Coe counsels that Fellowship cells shouldn’t engage in direct evangelical activism, but rather allow Christian causes to benefit from the bonds that develop within the cells. Former Nixon counsel Chuck Colson provides a rare illustration of the process in his 1976 Watergate memoir, Born Again. Facing prosecution in 1973, Colson allowed Coe to ensconce him in a Fellowship cell with a Nixon foe, Senator Harold Hughes. Hughes became the Nixon hatchet man’s staunchest defender, voting in favor of a possible pardon for Colson and later supporting Colson as he built Prison Fellowship, now one of the most powerful organizations of the Christian right.
That’s how it works: The Fellowship isn’t out to turn liberals into conservatives; rather, it convinces politicians they can transcend left and right with an ecumenical faith that rises above politics. Only the faith is always evangelical, and the politics always move rightward.
last year i was worried, often, that right wing christians in washington wanted to use global warming to physically harm states, and residents of states, that are “less-than-pure” (as the article writers put it). their common language happily predicting climate-related blessings for north america seemed driven by a belief they weren’t sharing about how divine forces were at work through the natural environment.
the apocalypse by other means.
their actions so far this decade are done and gone. it’s their future capacity as quiet spoilers — calling the resource scarcity issues serious but, you know, “needing further study” — something we should take slowly — don’t scare the horses — that’s more frightening. a hidden, literal scorched earth program.
i wrote about smokestacks as the new nuclear arsenal — a first strike weapon you didn’t have to fire — you could just stand there with your hand near the switch saying, over and over, “i didn’t hear you — did you say ‘leave it on’?”
and the money problems and the country’s loss of esteem — a hard fall from manifest destiny, driven by corrupt crusading, crazy financial measures, future-blind resource management, and a strong refusal to share unprecedented wealth, in cash or in kind — made me wonder whether those people and their raging anti-commie, anti-muslim crap would be tilled under or if they’d go for the global hail mary — bring us to our knees for mercy.
and hillary is in this group. and apparently, she and god only know why.
ps. obama wants us to get past the divisions and the pain of the 1960s. why don’t we start by sending these dominionist nutjobs out to sea in a padded rubber raft?
pps. “i understand you think humanity couldn’t possibly have caused the earth’s climate shift how the scientists are saying. what do you think did — a larger force? the sun, maybe? or — bigger.”
apr 10. as i was reading about the kinds of personal transformations and peer pressuring coe did, i wondered if obama, who to some observers appeared to have moved rightward in the senate, had also done some personal time with the fellowship. yes.
Q: why don’t people want to be the first to walk on the floor of the sea?
ps. how could anything eat you? you’d be encased in 10 meters of metal!
pps. see, it can help develop killing. think of the mine-resistance possibilities. you could be the first completely explosives-protected pedestrian.*
ppps. now we just have to think of a way to get you back out of the water. you may need to hoof it.
pppps. actually… no metal. you could maybe tramp around inside a big ball, like those kids’ toys. “this is our incredible technology. we call it: HAMsTer.”
ppppps. “you will not actually be able to see anything through the fine deposits kicked up by HAMsTer. we apologize for the inconvenience.”
*we are excited to offer this to you but development is currently stalled until the arrival of practical fusion power. until then we advise being friendly.
i feel like pissing on something. presidential candidates are really good for that — presidents getting more than any human’s share of crappy adulation — and given how much energy any lately have applied to the service component of public service — the only reason not to is it’s unproductive.
anyway you know i wrote, narrowly, about the forbidden right of citizens to criticize american foreign policy for being exactly what it is, which is often crazed and thieving, of lives and livelihoods — a vision of military domination too dark to discuss in public — because the list of murderous disasters would swamp the debate and risk ending the policy — so we are not to speak of it.
do you get the feeling, if and when iraqis kick us the fuck out, our tip-top tigers will take that as final proof the savages sabotaged their own liberation? imagine! choosing autonomy over freedom. yeah, sure, guys, the menace of iran is everywhere, and after hezbollah finishes setting up clinics and clearing out illegal bomblets, they’ll obviously be wanting a nuclear warhead. iraq? no, i never heard of it, either.
so anyway saurabh wrote about all this how the establishment’s treating it, you know, about the right of white folk to their patriotic bedtime stories and barack’s bullshit breakthrough.
After stripping away his eloquence and his acknowledgment of their difficulties, Obama’s recommendations are kin to those of any white conservative — mend your own house, and stop thinking about race.
“someone’s going to be president,” is what i keep saying to myself. i noticed when ralph nader announced he was running again — expected it, actually, after edwards dropped out — and that he pummeled cynthia mckinney in the california green, peace and freedom primary — and even sort of noticed that local hero matt gonzalez would be running with him — but i didn’t see that matt’d written about the boy from illinois, none too favorably:
It is shocking how frequently and consistently Obama is willing to subjugate good decision making for his personal and political benefit.
oh and he’s in the pocket of the nuke industry and loves bad ethanol and “clean coal” and hasn’t yet protected a consumer borrower from anything. all things to recommend him, in the current situation, but if that’s not enough, he looks like he’ll be fish food. voluntarily.
i guess i’m saying all this because — being honestly frightened about us getting knee-capped in the near future and thus incapable of finishing out the last 30 of an undistinguished, unsound, backloaded 40-year fix-it plan — i hope people don’t give him five minutes of honeymoon.
i mean people who know and care.
ps. it’s because our politicians are more important.
National elections in Europe often last only six weeks, and campaigns are publicly financed. That makes the details of the United States’ prolonged primary season, the winner-takes-all Electoral College and campaign-financing groups particularly murky waters for Europeans.… “Quite frankly, the American democratic system is atavistic.…It’s outdated. It doesn’t really reflect democracy in a modern sense.”
pps. what’s the mystery? our elections are like our military. a gigantic contemptuous stream of money dedicated to wiping out debate, due process, and attention to physical limits. seriously pathological. not much murk about it.
ppps. but hey, don’t we all think, in the face of the biggest and worst and scariest combined wrecking ball maybe we’ve ever seen, the best use of the most motivated and energetic of civic-minded folks is getting other people to vote — for two fucking years!!!
pppps. oh but maybe they’ll do something about it. something totally different than what they’ve already said they’ll do, what they’ve already tried to put it place. not enough, but, i’m sure that’s fine.
and connecting this to the other angry-scared post about high washington dominionism, another thing you — as a power-seeker — must recant about wright’s sermons is the social gospel itself — as an individual you must deny that people bear responsibility even to address pressing social problems; as a leader you must refuse to carry that responsibility in collective form.
that way leads to mass murder, i guess the thinking went. how quaint.
mar 23. many people in the world, many ways of seeing, like the man said.
Quite naturally, the speech was picked over by political commentators, and various failings were found and trumpeted. That’s the trouble with delivering a nonpolitical speech in a political arena; people will purposely misunderstand it.
i couldn’t tell you if i inhaled or didn’t. it’s been a long night. (”nonpolitical”?)
Stripped of the inflammatory language, [Wright's] statements are not all that unusual in the rhetoric of the left; people who are genuinely shocked by them have just not been paying attention.
or the rhetoric of the huge number of people who are outside washington’s standard definition of “the world”.*
[R]esentments are what demagogues use to prevent people from understanding the nature of [inter-cultural problems] and, often, to get [those people to] vote against their own self-interest. It’s not that this is a secret, but it’s quite amazing to hear a candidate say it out loud, and that well.
my objective wasn’t demagoguery. mine was to say that a politician can be smart, right, and untrustworthy. but i think in fairness, i have to do what i didn’t want to do before, which is this:
for myself, i think perfection is out of our reach and unity is subject to interpretation. when you have it, though, the question is the diminishing returns — is the strength and depth you gain from pulling together greater than the steering control you lose in common cause with fake-populist snakes? the devil’s in the details and like said, good people don’t automatically send good representatives to good institutions.
even if wishes were fishes, there’d still be nobody you had to watch harder than your agents.
*one time samantha power said, of a book growing from that outside–”the world” branch of thinking,
[R]eading Chomsky today is sobering and instructive for two reasons. First, his [bitter condemnations of american power-holders' behavior and intent] have come to influence and reflect mainstream opinion elsewhere in the world; and second, the radicalism of the Bush administration has laid bare many of the structural defects in American foreign policy, defects that Chomsky has long assailed.
whatever. she believes in a variety of monsters. and maybe also in perfectability.
ring ring ring