there, even if you have done nothing wrong, the government may not be able to help you. Don’t discuss politics with the natives, and don’t joke within range of the police or the omnipresent cameras.

The image of a newscaster hurriedly retracting a statement by a foreign leader – even a sleazeball like Musharraf – because he has contradicted the official government pravda would have been unthinkable in America ten years ago.

Similarly, people didn’t blink when the military suddenly "revised" its death toll in Iraq from 1235 to 999, explaining that the 236 who died of accidents (friendly fire, including suicide, or traffic accidents, even some caused by enemy action, and so on) didn’t count. No word on whether the families and friends of those 236 are overjoyed to learn that their loved ones aren’t dead after all, at least, not in a clerical sense of the word. Of course, that one backfired, because the next poor bastard that got blown to shit over there got to be number one thousand, and the media just loves odometer numbers.

What’s going to save us?

The right is basically very stupid. Resetting the death toll to 999 was pretty stupid, since it really didn’t take much imagination to wait a day or two, and then they could have reset the number to 1,003 or 1,004, and the media would have just snoozed through it. And the typical Fauxed-up bonehead wouldn’t have turned to his wife and said, "Didn’t they hit 1,000 already? Right after the GOP convention, wasn’t it?"

Rummy outdid himself with his "You go to war with the army you have, and not the army you wish you had." Randi Rhodes, on Air America, riposted, "You go to war with the president you have, and not the president you wish you had." Not content with telling the troops to go screw, he said that even with armor, tanks get blown up. Translated: "You’re going to die anyway, so why waste perfectly good armor on you?" With Ashcroft retiring to a life of greasing himself up and setting fire to calico cats, Rummy becomes the craziest, and dumbest, member of the Putsch administration.

Speaking of stupid, the religious right, emboldened by the hallucination that Putsch won the election because America had gone religiously insane, upped their drive to restore America to "biblical values."

The religious right loves to embrace "biblical values" that most decent people, and America as a nation, rejected long ago. America doesn’t burn witches, or force menstruating women to spend a week each month out in the carport, or demand people be beaten for wearing wool blends, or even spandex. And while America doesn’t mind massacring other tribes, Americans don’t usually endorse it unless someone waves a flag in their faces and tells them there are evil people out there.

Anyone who has actually read the bible knows that most of the values contained therein aren’t even remotely American – six of the ten commandments are flat-out unconstitutional, and of the remaining four, three would be unenforceable in any civil court – but there is one biblical value that America embraced for the first ninety years of her existence: slavery. And the religious right wants us all to know that, being a biblical value, it’s really not nice to portray slavery in a negative light, what with all that talk about human dignity and freedom, and those images of frightened women with babies being chased across ice-choked rivers. Talk like that is just plain unbiblical!

So right on schedule, the religious right, which for years has denied that it is home to toothless southern bigots too dumb to understand that the earth revolves around the sun, finds itself championing the use of a book called "Southern Slavery, As It Was." A list of some of the more remarkable observations about slavery, related in a news article written by T. Keung Hui, follows at the end of this essay.

Bad enough that in 2004, we have illiterate morons claiming transcendent wisdom from the creator and keeper of the universe who tell us that the earth was created in seven days just six thousand years ago, or that the earth stopped rotating for 36 hours just so the Israelites could arrange for a trumpet volunteer solo. No, that’s not enough.

Now the religious right has decided the time has come to polish the turd known as slavery.

The weird thing is that the religious right, while perhaps not the brightest group of people in the world and certainly not the most tolerant, aren’t noted for their racism. In fairness, they have probably done more for integration over the past 50 years than has mainstream America.

But the bible was, at best, neutral about slavery (and has long passages on the care and tending of slaves), so here’s the religious right, trying to make slavery look like a good, all-American institution that showed that man is truly the acme of God’s creations.

Sure to be a crowd pleaser. I haven’t even bothered trying to hide my grin. I wanted these people to fuck up and overreach, and here we go, right on schedule.

If I was a religious man, I might credit Voltaire’s prayer for all this. He once said (paraphrasing) "Oh lord, make my enemies look ridiculous. And it came to pass."

from http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/1913619p-8258411c.html

'SOUTHERN SLAVERY, AS IT WAS'

Here are some excerpts from the booklet:

* "To say the least, it is strange that the thing the Bible condemns (slave-trading) brings very little opprobrium upon the North, yet that which the Bible allows (slave-ownership) has brought down all manner of condemnation upon the South." (page 22)

* "As we have already mentioned, the 'peculiar institution' of slavery was not perfect or sinless, but the reality was a far cry from the horrific descriptions given to us in modern histories." (page 22)

* "Slavery as it existed in the South was not an adversarial relationship with pervasive racial animosity. Because of its dominantly patriarchal character, it was a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence." (page 24)

* "There has never been a multi-racial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world." (page 24)

* "Slave life was to them a life of plenty, of simple pleasures, of food, clothes, and good medical care." (page 25)

* "But many Southern blacks supported the South because of long established bonds of affection and trust that had been forged over generations with their white masters and friends." (page 27)

* "Nearly every slave in the South enjoyed a higher standard of living than the poor whites of the South -- and had a much easier existence."  (page 30)