watch out the world's behind you
Just a follow up, but an important one, to yesterday's post - I recall mentioning someplace in that entry that the real effect to all this "values" blather is to poison the well, as it were: there's no direct damage being done to the targets per se (Jews, queers, women, etc.), but it shames "them," puts "them" on the defensive, and in the best tradition of post-modernism, makes honest definitions of the words people associate with all that's good and pure - values, morals, etc. - subjective and entirely wrong. If this were a strategy, and it looks like one, I'd say that was the heart of it.
There's another prong to this fork, though - the mandate's there, however factually illusory, but the media, the only real public space left in most communities, has conceded it; it's simple and it makes for good teevee. Based on this, that faction of the "culture Right," is looking to shut down "deviancy" from their core..well, whatever they stand for. I can't really tell. But that's what we've got - a new McCarthyism, tacitly stoked by the leaders of the most powerful political party in the world right now. I think it's safe to say that McCarthyism was never truly a political crusade, but one against an international sentiment, a kind of intellectual pogrom, and the New McCarthyism is a similar kind of nativism, with some angry chauvanism and a spot of racism for good measure.
As Rich says:
As Mr. Gibson shrewdly contrived his own crucifixion all the way to the bank, trumping up nonexistent threats to his movie to hype it, so the creation of imagined enemies and exaggerated threats to Christianity by "moral values" mongers of the right has its own secular purpose. The idea is to intimidate and marginalize anyone who objects to their efforts to impose the most conservative of Christian dogma on public policy. If you're against their views, you don't have a differing opinion — you're anti-Christian (even if you are a Christian).
And how are the more facile elements of the media complicit in this?
Even more important than inflated notions of the fundamentalists' power may be their entertainment value. As Ms. Kissling points out, the 50 million Americans who belong to progressive religious organizations are rarely represented on television because "progressive religious leaders are so tolerant that they don't make good TV." The Rev. Bob Chase of the United Church of Christ agrees: "We're not exciting guests." His church's recent ad trumpeting its inclusion of gay couples was rejected by the same networks that routinely give a forum to the far more dramatic anti-gay views of Mr. Falwell. Ms. Kissling laments that contemporary progressive Christians lack an intellectual star to rival Reinhold Niebuhr or William Sloane Coffin, but adds that today "Jesus Christ would have a tough time getting covered by TV if he didn't get arrested."
If we're lucky, they won't blow up any statues of the Buddha.
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