The Mote

In BoBo’s Eye

The following is excerpted from BoBo’s Op Ed piece in today’s NYT entitled “Drafting Hitler” and transcribed here.

This is, in all seriousness, just about the lightest editing I have ever had to do on a “parody” post.

It isn’t particularly soaring or poetic precisely because virtually all I did was substitute out the word “Fundy” for “Islamist”, smooth it out a little, and change the exampled around to fit our country and our own, home-grown, bigoted zealots.

Y’know, the same zealots who run the Party for which Mr. Brooks so dutifully stooges.

Our Christopaths don’t storm embassies and burn them, of course: Instead, our lunatics control the men who staff them.

But past that, I read this and laughed sadly: BoBo boldly taking on Fundamentalist Extremists…as long as they are safely 10,000 miles away. Swap a few words around, and this is nothing more than a rather pedestrian jeremiad that could have been written by any Progressive about the Dominionist core of the GOP, any day of the week.

And about that mad, dark heart that powers his own Party?

From BoBo, only silence. Column after column after column of conspicuous silence.

In BoBo’s world, that it the Hate that dare not speak it’s name.

Here’s the piece (Actual hateful wingnut cartoon added for effect.)

You want us to know how you feel. You in the Christian Conservative Movement published a Chick Tract of Muslims burning in Hell so we in The Enlightenment would understand how offended you were by those Danish cartoons.
Well, I saw one of your the many anti-muslim cartoons:

Like this one

But I still don't know how you feel.
…

I still don't feel as if I should bomb family planning clinics or say that liberal judges are worse that Hitler or terrorists. I still don't feel your rage. I don't feel threatened by your sophomoric cartoon, even one as tasteless as that one.
…

At first I sympathized with your anger at the cartoons because it's impolite to trample on other people's belief...even though your own favorites are rabidly anti-humanist, anti-semitic, anti-muslim, anti-Catholic, anti-gay, anti-evolution and anti-just-about-every-other-Western-tolerance-based-virtue. But as the rage spread and the issue grew more cosmic, many of us in The Enlightenment were reminded of how vast the chasm is between you and us. There was more talk than ever about a Culture War. We don't just have different ideas; we have a different relationship to ideas.

We children of the The Enlightenment were born into a world that reflects the legacy of Socrates and the agora. In our world, images, statistics and arguments swarm around from all directions. There are movies and blogs, books and sermons. There's the profound and the vulgar, the high and the low.
…

But you have a different way. When I say you, I don't mean you Christians. I don't mean you genuine followers of the teaching of Jesus scholars and learners. I mean you Fundamentalist Conservatives. I mean you White men who were educated in this country, but who have retreated in disgust from the inconclusiveness and chaos of our conversation. You've retreated from the agora into an exaggerated version of Fundy purity.

You frame the contrast between your world and our world more bluntly than we outsiders would ever dare to. In the past the protesters held signs reading "God Hates Fags”, "AIDS is Gods Justice", “Kill Hugo Chavez” and "Condoms Cause School Shootings". On the 700 Club, a prominent and powerful Republican Pastor declared this about the slaughter on 9/11: "We have a court that has essentially stuck its finger in God's eye. We have insulted God at the highest levels of our government. Then, we say, 'Why does this happen?' It is happening because God Almighty is lifting His protection from us."
…

Our mind-set is progressive and rational. Your mind-set is pre-Enlightenment and mythological. In your worldview, history doesn't move forward through gradual understanding. In your worldview, history is resolved during the apocalyptic conflict between the supernaturally pure Armies of Christ and the supernaturally evil Liberal.

You seize on any shred — even a years-old apocryphal story of a “welfare queen” or a misclassified fossil — to prove to yourself that Negroes are lazy, shiftless moochers, the Earth is really 6,000 years old, and the Rapture is at hand. You invent primitive stories — like the one about God wiping out whole towns because of their lack of piety — to reinforce your image of Liberal Evil. You deny Evolution because since your God is all powerful and apparently as deranged as you say, He could have whomped the whole thing up over the course of a six-day-week including all the overwhelming evidence that Creationism is tripe and Genesis never happened.

In my world, people search for truth in their own diverse ways. In your world, the faithful and the Liberal battle for survival, and words and ideas and cartoons are nothing more than weapons in that war.

So, of course, what started in pulpit in Lynchburg ended up for you with Michael Moore, 9/11 and the Liberal Judge. But in your overreaction this past week, your defensiveness is showing. Democrats are coming to your region, and Democrats bring the conversation.

You fundamentalists have turned yourselves into a superpower of dysfunction, demanding our attention week after week. But it is hard to intimidate people forever into silence, to bottle up the conversation, to lock the world into an epic war only you want. While I don't share your rage, I do understand your panic.

To be clear, I agree with much of what BoBo said in this column, but it this case the raging hypocrisy of the messenger overwhelms the message.

Like attending a writer’s workshop on “The Importance of Integrity in the Autobiography”. I might agree with the material, but once I take my seat and find out it’s being facilitated by James Frey, my only reaction is going to be, “You must be shitting me!”