Waxing and waning

A couple of articles in recent days, one by Bill Moyers (Also available here), and the other, a transcript of a speech by Seymour Hersh, raise the alarm about the madness of our current situation. Hersh warns us about the religious zeal of Bush and his gang members. Moyers warns about the religious zeal of Bush’s supporters across the country. Both of these articles are valuable contributions to our knowledge of the challenges we face. But they also leave us hanging. And this is what I find frustrating and lacking in "liberal," "leftist," "progressive," and "alternative" analyses and exposition.

What both these renowned journalists fail to recognize or mention is that everyone in the Bush crime family is an individual criminal sociopath, a mortal human being with feet of clay, dependent on the approval of others for their very lifeblood, and dependent also on their ability to surround themselves with a cover of lies and illusion. This is not a structure of power that is meant for longevity.

The same goes for the network of evangelical Christians that form the largest basis of support for the Bush crime family. The proliferation of evangelical Christianity in this country is a phenomenon that had a beginning, is in a period of ascendancy, and will soon enter a period of decline and likely termination. It is too inconsistent with the actual life and teachings of Jesus to have much staying power. The essence of "evangelizing" is to convert other people to not so much the "faith" of the evangelizer as to the organization of the evangelizer. The "faith" is the hook that brings people in. The need fulfillment for the evangelizer is the money and power that added converts bring. It’s a big pyramid scheme, and it’s no accident of nature that so many evangelicals are also drawn to such pyramid schemes as Amway (see Merchants of Deception). Henry David Thoreau described the need to evangelize most insightfully in his great work, "Walden" thusly: "Wherever a man goes, men will pursue him and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate oddfellow society." (The Village, Walden)

The decline of both the Bush crime family and evangelical Christianity can be safely predicted, and the reasons are twofold. One is that the basis of the support for both is a form of social psychosis, hysterias cooked up about the world and our place in it. As I have referred to before, this type of hysteria is nothing new, and was well documented by Charles MacKay in 1841 in his masterful work "Extraordinary Popular Delusions And The Madness Of Crowds."

These hysterias seem to have staying power while they are in their ascendancy, but they eventually peter out, largely due to time, the tiredness of the message, and the lack of true fulfillment they bring.

The other reason for the impending decline of the Bush crime family and evangelical Christianity is real world experience. Just as our economic system is approaching the limits to growth, the Bush crime family is approaching the limits to criminality. The entire planet has taken notice of the murderous invasion and occupation of Iraq. It was not done out of necessity or even for defense of the country, but for the delusions of grandeur of the Bush regime and its corporate beneficiaries. Every country on Earth is on notice that they also are vulnerable to such a capricious and rapacious attack. When such attention is awakened, the results will not be far in the future. It is not only Newton’s Third Law of Motion, but also the Law of Karma that remind us that similar actions have similar results. It is the fool who engages in actions heedless of the consequences. There is no action in the entire life of George W. Bush that indicates that he has ever paid any attention to this truth, and his hour of strutting and fretting upon the stage will be over soon.

There is much to say on the likely manifestations of the end of these two pathological phenomena. For now, I will just briefly mention a few. First, the economy: Depleting oil resources, rising oil prices, OPEC converting to the Euro, the trade deficit, the budget deficit, the personal credit crunch, the impending collapse of the Stock Market, and the failure to achieve growth of GNP in the midst of all these factors.

Then there is the increasing difficulty of being an American on this planet. Both here and abroad, life is becoming harder. The challenge of bringing children into the world in an evironment of hatred worldwide and assault on our national fabric at home will soon wear thin. The cause of this difficulty, the Bush crime family and its enablers, is becoming clearer every day.

For the evangelicals, in addition to the above realities there is the need to have the apocalyptic scenario of the "End Times" come about as supposedly predicted by "Scripture," but actually predicted by a couple of crackpots in the 1800s. The spells under which evangelicals are bewitched are not cast in "Heaven," but on Earth, by men, and the spells can be broken. People can come to their senses. What is required is exposure of the phony, exploiting preachers and those who help them promote their preposterous worldview. What also is required is for those who are not taken in by either the Bush crime family or Christian evangelism to speak a greater truth. And the first precondition for doing this is to have a greater truth to speak. Stay tuned.