Posted by Steve Dietz on December 11, 2004 3:04 PM
ToDo #1423: See the Monster(s)
In a talk posted on TomPaine.common sense, journalist Bill Moyers first raises the specter of President Reagan's Secretary of the Interior, James Watts, who
told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, "after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back."
Snicker, snicker, right? Who are these freaks?
But Moyers goes on to point out:
The press corps didn't know what he was talking about. But James Watt was serious. So were his compatriots out across the country. They are the people who believe the Bible is literally true - one-third of the American electorate, if a recent Gallup poll is accurate. In this past election, several million good and decent citizens went to the polls believing in the rapture index. That's right葉he rapture index. Google it and you will find that the best-selling books in America today are the12 volumes of the "Left Behind" series written by the Christian fundamentalist and religious right warrior, Timothy LaHaye. These true believers subscribe to a fantastical theology concocted in the 19th century by a couple of immigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the Bible and wove them into a narrative that has captivated the imagination of millions of Americans.
Moyers ends with a rather standard but ambiguous, almost ambivalent, call to arms
The news is not good these days. I can tell you, though, that as a journalist I know the news is never the end of the story. The news can be the truth that sets us free溶ot only to feel but to fight for the future we want. And the will to fight is the antidote to despair, the cure for cynicism, and the answer to those faces looking back at me from those photographs on my desk. What we need to match the science of human health is what the ancient Israelites called 'hocma' 葉he science of the heart.....the capacity to see....to feel....and then to act...as if the future depended on you. Believe me, it does.
What does this mean? We should become "compassionate liberals," who feel more? I would place the emphasis on the first part of this hocma, the capacity to see.
Toward the end of Frederico Fellini's classic 1960 film La Dolce Vita, a group of "salt of the earth" fisherman land a "monstrous" sea creature, which the degenerate-sophisticates from the city stumble upon, literally, after a night of debauchery. The camera zooms in on the creature's eye, which stares back unblinkingly, perhaps representing the "monstrosity" of Fellini's own reportage in the movie.
It is momentarily gratifying to think of Karl Rove as that unblinking sea monster, poring over precinct level statistics, "seeing" the American electorate and craftily manipulating it. It is more difficult to really see for ourselves beyond the apparent monstrosity of the one-third of the American electorate who believe the Bible is literally true - name your favorite "monstrosity" - or, god forbid, to understand ourselves as the monstrous, and to truly act upon such knowledge. But it is a necessary precursor to action.
Toward the end of