Attention Fundy Shoppers:

Bonfire in Aisle Two.


This will be the First and Last time I will ever defend anything to do with Wal-Mart, and I do it fully realizing that they’re probably punk out tomorrow.

Nonetheless…

So last night I’m lounging around the castle in my chaps and snuggle-socks watching the “Charlie Rose Show” (as I am occasionally wont to do) as guest interlocutor Bill Moyers interviews Daniel Dennett (Philosopher-at-large) about God and faith and atheism and all of that good stuff.

It was a wholly civil and reasonable discussion -- fully two-sided, since absent also were Rose’s long, discursive, middle-brow-soliloquies masquerading as questions (And don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about!

Those vast, in-love-with-my-own-voice cantos of querielettes strung together with the phrase “in terms of”…that teasingly trail off after 16 or 18 minutes. And into whose momentary silences timid guests often venture a toe, only to have it lopped rhetorically off as Rose gathers himself for another aria masquerading as a question.

I swear, I have never heard any other talk show where the guest actually has to so often and forcibly interrupt the host just to wedge in an answer to a putative question that has, by now, been asked five different ways.

If you have never seen Himself on the teevee machine, imagine you have been buffaloed into shoe-shopping with a woman who is now deep into trying on seventeen virtually-identical pairs of black pumps, and after talking at length about the virtues of each successive choice, briefly pretends to ask your opinion after each fitting, and then flits away to wedge herself in to the next pair before the first syllable falls from your lips.

Like that, only with topics instead of stilettos.

Anyway)

They were having a perfectly amicable and interesting conversation about what “the American people” need to do about this and that. How sweet-sweet reason needs to be invoked and defended. How “we” must explain to the Fundies that it’s not nice or healthy or fair or democratic for them to try to force their beliefs down everyone else’s collective throat.

How they shouldn’ta, ought’na be allowed to play the “My God is infallible and can miracle anything into anything” card every time they get caught scamming and lying and passing their freakish ignorance and bigotry off as, well, “Gospel.”

And while I enjoyed the conversation – ever so much more so since I didn’t have to TiVo it and piece together the salient sentence fragment out of an ocean of Ponderous Rose Prose – I wondered, not to the first time, this:

Who in the fuck are you talking to?

With respect, you keep saying “we” and “they” as if “they” are going to wake up one day and realize that they are the problem. That Conservative Fundamentalism is the bone cancer of democracy. That people like Mullah Falwell or Mullah Dobson or Mullah Roberston and their legions of Christalopithecans are going suddenly start putting the good of the nation ahead of the good of their cult.

Earth to Liberal Guy: They’re not.

This from the L.A. Times ambles that line of thinking right down the aisles of Wal-Mart…

Wal-Mart Sells 'Brokeback' Amid Conservative Protest
Christian group accuses the retailer of 'pushing an agenda' by featuring the gay-themed film.
By Claire Hoffman
Times Staff Writer

April 4, 2006

Wal-Mart to the producers of "Brokeback Mountain": We won't quit you.

Today, the largest retailer in the U.S. starts selling DVDs of the film about a gay love affair between two ranchers, despite protests from a national Christian organization.

The 3-million-member American Family Assn. initiated a campaign last week encouraging Wal-Mart customers to ask the company to refuse to stock the Universal film, whose director won an Academy Award last month, in its 3,900 stores.

The Tupelo, Miss.-based group began its campaign last week, after Wal-Mart placed ads with images of the film's stars, Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger, at the front of stores to promote the DVD release.

"It wasn't even a blockbuster movie, so if Wal-Mart isn't trying to push an agenda, why would they put it at the front door?" said Randy Sharp, director of special projects for the association, which calls itself an organization for "people who are tired of cursing the darkness and who are ready to light a bonfire."

Sharp said Wal-Mart was "trying to help normalize homosexuality in society. But how many copies are they going to have to sell to recruit the losses of customers who they've offended and will no longer shop at Wal-Mart?"
…

Still, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has a history of bowing to pressure from the American Family Assn. and other organizations on issues of decency.

After customer complaints in 2002, the store pulled a pregnant version of one of Barbie's friends, Midge, even though the doll wore a prominent wedding ring.

And in 2003, the family association led the charge to persuade Wal-Mart and other retailers to stop carrying magazines it considered crude. As a result, Wal-Mart discontinued FHM, Maxim and Stuff and placed plastic shields over Cosmopolitan, Glamour and others.
…

Fuck these people, with every large, sharp object in the Gardening Department.

Of course, they could just not buy that which offends them. Just not read what gives them those guilty, gladiator-movie, big-pants-feelings “down there”. Just not watch what, in the immortal words of Lewis Black, “makes them feel icky.”

But no: It’s always with the bonfires, these people.

Books. Churches. Humans.

Always gotta put the torch to what they fear.

And since these human blisters fear every-fucking-thing…Everything Must Go!

In the end, “Brokeback…” is just an idea, manifested as strings of 1s and 0s incised on a sliver of plastic.

If you don’t voluntarily slot it into a DVD player and voluntarily set aside a couple of hours to watch it, it has no more power to work it’s Terrible, Nancification Mojo on you or your weak-willed whelplings -- or inflame the tender sensibilities of your morally stunted God -- than a lost episode of “The Prisoner” in an abandoned Chevy at the bottom of a mine shaft, or a pornographic mosaic under a heap of Atlantean rubble on the ocean floor.

How is it that the same human atavisms who whip themselves into rabid, ass-biting berserkers at the thought of someone, somewhere buying a copy of “Brokeback Mountain” in a Wal-Mart bargain bin...can also believe that they can make History, Cosmology, Chemistry, Archeology, Paleontology, Biology, Reason, Physics and Causality vanish in a burst of phuqutard willpower if they just close their potato-bug eyes and Wish Reeeeeal Hard?

I mean, can’t they just pretend Wal-Mart isn't there?

But of course they can’t: The Church of Cripplingly Low, Low Prices is where they do the rest of their prayin’, and since you can’t have no queer cowpokes fagging up the Temple of Commerce, ya gotta drive the genderchangers out of God’s Other House.

All of which is by way of my answer to Dan Dennett’s perfectly reasonable and utterly misguided thesis.

We’re at war, Mr. Dennett, with a vast number of our fellow citizens who will never listen to you, never heed you, never even notice you or I exist.

They are a vicious, dangerous cult that has declared war on The Enlightenment, and sworn blood-oaths that Science, Tolerance and Reason are to be treated as enemy combatants in that war: traitors to Heaven to be tortured, but never trusted.

But don’t bother taking my word for it. I am, after all, just a stinkin’ Liberal, so what do I know?

Instead listen to what Kevin Phillips – Old School Conservative and one of the Architects of the modern Republican Party – has to say about the Party he helped create.

This from the WaPo…

How the GOP Became God's Own Party

By Kevin Phillips
Sunday, April 2, 2006; B03
Now that the GOP has been transformed by the rise of the South, the trauma of terrorism and George W. Bush's conviction that God wanted him to be president, a deeper conclusion can be drawn: The Republican Party has become the first religious party in U.S. history.

…
Today, a leading power such as the United States approaches theocracy when it meets the conditions currently on display: an elected leader who believes himself to speak for the Almighty, a ruling political party that represents religious true believers, the certainty of many Republican voters that government should be guided by religion and, on top of it all, a White House that adopts agendas seemingly animated by biblical worldviews.
Indeed, there is a potent change taking place in this country's domestic and foreign policy, driven by religion's new political prowess and its role in projecting military power in the Mideast.

…In addition to its concerns with oil and terrorism, the White House is courting end-times theologians and electorates for whom the Holy Lands are a battleground of Christian destiny. Both pursuits -- oil and biblical expectations -- require a dissimulation in Washington that undercuts the U.S. tradition of commitment to the role of an informed electorate.

The political corollary -- fascinating but appalling -- is the recent transformation of the Republican presidential coalition. Since the election of 2000 and especially that of 2004, three pillars have become central: the oil-national security complex, with its pervasive interests; the religious right, with its doctrinal imperatives and massive electorate; and the debt-driven financial sector, which extends far beyond the old symbolism of Wall Street.
…

Over a quarter-century of Bush presidencies and vice presidencies, the Republican Party has slowly become the vehicle of all three interests -- a fusion of petroleum-defined national security; a crusading, simplistic Christianity; and a reckless credit-feeding financial complex. The three are increasingly allied in commitment to Republican politics. On the most important front, I am beginning to think that the Southern-dominated, biblically driven Washington GOP represents a rogue coalition, like the Southern, proslavery politics that controlled Washington until Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860.
…

Unfortunately, more danger lurks in the responsiveness of the new GOP coalition to Christian evangelicals, fundamentalists and Pentecostals, who muster some 40 percent of the party electorate. Many millions believe that the Armageddon described in the Bible is coming soon. Chaos in the explosive Middle East, far from being a threat, actually heralds the second coming of Jesus Christ. Oil price spikes, murderous hurricanes, deadly tsunamis and melting polar ice caps lend further credence.

The potential interaction between the end-times electorate, inept pursuit of Persian Gulf oil, Washington's multiple deceptions and the financial crisis that could follow a substantial liquidation by foreign holders of U.S. bonds is the stuff of nightmares. To watch U.S. voters enable such policies -- the GOP coalition is unlikely to turn back -- is depressing to someone who spent many years researching, watching and cheering those grass roots.
…

These developments have warped the Republican Party and its electoral coalition, muted Democratic voices and become a gathering threat to America's future. No leading world power in modern memory has become a captive of the sort of biblical inerrancy that dismisses modern knowledge and science. The last parallel was in the early 17th century, when the papacy, with the agreement of inquisitional Spain, disciplined the astronomer Galileo for saying that the sun, not the Earth, was the center of our solar system.
…
Unfortunately, three of the preeminent weaknesses displayed in these past declines have been religious excess, a declining energy and industrial base, and debt often linked to foreign and military overstretch. Politics in the United States -- and especially the evolution of the governing Republican coalition -- deserves much of the blame for the fatal convergence of these forces in America today.

Shorter Phillips (dialog nicked from "Rosemary's Baby"): What have you done to it? What have you done to its eyes?

Shorter Dobson: He has his father's eyes.

These people will never leave us in peace because our very existence, Mr. Dennett, is hateful to them.

It doesn’t matter what we say or what we do, or how reasonable we are or how much of the middle ground we cede to them in the cause of the commonweal and keeping the peace in the family: Hate and fear is not what they feel, it’s who they are. They’re are on one, long, mean Blood-o-the-Lamb drunk, and no matter how often they are appeased, they will always find another excuse for rage.

For another pogrom.

Another purge.

Another bonfire.

I have no wish to try to reason with this filth any longer, Mr. Dennett. They have been steadily, unblinkingly goose-stepping towards the Constitution and the Bill of Rights with torches in hand for 30 year and have been crystal-clear about their intentions.

We cannot coexist because people who are simultaneously weak and stupid and believe they and they alone are the sole proprietors of the Inerrant Word Of God Bar and Grill will never tolerate competition in the marketplace of ideas: Like “Brokeback…” and Wal-Mart, their solution is to drive any nonconfoming thought out of the marketplace altogether and into oblivion.

And since we can’t live together (and the Christian/Buddahist/Humanist/Whatever in me is somewhat squeamish about the idea of luring them all together into the high desert, lighting off a nuke, and Rapturing their constituent atoms into the stratosphere) we must win.

However long it takes and however hard it is, we must win, and in the end, the only way to beat them...is to beat them. Is to render them electorally radioactive and, ultimately, culturally extinct.

They must be taken on head-on, and their squirmy fellow-travelers -- those Moderate Republicans who live off the cream, and are only along for the ride ‘cause the Children of the Corn promised not to touch their guns, raise their taxes or make them personally risk their tender assflesh killing brown people in faraway lands to keep their pump prices low -- must be dragged out into bright light and verbally scourged at every opportunity.

Yes, without a bankroll that’d choke an Abramoff, or a private army, or relatives in the White House, there are lots of things that the average citizen can’t do, but this it something we can do.

Every time they hit the lever for a candidate with an (R) in front of their name -- every time they run as a candidate with an (R) in front of their name -- we need to be demanding to know why they side with American Wahabi against their own nation and Founders.

And if they refuse to answer, we need to Shout Louder.

Conservative Fundamentalism must called publicly by its True Name –- Suicide-Pact Theocracy -- and frog-marched out to join Communism and Fascism –- with which they share so much in common -- on the Monumentally Bad Idea ash-heap of history.

That or it all ends, sooner or later, in the blood, fire and mad midnight mobs of a self-fulfilled Crazy Jebus’ Final Days Sale!!!